Microsoft acquires Nokia devices, services business.

Microsoft Corp has announced it has completed its acquisition of the Nokia Devices which allows the two companies to come together as one to deliver a family of devices and services that will delight consumers and empower businesses.

Already, the acquisition has been approved by Nokia shareholders and by governmental regulatory agencies around the world.

Accordingly, the completion of the acquisition marks the first step in bringing these two organizations together as one team.

As part of the transaction, Microsoft will honor all existing Nokia customer warranties for existing devices.

Reacting on the new development, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, said that, “Today we welcome the Nokia Devices and Services business to our family. The mobile capabilities and assets they bring will advance our transformation.

“Together with our partners, we remain focused on delivering innovation more rapidly in our mobile-first, cloud-first world.”

Reporting to Nadella is former Nokia President and CEO Stephen Elop, who will serve as executive vice president of the Microsoft Devices Group, overseeing an expanded devices business that includes Lumia smartphones and tablets, Nokia mobile phones, Xbox hardware, Surface, Perceptive Pixel (PPI) products and accessories.

Microsoft welcomes personnel with deep industry experience in more than 130 sites across 50 countries worldwide, including several factories that design, develop, manufacture, market and sell a broad portfolio of innovative smart devices, mobile phones and services.

Windows Phone is the fastest-growing ecosystem in the smartphone market, and its portfolio of award-winning devices continues to expand.

It would be recalled that in the fourth quarter of 2013, according to IDC, Windows Phone reinforced its position as a top three smartphone operating system and was the fastest-growing platform among the leading operating systems with 91 percent year-over-year gain.

With the Nokia mobile phone business, Microsoft will target the affordable mobile devices market, a $50 billion annual opportunity,2 delivering the first mobile experience to the next billion people while introducing Microsoft services to new customers around the world.

Microsoft will continue to deliver new value and opportunity, and it will work closely with a range of hardware partners, developers, operators, distributors and retailers, providing platforms, tools, applications and services that enable them to make exceptional devices.

With a deeper understanding of hardware and software working as one, the company will strengthen and grow demand for Windows devices overall.

Source: Vanguard

Samsung Galaxy S5 and New Gear Devices Now Available Globally

Samsung's new flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5, today goes on sale in 125 countries, including the U.S. It also becomes available in Europe, Middle East, Latin America and most markets in Asia.

The company's trio of fitness devices — Gear 2, Gear 2 Neo and Gear Fit — also become available today.

Launched during this year's Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, the Samsung Galaxy S5 is a powerful device, with a 5.1-inch screen, a quad-core, 2.5GHz processor, 2GB of RAM, 16/32GB of storage and a 16-megapixel camera. It's waterproof and dustproof, and comes with a fingerprint scanner and a heart-rate monitor.

In the U.S., you can get it at every major carrier, including AT&T, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile, for the price of $199 with a two-year contract.

The Samsung Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo are the company's new, sleeker and lighter smartwatches, the biggest difference between the two being plastic (instead of metal) case and the lack of camera on the Neo. The Gear Fit is a smaller, leaner fitness wearable with a 1.85-inch Super AMOLED curved touchscreen. All three devices are water-resistant, and come with a heart-rate monitor.

Google Starts Scanning All Android Apps For Malware

Google is taking new steps to ensure Android users are protected from malware and other harmful apps.

The company announced Thursday it is expanding its app verification service to monitor all the apps on users' devices — including those downloaded from the Google Play Store.

Previously, when the Verify Apps service was enabled, only apps from third-party app stores were scanned, and only upon installation. Now Verify Apps will check every app before it is installed — and will regularly check that all of a user's installed apps are "behaving in a safe manner."

"Because potentially harmful applications are very rare, most people will never see a warning or any other indication that they have this additional layer of protection," said Android security engineer Rich Cannings in a blog post. "But we do expect a small number of people to see warnings (which look similar to the existing Verify apps warnings) as a result of this new capability."

Google's malware scanner for Android will now include apps downloaded from the Google Play Store.

IMAGE: GOOGLE

Google already has a system, codenamed "Bouncer," that analyzes each app uploaded to the Google Play Store for malware. But this service doesn't check apps from third-party stores or applications that have already been downloaded.

The Verify Apps setting, found under the security settings menu on most versions of Android, is enabled by default on Android smartphones and tablets.

What the Heartbleed bug is, and how you can protect yourself (and your servers)

Over the last couple of days, you may have heard about the rather ominous sounding Heartbleed bug — a bug that affected hundreds of millions of websites, exposing usernames, passwords, encryption keys, and other sensitive data. This bug went undiscovered for two years, meaning it’s highly likely that some of your data was exposed, and may have been scooped up by enterprising hackers — and unfortunately, given the nature of this bug, there’s almost nothing you can do about it. As of this morning, despite the frenzied installation of security patches, a huge number of sites are still affected by the bug, and they will likely remain so for months to come. Read on to find out more about Heartbleed, and what you can do to protect yourself.

What is the Heartbleed bug?

Heartbleed is a bug in OpenSSL’s implementation of the SSL/TLS protocol. OpenSSL is an open source library that manages secure, encrypted communications for the majority of online web servers. If the server supports encrypted communications — i.e. it accepts addresses that start with https:// — then there’s a good chance that it’s vulnerable to Heartbleed. You can use the Heartbleed test website to see if a site is vulnerable to the exploit.

I won’t get into the technical details of what caused the Heartbleed bug in the first place — the Heartbleed website has all the info you might need — but I’ll tell you roughly how it works and what data it exposes. Heartbleed, official designation CVE-2014-0160, is a bug in OpenSSL’s heartbeat extension. It isn’t important to know what this extension does, only that it was poorly coded (in coder speak, it lacked bounds checking). This bug can be exploited by a hacker to read blocks of 64KB from the server’s RAM. The hacker can only grab one 64KB block at a time, but he can keep going back for more until he’s gathered all the data he needs.

With access to the server’s memory, the jig is up. Passwords, security certificates (encryption keys), other sensitive details — they’re all stored in memory, and they’ve all been exposed for the last two years thanks to OpenSSL’s Heartbleed bug.

Yahoo was vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug, but has now been fixed

How to protect yourself/your servers from Heartbleed

If you’re a server admin: The Heartbleed bug has been patched in version 1.0.1g of OpenSSL. If the updated package isn’t available for your distro yet, the compile-time option of -DOPENSSL_NO_HEARTBEATS will also mitigate against the bug.

If you’re a web surfer: The short and rather unpleasant answer is, there isn’t much you can do to protect yourself from Heartbleed. If a website requires you to log in (to post a comment, to check your email) there is a good chance that hackers have had two years to glean your password from the server’s memory. The bug is exacerbated by the fact that it leaves no trace in log files, so there’s no way of telling if a password or encryption key has been exposed.

It sounds dramatic, but a bug of this magnitude basically necessitates that almost everyone on the internet changes their passwords. There is a very high chance that your name and password is currently sitting on a server that is vulnerable to the Heartbleed bug. If you’re a server admin, you really need to issue new security certificates for any affected domains.

Before you go and change your passwords, though, bear this in mind: Until all of your websites have updated to a secure version of OpenSSL, you’re still vulnerable. How long will it take for the entire web is using a secure version of OpenSSL? Larger websites should be fairly quick to react to an exploit of this magnitude. By the end of the week, I would be surprised if there are any big web services that are still vulnerable.

As always though with security vulnerabilities, though, it isn’t the big sites you need to worry about: It’s the forums and smaller e-commerce sites that don’t have dedicated administrators that will probably be vulnerable for months or years to come. These smaller sites are notorious for running software that is months or years out of date, because no one can be bothered (or knows how to) perform the requisite updates. If you know someone who runs a smaller website or forum, send them a link to this story or to the Heartbleed bug website. Tell them that they really need to update to the latest version of OpenSSL.

The Heartbleed bug will cause ripples for years to come — and in the short term, possibly a tsunami of high-profile hacks as well, unless big websites move very quickly indeed. Following the bug’s public disclosure on April 7, there has already been a marked increase in the number of users reporting hijacked accounts. If a hacker manages to obtain the security certificates for a high-profile target, like a bank or government — which is a very likely possibility — there’s almost no limit to the amount of damage that could be done.All because of a sloppy bit of coding by the OpenSSL team.