The Glider

Apple released its first security update for 2012 and the first major update for OS X Lion. Apple released 39 patches addressing 52 CVE issues and revoked DigiCert Malaysia. - Apple patched a slew of security issues in its OS X operating system in a fairly large security update to prevent potential drive-by-attacks and to fix issues in third-party products. The OS X Security Updates cover Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) and Lion (OS X 10.7), according to the support article r...

AMD executives are looking to change the way their chips are designed to take greater advantage of their compute and graphics capabilities, and to integrate third-party intellectual property. - Advanced Micro Devices executives are laying out a roadmap for future chips that they say will be fundamentally different from larger rival Intel and leverage the work theyve done integrating the graphics and CPUs onto a single piece of silicon. At the companys annual Financial Analyst Day Feb. 2 i...

Oracle patched three products to address a vulnerability in Web Application frameworks that could cause a denial of service due to hashing collisions. - Oracle quietly released patches for its Oracle Fusion Middleware and Sun Products Suite to address a handful of security flaws. The out-of-band patches addressed denial-of-service vulnerabilities that were present in several Oracle products, the company said in a security alert issued Jan. 31. A ...

2011 went into the books as a year of environmental disasters on an unprecedented global scale that have affected the lives and livelihoods of billions of people. The United States alone set a record with 12 separate billion-dollar weather/climate disasters in 2011, with an aggregate damage total of approximately $52 billion, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Thus, data backup and recovery has become a hot topic among IT managers. With this as background, data protection provider Acronis and the Ponemon Institute did some research to see how SMBs are approaching disaster recovery. The result is Acronis' second annual Disaster Recovery Index, released Feb. 1, which audited 18 countries and nearly 6,000 IT personnel. According to the survey findings in this report, a typical SMB today manages more than 100 servers, desktops and laptops and produces almost 40TB of fresh data each year. That is an awful lot of data to protect. The following slide show explains some of the research highlights. - ...

Facebook filed for its initial public offering as expected Feb. 1, ending a week of hype, buzz and punditry that had financial and Internet analysts predicting the social network giant's initial public offering would be the biggest in the history of the Internet. The company will trade under the ticker symbol “FB,” but has not revealed whether it will trade on the NASDAQ or NYSE. While Facebook will go on touting its Like buttons for Web publishers and hawking its Timeline user interface for consumers and applications alike, the company's financial statements will be poked, prodded and pored over by hundreds of experts looking to divine just how big an Internet player Facebook is now and can become 5, 10, 15 years down the road. Facebook may be the biggest IPO to date, but it isn't the only game in town. In this slide show, eWEEK takes a look at some of the top Internet company IPOs of the past couple of years, along with some obvious earlier blockbuster debuts. Plus, we make our logical guess for whom we think the next IPO will be. - ...

Microsoft has released version 1.0 of its Kinect for Windows SDK and runtime, expanding the Kinect's possibilities beyond the Xbox 360. - Microsoft has made the version 1.0 of its Kinect for Windows software development kit and runtime available for download. “Looking towards the future, we are planning on releasing updates to our SDK and runtime 2-3 times per year,” Craig Eisler, general manager of Kinect for Windows, wrote in ...

Sprint and ZTE have teamed up to offer a 7-inch Android-running 3G tablet for $100 with a two-year contract. Will it distract consumer attention from the $200 Kindle Fire? - Sprint will begin selling ZTE's first tablet for North America Feb. 5. In a world of fast-selling Apple iPads and Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the ZTE Optik is likely to attract attention for its selling price: $100 with a two-year service agreement. The Optik runs Android 3.2, known as Honeycomb, an...

Mozilla's Firefox 10 is relatively light on new user features, but includes a variety of new tools for developers, particularly those creating multimedia experiences. - In keeping with its rapid release cadence, Mozilla has released Firefox 10.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. While the latest browser version features relatively few cosmetic changes, there are some under-the-hood additions that could prove vital for developers trying to create next-generation Web exper...

Aggressive LTE rollouts will make spending on 4G LTE the primary source of wireless infrastructure spending by 2013, says IHS iSuppli. Spending will triple from 2012 to 2013. - With the Verizons and AT amp;Ts of the world racing to roll out 4G Long-Term Evolution networks, the technology is expected to become the industry's primary area of infrastructure spending. Analysts with IHS iSuppli, in a Jan. 31 report, said they now expect global capital spending on LTE tech...

Facebook could make some big-time acquisitions, such as bidding for streaming video giant Netflix, or snapping up some mobile assets. Big data may also be on tap. - Facebook's $5 billion IPO will give the company the capital boost to expand into new services and make some larger acquisitions it might not want or be able to do while private, analysts agree. Gartner analyst Ray Valdes believes Facebook might use its new capital to acquire larger companies than ...