Beta Versions of Microsoft Office Available for Free, Will Reach Touch-Enabled Devices with Windows 8 OS

Beta Versions of Microsoft Office Available for Free, Will Reach Touch-Enabled Devices with Windows 8 OS

If Microsoft Office has been a user's main productivity software for a very long time and he or she is considering to try future versions of this office suite, here's something which can be looked forward to.

Redmond has released a beta program for Office that enables users to try out future versions of Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, and Access before the stable versions are to be released. While the service is completely free of charge both for individual and corporate use, the company still expects participants to send feedback and support its own team of developers to update these software suite in order to provide improved stability and features when released to users.

Microsoft is getting a few pretty exciting products ready for Office users. This includes a touch-optimized version that's designed especially for devices running with Windows 8 an later. This latest version will enable Windows 8 to make and edit documents right in the Modern UI of their devices. According to the people close to the development strategies, this step is very crucial towards a broader strategy, which also includes Windows 9 that is supposed to be released some time in 2015.

The next Windows operating system is supposed to be dumping the desktop on ARM tablets. However, this would rather include a touch-enabled version of Office. This offers consumers the power to work with documents, whether they are using a desktop or a mobile PC.

Among the first apps that will arrive in the touch-optimized Windows 8 UI are Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. Microsoft has already featured a presentation during the BUILD developer conference last April. The only thing that's yet to be known is the date of availability. However, there are reports that said that Microsoft could launch the new Office suite for Windows 8 later this year, most likely after the Android build will officially be released on the market.

IBM to Spend $3 Billion to Research the Future of Chips, Systems

IBM to Spend $3 Billion to Research the Future of Chips, Systems

The industry can continue to shrink conventional silicon chips to 7nm over the next several years, IBM says, but what comes after that is unclear.

IBM will spend $3 billion over the next five years in projects that not only will help to continue to shrink current processor architecture to at least 7 nanometers, but also to fund more research into what will replace the traditional silicon chip architecture when it reaches its physical limitations.

Chip makers like IBM and Intel for years have been shrinking the circuitry on silicon processors as they've looked to improve performance, increase energy efficiency and shrink the size of systems they power. For example, Intel currently offers chips at 22nm, with plans for 14nm next year. IBM officials said that over the next few years, the miniaturization will continue to 10nm and then 7nm.

However, what's next beyond that is unclear. Eventually the circuitry will shrink to the point where "you can't build a reliable device," Bernie Meyerson, IBM Fellow and vice president of Innovation at the company, told eWEEK. "You can't make it work."

Given that, IBM is working on what might come next and will lead to new system architectures, Meyerson said. Such possibilities run from quantum computing and neurosynaptic computing to carbon nanotubes and graphene.  hat IBM is doing now is something the company has done throughout its history—used its researchers to anticipate major changes in the industry and create solutions to address challenges that may be five or 10 years down the road, he said. Meyerson pointed to the shift to CMOS technology in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and then again at the end of the 1990s when company researchers decided that increasing the frequency of chips was no longer the best way to improve performance and shifted to using multiple cores in processors, releasing the first of its multi-core Power processors at the end of 2001.

"If you have a research division looking at the horizon all the time, this shouldn't come as a big surprise," he said. "We have pretty good headlights. Our headlights go a long way."

The transitions to CMOS and multiple cores were moments when IBM "needed to bet the farm," Meyerson said. This latest move represents a similar moment. "You have to make a bet," he said.

The industry for decades has worked to keep up with Moore's Law, the idea voiced by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors in chips would double every 18 to 24 months. While many in the chip industry say they are keeping up with Moore's Law, it's increasingly difficult to do through the shrinking of the transistors and circuitry. And Meyerson argued that it has "been dead for a decade or so."

The challenges are many. Cloud and big data applications are putting pressure on systems for better performance, greater bandwidth capacity and more memory, while businesses also are demanding computers that consume less power. Conventional chip designs will be able to get to 7nm and maybe a little smaller, but beyond that, the challenges and complexities become daunting.

That's where the new technologies and materials like carbon nanotubes, graphene and silicon photonics, as well as new computing models like quantum and neuromorphic computing come into play.

"We needed to make a major investment here to look at the next step, a Plan B," Meyerson said, addin g that IBM already has made progress in many of these areas.

Quantum computing would enable systems to process millions of calculations at the same time rather than one at a time. In traditional computing, bits can only values of "1" or "0". However, quantum bits—or "qubits"—can hold values of 1, 0, or both at the same time, opening up the possibility of systems running through millions of calculations simultaneously. Meyerson compared it to communications between humans.

"It would be frustrating to have a conversation where you could only say 'yes' or 'no,'" he said. "What if you could say 'maybe'?" - See more at: http://www.eweek.com/servers/ibm-to-spend-3-billion-to-research-the-future-of-chips-systems.html#sthash.gVPnIy5C.dpuf

7 best practices for smartphone security

7 best practices for smartphone security

Set a lock code

From email to texts, phonebook entries, and pictures, your phone has lots of personal information that's potentially accessible to prying eyes. Bottom line: if you take your phone out of your house, you should definitely use a lock code. You can use a 4-digit PIN or an actual password with letters, numbers, and characters, as Kent German points out. This will help keep nosy people or thieves from easily accessing your information.

Enable 'Do Not Track' in your mobile Web browser

Any information you provide on a website is collected and likely used for serving you relevant advertisements. The Do Not Track option asks websites to refrain from collecting your data. The Google Chrome browser for Android and Safari on iOS will allow you to set up Do Not Track. While enabling this option does not guarantee that your data will not be collected, some websites will adhere to your preference.

Block your phone number when necessary

When you call a business that might collect your number, it’s a good idea to thwart its efforts. As Dennis O’Reilly points out, many places will collect your number, any information attached to it, and then use it for profit.

If you don’t want to toggle number blocking on and off just for businesses, you might consider using Google Voice to call businesses. Then you can very easily block any incoming call that isn’t in your phone book.

Avoid answering spam calls

There are a lot of telemarketing services that will call your phone just to determine if the number actually reaches a person. Once that happens, your number is put on a list that is sold to other companies, and you'll receive even more spam calls and possibly texts. If you’re not on an unlimited plan, you may incur additional charges for text messages you didn’t want to receive in the first place.

Instead of picking up and confirming your number, use a caller ID solution to figure out who is trying to reach you. On Android, check out Current Caller ID by Whitepages, which will display caller information as small window on the incoming call screen. On iOS, you’ll have to use a slightly different approach: install Truecaller and take a screenshot of an incoming call for the app to identify the caller (the app creators say that currently there is no way to intercept the call process).

Use a recovery app to find a lost or stolen device

Panic strikes as you realize that your smartphone isn’t in your pocket. Where was I last?! When did I set the phone down? Did I drop it when I got out of my car? With the recovery apps on Android and iOS, you can lock down access to your device and even find its current GPS location.

Add owner contact info to your device

If your device gets lost in the wild and some good samaritan finds it, how will they find you? For this reason, you should add enough contact information to the device that can be used to contact you. For instance, you don’t need to provide your whole name -- maybe just a first name and last initial-- and a phone number of a friend or relative that can get in touch with you about your lost device. Think of it like a pet tag for your Android or iPhone.

Stay physically secured

Despite all your efforts blocking access to your apps, number, or other information, you are still faced with the threat of someone physically stealing your device. To combat this, Jessica Dolcourt recommends keeping a firm grip, putting the device in a hard-to-access place (tight front pocket, deep pocket in bag), and refraining from advertising the fact that you have an amazing new device. Hopefully these tips will keep your phone from taking an unwanted excursion with a thief.

Firefox add-on puts all of your Google apps under one roof

 

Gmail was likely your gateway drug to the other addictive products in Google's apps stash. Perhaps you tried Gmail in college, and before you knew it Google Drive and Calendar became daily habits, while you were also regularly using Google Music, News, and Photos.

If you have found yourself at the mercy of Google's myriad apps, then you have probably cobbled together a system that keeps them at your fingertips. Google provides a button on many of its apps -- including the Google homepage, Gmail, Google Drive -- that lets you access a panel of app icons. This panel, however, includes only a limited number of Google's apps, and each is opened in a new tab.

Firefox add-on Integrated Inbox places Google's apps -- along with some popular third-party apps such a Dropbox, Evernote, and Twitter -- under one roof. Which is to say, on a single tab. Integrated Inbox uses Gmail as a hub and lets you create a customizable, collapsible list of apps. Here's how it works:

Install Integrated Inbox and when you reload your Gmail inbox the add-on will take effect. You may not notice it at first because the add-on is rather stealthy -- careful not to mess with the look and feel of your Gmail inbox. But look closely and you'll see that it places a small settings button at the top of the page. (It's an open box that looks like a colorful version of the Dropbox logo.) And if your scroll to the top of your inbox, you'll see a line appear with the Gmail logo. To the right of this line you can click a button to access its settings or another button to collapse your inbox.

When you collapse your inbox, you'll get to the meat of Integrated Inbox -- the customizable list of apps that you can access from the comfort of your Gmail inbox. Each app on the list opens right within your Gmail inbox pane. Just scroll to the top of an app to access the button to collapse it and return to the list again.

Some apps don't quite conform to the limited space of Gmail's inbox pane, but you can tweak the pixel count of most apps to improve the layout via an app's settings icon. And you can simply drag and drop apps on the list to reorder them.

To add new apps, click the colorful box icon at the top your Gmail inbox and choose Settings. On the Integrations tab of settings you'll see two columns: Available Services and Your Integrated Inbox. You can drag each app (or click on its arrow icon) to it from one column to the other.

You see that some apps are available for free while others require a Plus or Pro account. The free account also limits you to only two integrated apps, while the Plus account provides a meager five apps. Pro lets you add an unlimited number of apps, and it also provides Cloud syncing and multi-account support.

A Plus account currently costs $29 a year, and a Pro account costs $49 a year, which seems a bit steep to me, but then again I have no problem with keeping 48 Firefox tabs open on a given afternoon (to say nothing of the number I may have open in Chrome). If you are more of the orderly type, then give Integrated Inbox a whirl. To get a taste, there is a free 14-day trial that does not require your credit card information.

Integrated Inbox is currently available as a Firefox add-on, but a Chrome extension is listed as coming soon.

How to search Twitter like a pro 

With an average of 6,000 tweets per second, or 500 million tweets a day, Twitter can be an overwhelming source of information. Even if you have crafted a finely tuned list of people to follow that's not too big and not too small but just right, your feed can often obscure useful or interesting tweets and tidbits with a seemingly unyielding stream of jibber jabber.

Thankfully, Twitter has a powerful search tool, and you don't need a Twitter account to use it. Just head to Twitter's search page and do one of two things.

1. Use search operators

Twitter lets you refine your search with a number of useful search operators. A list of examples can be accessed from Twitter's main search page.

Screenshot by Matt Elliott/CNET

2. Use advanced search

If you'd rather fill out a few fields to refine your search query than commit a search operator or two to memory, then click the advanced search link on the main search page where you can narrow search parameters for words, people, places, and dates. And at the bottom, you can even filter by attitude to include only tweets deemed positive or negative.

Android's phone wiping fails to delete personal data

Avast discovered that Android's factory reset option leaves deleted data in a recoverable state.

Was that naked selfie you took really deleted before you sold your phone on eBay?

A new study from security software vendor Avast calls into question the effectiveness of Android's factory reset option, which many people have relied upon to delete personal data from their old smartphones before reselling or making a charitable donation with the old device.

Avast -- known for its security software on Windows, Mac, and Android -- purchased 20 Android smartphones from eBay, which has around 80,000 used smartphones for sale at any given time. Among the data that Avast employees recovered from the phones were more than 40,000 photos -- including 250 nude male selfies -- along with 750 emails and text messages, 250 contacts, the identities of four phones' previous owners, and one completed loan application.

The problem, as Avast mobile division president Jude McColgan told CNET, is that people still aren't used to considering the implications of all the personal data stored on a smartphone.

"Users thought they were doing a clean wipe and factory reinstall," he said, but the factory reinstall is cleaning phones "only at the application layer."

Using off-the-shelf digital forensics tools, Avast was able to recover SMS and Facebook chats from Android phones.

Smartphones can be a treasure trove of personal data, thanks to the central -- and often rather intimate -- role they've taken in people's everyday lives, through Facebook posts, Snapchat conversations, online banking, Amazon purchases, and much more. It's a new reality of personal technology recognized last month by no less a body than the US Supreme Court, which ruled that police must get a search warrant before delving into the contents of a person's cell phone.

"We have a very unique relationship with our mobile phones that we've never had to any other technological device," Bronson James, a lawyer involved in one of the cell phone cases decided by the Supreme Court, told CNET's Ben Fox Rubin. "In our brief we equated our mobile devices as the entryway into our virtual home."

Avast didn't have to resort to much digital jiu-jitsu to recover the data from the phones it acquired, McColgan said. His team used "fairly generic, publicly available," off-the-shelf digital forensics software such as FTK Imager, a drive-imaging program.

"Although at first glance the phones appeared thoroughly erased, we quickly retrieved a lot of private data. In most cases, we got to the low-level analysis, which helped us recover SMS and chat messages," Avast researchers Jaromir Horejsi and David Fiser wrote in the report.

Avast noted in the report that its own Android security app comes with a deletion tool that the company said does a better job of wiping personal data than the included reset option.

McColgan was not shy about pointing this out. There's a challenge, he said, in making people more aware of device security "when your whole PC and more is in your pocket."

Google restores links to British newspapers in 'right to be forgotten' flap

Google Inc. on Thursday reversed its decision to remove several links to stories in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, underscoring the difficulty the search engine is having implementing Europe’s “right to be forgotten” ruling.

The Guardian protested the removal of its stories describing how a soccer referee lied about reversing a penalty decision. It was unclear who asked Google to remove the stories. Separately, Google has not restored links to a BBC article that described how former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive Officer E. Stanley O’Neal was ousted after the investment bank racked up billions of dollars in losses.

Mr. O’Neal said on Thursday he has “no knowledge” of an apparent effort to remove a BBC article mentioning him. The previous day, BBC economics editor Robert Peston suggested O’Neal may have asked the search engine to exclude a 2007 blog post that mentioned him from its results under a European privacy rule.

Peston’s suggestion that O’Neal had the search results tweaked came in a new blog entry posted on Wednesday. In an e-mail to Reuters, O’Neal said “I have no knowledge of it whatsoever.”

The incidents underscore the uncertainty around how Google intends to adhere to a May European court ruling that gave its citizens the “right to be forgotten:” to request the scrubbing of links to articles that pop up under a name search.

Privacy advocates say the backlash around press censorship highlight the potential dangers of the ruling and its unwieldiness in practice. That in turn may benefit Google by stirring debate about the soundness of the ruling, which the Internet search leader criticized the ruling from the outset.

Google, which has received more than 70,000 requests, began acting upon them in past days. And it notified the BBC and the Guardian, which in turn publicized the moves.

The incidents suggest that requesting removal of a link may actually bring the issue back into the public spotlight, rather than obscure it. That possibility may give people pause before submitting a “right to be forgotten” request.

“At least as it looks now, there are definitely some unworkable components,” said Electronic Frontier Foundation activist Parker Higgins. “We’ve seen a number of situations in the past few days, where somebody in an effort to get a certain thing forgotten has brought more attention to it than ever was there before.”

“It does make you think that maybe if you’re actually trying to make an episode of your history be forgotten, this channel maybe isn’t the best way.”

Google’s objective is to protect the reliability and effectiveness of its search franchise. It remains uncertain how it adjudicates requests, or how they intend to carry them out going forward.

“Their current approach appears to be an overly broad interpretation,” a spokeswoman for the Guardian said. “If the purpose of the judgment is not to enable censorship of publishers by the back door, then we’d encourage Google to be transparent about the criteria it is using to make these decisions, and how publishers can challenge them.”

Google, which controls more than 90 per cent of European online searches, said it was a learning process.

“This is a new and evolving process for us. We’ll continue to listen to feedback and will also work with data protection authorities and others as we comply with the ruling,” the company said in a statement.

Notifying media outlets about scrubbed links has the effect of enhancing transparency, privacy advocates say. It might also prompt European courts to re-examine aspects of the ruling, including how it affects media outlets’ coverage.

“It’s terra incognito for everyone,” said Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “If sites that receive the notices choose to publicize them in ways that end up boomeranging against the people requesting, that might cause the courts to examine what those sites are doing.”