Notebook Laptop news
Tech News

Though Bill Gates leaves his full-time duties at Microsoft on Friday, he remains nonexecutive chairman and will participate in select projects at the direction of Microsoft’s current executive management team. Below is a rundown of who they are and what some of their near-term challenges are in Microsoft’s post-Gates world.

– Steve Ballmer, chief executive officer and the man in charge of it all. Ballmer’s main challenge at the moment is to figure out a way for Microsoft to put a dent in Google’s advertising dominance now that the Yahoo deal has fizzled. Ballmer also must help Microsoft diversify its revenue base, which still mainly comes from Windows and Office. He also must lead Microsoft through Gates’ transition and prove to everyone that he can carry Microsoft forward even without Gates by his side.

The U.S. Executive Office of the President doesn’t have to turn over information on an alleged 10 million missing e-mail messages to a government watchdog group seeking information on how the e-mails were lost, a judge ruled Monday.

Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) had sought information on the missing e-mails through the 41-year-old Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly ruled that the Office of Administration (OA) in the Executive Office of the President is not subject to the law that allows citizens to request that the U.S. government disclose the contents of previously unreleased documents.

A U.S. hacker who hooked up a botnet within Newell Rubbermaid’s corporate network was sentenced to 41 months in prison on Wednesday, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.

Robert Matthew Bentley, of Panama City, Florida, must also pay US$65,000 restitution. He was sentenced in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.

Bentley could have received a 10-year sentence. He pleaded guilty to charges of computer fraud and conspiracy to commit computer fraud for using the botnet to install advertising software on PCs located throughout Europe without permission.

(more…)

Two U.S. Congressmen have accused China of hacking their office computers, possibly compromising information on Chinese dissidents, the Congressmen and news reports said.

Virginia Rep. Frank Wolf said from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, “in August 2006, four of the computers in my personal office were compromised by an outside source. This source first hacked into the computer of my foreign policy and human rights staff person, then the computers of my chief of staff, my legislative director, and my judiciary staff person. On these computers was information about all of the casework I have done on behalf of political dissidents and human rights activists around the world.”

(more…)

A U.S. judge ordered a Florida business connected to the 2006 Hewlett-Packard spying scandal to halt the sale of personal telephone records and ordered defendants in the case to pay more than US$605,000 after a complaint by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.

Judge Anne Conway of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, Orlando Division, ordered Action Research Group and people connected with the company to stop obtaining consumers’ telephone records without their consent, the FTC announced Wednesday.

Intel engineers first began toying with a low-power microprocessor almost a decade ago, but their initial design was rejected by the company’s top executives and the effort stalled soon after, an Intel executive said on Wednesday.

The initial concept behind Atom, Intel’s new family of low-power chips for mobile devices, had its genesis in a research project at Intel’s labs in 1999, but the idea was not “received enthusiastically” by Intel’s senior staff, said Justin Rattner [CQ], Intel’s chief technology officer, during a speech at Intel’s “research day” in Santa Clara, California.

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Intellipedia project for information-sharing within the nation’s intelligence community is still in the early adoption phase a couple years after its launch, but has become a brand name for an entire suite of related Web 2.0 technologies, two CIA officials involved with the effort said Tuesday.

Intellpedia’s core is a wiki, built with the same software as Wikipedia. It resides on three different networks, designated unclassifed, secret and top-secret. Over the past couple of years, the initial project has grown to include an instant messaging client built with the Jabber platform, a tagging system similar to del.icio.us, RSS feeds, image galleries and even the CIA’s version of YouTube.

Hewlett-Packard has set ambitious goals to improve the energy efficiency of its printers and use more recycled materials in their manufacture — and it intends to draw buyers’ attention to the features with a new Eco Highlights labeling plan.

Despite all the work that HP is doing to reduce the environmental impact of its printers, though, the biggest problem is the paper itself, according to Klaus Hieronymi of HP’s Environmental Business Management Organization.

Mobile Web surfers in the U.S. spend more time on classified-ad site Craigslist than on any other Web site, and they spent nearly twice as much time browsing as their British counterparts in March.

Those are among the findings from a study by mobile research company M:Metrics in which client software installed on participants’ smartphones gleaned information about user activity. It found U.S. owners of smartphones — not even counting iPhones or BlackBerry devices — spent nearly 4 hours, 38 minutes using their browsers in March. U.K. subscribers spent just under 2 hours, 25 minutes, on average. The survey tracked 3,500 users of Symbian, Palm and Microsoft Windows Mobile smartphones in the U.S. and U.K.

(more…)

After warning on Tuesday that hackers were exploiting an unpatched bug in Adobe Systems’ Flash Player software, Symantec has backtracked from this claim, saying the flaw is “very similar” to another vulnerability that was patched last month.

Symantec’s initial warning described a disturbing threat — a previously unknown and unpatched flaw that was being exploited on tens of thousands of Web pages. The flaw allowed attackers to install unauthorized software on a victim’s machine and was being used to install botnet programs and password-logging software, Symantec said.

(more…)