Microsoft finally unveils its new browser called Edge

At last the long wait is over, Microsoft finally reveals its official name for its new web browser plans last January, dubbed as Microsoft Edge, which is previously code-named Project Spartan.

Microsoft made the announcement at the annual Build Developer Conference 2015. Edge will replace Internet Explorer as the default browser of Windows 10 PCs, smartphones and tablets. It's not surprising that the nickname "Edge" is based on the new rendering engine that Microsoft is using for its Windows 10 browser which is called EdgeHTML.

Joe Belfiore, the Corporate Vice President, Operating Systems Group at Microsoft also said that the name was referred to the idea of Microsoft being on the edge of consuming and creating.

Microsoft Edge is designed to be a lightweight web browser with a layout engine built around web standards that is created for interoperability with the contemporary web.

The browser's new logo appears to be similar to the Internet Explorer's logo. However, the directions of the swirls have been changed and the color is a bit darker.

Microsoft Edge consists of unique features such as the ability to annotate on web pages, modern and futuristic design for new tabs which appear to have a flat design concept, jotting down notes or draw on top of web pages for a great way of reading and consuming content, favorites folder built into the browser, thumbnails of frequently visited websites, web applications and further integration with digital assistant Cortana to offer more personalized results and actions.

Developers will be able to carry their Chrome extensions or Firefox add-ons with just a couple of changes to Microsoft Edge.

Microsoft Edge also enables users to engage with sites and provide them a chance at starting to write some web code, which they may put into an application through web extensions built into the web browser.

Stay tuned on The Corliss Tech Review Group blog for more updates.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: How secure are payment technologies?

New payment technologies have the potential to make shopping online and in store more secure, but banks, tech companies and shops must first move to upgrade their systems efficiently and correctly, say cyber safety experts.

The payments industry is working to make it faster and more convenient to move money around. Yet, if implemented wrongly, this can make life easier for hackers too, the security experts say.

“Many of these evolutionary or revolutionary changes have been driven by convenience and ease of use, and often accepting a certain amount of risk,” says Amit Mital, chief technology officer of security firm Symantec.

Making the purchase of goods more secure is a priority for retailers, banks and payment companies. In the US, where payment card technology is less sophisticated than in Europe, retailers have recently been hit by massive data breaches, in which hackers have been able to steal tens of millions of customers’ card and personal data.

The highest-profile technology to hit the market is Apple Pay, which works with the iPhone 6s. It lets shoppers store their credit card information on their iPhone and pay for goods by tapping the phone on an in-store receiver. Because of a technology called “tokenisation” experts say it is more secure than current card systems.

With tokenisation, merchants receive data that obscures the shopper’s actual credit card number, reducing the chance that hackers can steal usable data from merchants’ internal systems. Because iPhones use fingerprint recognition to verify shoppers’ identity, it is also nearly impossible for a thief to steal an iPhone and make a purchase.

“We do not see any concern on our side in terms of security,” says Thierry Denis, president in North America for Ingenico, a manufacturer of credit card readers.

But there is a catch. In the first few months after Apple Pay’s launch last year, thieves have been able to take stolen credit cards, load them on to iPhones, and go shopping. They have not compromised the technology, but have got through the banks’ processes for checking — during the Apple Pay set-up — that the customer adding the card to his or her phone is the card’s real owner.

That fraud started showing up within a month of Apple Pay’s launch last year, with the level of fraud seen through the set-up far higher than that seen typically seen in credit cards, according to Cherian Abraham, a payments analyst who wrote one of the first blog posts to call attention to the issue. Given Apple’s sophisticated technology, the fraud was a “surprise to all”, he wrote.

Mr Mital of Symantec said the recent incidents of fraud on Apple Pay were “more of a failure in process than in technology”.

Joe Majka, chief security officer of Verifone, a manufacturer of point of sale terminals where shoppers swipe their cards, says that better encryption on such devices could be a security “game changer”, if widely adopted.

Like tokenisation, encryption means that hackers cannot make as much use of data they might steal if they are able to get into a retailer’s network.

Retailers have been slow to adopt such encrypted systems for various reasons. Regulations in the US are changing later this year and retailers will soon be responsible for the cost of fraud if they do not accept chip-and-pin cards, which make transactions more secure than when users just swipe their card.

But small retailers do not often see fraudulent purchases and so may be reluctant to spend on upgrading, without realising that their older systems mean they could be giving hackers a way to steal their customers’ data, says Mr Majka.

For larger retailers, making the shift takes work.

“When you talk to merchants and [payment] processors,” says Mr Majka, “there are so many changes in their systems, in their coding, that have to be made to accommodate an encrypted transaction.”

Other innovations featuring purely digital mobile payments via apps also face risks.

Cash-transfer app Venmo, which is owned by PayPal, recently faced media reports highlighting how hackers could access the app to transfer money to themselves.

Venmo has since added better email notifications and is adding multi-factor authentication to make logging in more secure. But the fact that this was already standard on services such as Gmail underlines how companies do not always use the most secure solutions available on the market.

Similarly, while US banks have been rolling out the more secure chip-and-pin cards for many months in anticipation of the regulatory changes this year, they are not yet available to all consumers.

Mr Majka of Verifone replaced his card recently and wanted a chip card. His bank, however, said he would have to wait. “It’s a little disappointing,” he says.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review - Protect Your Assets By Practicing Common-Sense Cybersecurity

Let’s get the scary stuff out of the way upfront: Cybercrime costs the global economy $575 billion annually, according to reports. The United States takes a $100 billion hit, the largest of any country, according to Politico. A report from former U.S. intelligence officials counted 40 million people whose personal information was stolen within the past year.

Online theft is huge, and it only seems to be getting worse. Hardly a week goes by without some story about hackers penetrating a computer system somewhere. Corporations, individuals, even White House servers were hacked last week. I sometimes wonder just how difficult it is for a determined bad guy to access grandma’s checking account or your neighbor’s IRA and grab those assets.

I am not the only one thinking about this. New York State Department of Financial Services issued a report on cybersecurity in the banking sector, where more than 150 organizations rely on third-party service providers for critical banking functions. The regulators want the banks to tighten security.

So should you.

We spend most of our time in financial markets looking at ways to deploy our capital: What assets to buy or sell, how much we should save for retirement, whether we should own more of these stocks and less of those bonds.

We don’t spend so much time thinking about the ways we can lose that money — to fraud and to common theft. We should be more vigilant, especially as we move our lives online, with digital access to our checking and savings accounts, our online portfolios, even our taxes.

It is impossible to make yourself hack-proof, but you can make yourself less vulnerable.

It all starts with some common-sense security steps. Three ways you probably can improve your existing practices: Develop better e-mail habits, beef up password security and (as always) remember that your behavior is the root of most of your problems.

Get your e-mail act together

Every day, your inbox fills with all manner of junk. Some of it is merely time-wasting nonsense, but let’s not forget about the really dangerous stuff: phishing schemes, malicious viruses and malware. It seems the only reprieve we get are those rare occasions when the main servers in Russia — a.k.a. Spambot Central — gets temporarily knocked off-line.

It’s more than a huge productivity killer, it’s a financial hazard. That $100 billion a year we mentioned above comes out of everyone’s pockets. Even if you have not been hacked, you are paying for it in some way. Banking costs are higher as financial firms spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on security.

People have tried a variety of ways to tackle this: Filters, whitelists, e-mail verifiers and trusted ID services; disposable ­ e-mail addresses from sites such as Mailinator; “junk” e-mail addresses from Hotmail, Yahoo or Google. And still the danger keeps coming.

I have a few tricks I use to keep the really nasty stuff under control, such as:

●View e-mail as plain text.

All of the bad links, embedded viruses and other malware go away when you select “view as plain text.” Sure, you lose all of the graphics and links, but you lose the threats as well.

●Create a primary e-mail address.

This is your main address — for colleagues, clients and peers. Never share this e-mail address. Don’t subscribe to anything using this address — no Internet mailing lists, no subscriptions, nada. Use this address alone for your finance- and business-related e-mails. Anything unrelated is junk; treat it that way. Block the domains of senders. Mark junk mail as junk.

●Use an e-mail forwarder.

I have been a big fan of Leemail.me. Instead of giving out my e-mail address, I use Leemail to auto-generate an address whenever I want to share my e-mail with an unfamiliar company. It forwards my e-mail from the company to me. When I want to shut that sender off, I flick a button.

Tracking the companies that share or sell your e-mail address is invaluable. The basic version of Leemail is, astonishingly, free, and the upgrade is only a few bucks a year.

●Don’t hit “unsubscribe”; get blacklisted instead.

There are a number of companies that provide e-mail services to third parties, shops such as Constant Contact, Vertical Response and iContact. They are the middlemen between businesses and consumers. And while they claim to be “opt-in only” and not spammers, in truth, they are subject to whatever bad behaviors their clients engage in. They all have become legal quasi-spammers.

On every e-mail these companies send, there is an unsubscribe button. NEVER CLICK THAT. When you do, you are not unsubscribing. Rather, you are verifying that your e-mail address is legitimate.

Instead, go to the company Web site and track down the customer service number. Call customer service and insist on having your e-mail or domain “blacklisted.” Thats the only way to ensure you will truly be unsubscribed. If the company refuses, file a Federal Trade Commission complaint.

Password security

If you were like I was five years ago, you had one simple password that you used for everything — Amazon, Facebook, Wall Street Journal — everywhere. This could’ve been disastrous. Now all passwords are different. Avoid the common errors, such as using birthdays or your kids’ names. Never use sequential numbers. And for goodness sake, don’t use “password” as your actual password.

Put all of your passwords on a document named something other than “My passwords.” I find burying passwords somewhere in a spreadsheet to be useful. Print out a copy and place it in your safety deposit box with other important papers.

Your biggest risk? You.

I have said all too often that when it comes to investing, people are their own worst enemy. Behavioral problems are rife in security as well. Get into the practice of thinking about security, and soon it becomes second nature.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has gotten much more serious about personal financial data security. They have informed advisers and brokers that there is a duty to protect client data. When we set up our wealth-management practice, we put into place specific policies and procedures to protect clients:

● All sensitive information is sent by secure e-mail using a third party for encryption.

● We never e-mail Social Security numbers or account numbers or other private data via regular email.

● We went totally paperless. Our file cabinets are empty, everything is cloud based.

● Any documents that arrive are shredded, so even our outgoing garbage is secure with nothing usable to a thief.

Most of this is common sense. However, many people are still vulnerable. With smarts and a bit of awareness, you can make your financial assets much more secure.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review - Us Regulator To Impose New Cyber Security Standards For Banks And Their Supply Chain

A new report highlighting deficiencies in US banks' oversight of suppliers' cyber security should serve to remind financial services companies in Europe of the due diligence they need to undertake, an expert has said.

Financial services and technology law expert Angus McFadyen of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that regulators in both the US and Europe are increasingly interested in what financial services companies are doing to address cyber security threats.

McFadyen was commenting after the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) announced its intention to introduce new regulations "strengthening cyber security standards for banks' third-party vendors" in the "coming weeks".

The announcement was made as it revealed that fewer than half of the banks it surveyed said they do not "conduct any on-site assessments" of "high-risk" suppliers, such as data processing companies and other suppliers that typically have access to "sensitive bank or customer data".

The NYDFS report (7-page / 313KB PDF) also said that only about 30% of the banks surveyed "require their third-party vendors to notify them in the event of an information security breach or other cyber security breach".

A fifth of the banks do not require suppliers to set "minimum information security requirements", whilst of those that do only a third "require those information security requirements to be extended to subcontractors of the third-party vendors", it said.

"A bank's cyber security is often only as good as the cyber security of its vendors," Benjamin Lawsky, superintendent of financial services at the NYDFS, said. "Unfortunately, those third-party firms can provide a backdoor entrance to hackers who are seeking to steal sensitive bank customer data. We will move forward quickly, together with the banks we regulate, to address this urgent matter."

McFadyen said that although "security is a growing concern on both sides of the Atlantic" the action proposed by the NYDFS is "the most forthright we’ve seen".

"European regulators are also actively looking at security," McFadyen said. "We’ve seen new rules around payment security come out of Europe and the Financial Conduct Authority’s (FCA's) own guidance on bank outsourcing touches on its importance. Security measures are rarely perfect, as we’ve seen with the takedown of the French TV channel TV5Monde, but the risks presented by a compromise in the sector are growing as we are increasingly digitising financial services."

McFadyen pointed to a recent announcement by the FCA on the implementation of new internet payments security guidelines in the UK as highlighting the regulatory focus there is on cyber security.

The FCA has said it will incorporate the new guidelines into its "supervisory framework" at the same time as the new EU Payment Services Directive (PSD2), which is still being negotiated, is transposed into UK law. The internet payment security guidelines were finalised late last year by the European Banking Authority (EBA).

"We are fully supportive of the objectives behind the guidelines and agree with the importance of consumers being protected against fraud when making payments online," the FCA said. "Ensuring the security of payments and the protection of sensitive customer data is a critical part of the infrastructure of robust payment systems."

"Many firms already have in place measures for strong customer authentication, and we would remind payment service providers of their responsibility to ensure consumers’ payments are safe and secure. We will be incorporating the detail of the requirements of the guidelines into our supervisory framework in line with the revised Payment Services Directive (PSD2) transposition timeline," it said.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Facebook to launch social network for cyber security experts

Facebook is launching a social network for cyber security professionals to share information about threats that could lead to cyber attacks, as the US government and companies search for new ways to co-ordinate their defences.

The world’s largest social network is stepping up its work in cyber security by teaming with other technology companies including Yahoo and online scrapbooking site Pinterest. The platform will enable companies to share clues about how hackers are behaving in the hope of preventing security breaches.

As cyber attacks hit companies from Sony Pictures to health insurer Anthem, the private and public sector are under pressure to work together to understand their adversaries. Hackers join forces and share tips to break into networks but so far, communication about cyber defence has often been haphazard.

Mark Hammel, Facebook’s manager of threat infrastructure, said ThreatExchange had been developed from a system that Facebook was already using internally to make it easier to catalogue threats to the site in real time.

Facebook’s decision to share the tool comes at a time when the company is trying to broaden its appeal beyond social interactions with friends and family and make the product a tool that is useful in the workplace. The company is also trying out a site and app called Facebook at Work, designed to facilitate internal collaboration between colleagues.

Mr Hammel said Facebook would give the cyber security service away for free, unlike some other threat detection systems.

“We feel that as our product’s footprint has grown, with the number of people using it to communicate, we have the ability to spend more time on broader security issues that affect the internet,” he said. He added Facebook was “really well positioned” with its “social sharing model” to direct a threat project such as this.

He added that Yahoo and Pinterest were good initial partners because they faced similar threats and had sizeable user bases. “Together, we’re protecting a pretty sizeable percentage of the internet,” he said.

The ThreatExchange comes after Barack Obama, US president, put information sharing at the heart of his cyber security proposals announced ahead of the State of the Union speech last month. He proposed legislation that would make it easier for companies to share information about cyber threats with the government.

The US government announced this week that it would be establishing a new agency, modelled on the National Counterterrorism Center with the aim of bringing together information from all arms of government during a cyber incident.

Mr Obama is expected to flesh out those proposals at a White House summit held at Stanford University on Friday, while appealing to the technology industry to do more to help.

The financial industry already leads the way in sharing information. The Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center — known as FS-ISAC — joined the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation, the post-trade services provider, last September to launch the first widespread not-for-profit intelligence service. The project is funded by 12 large companies from sectors including finance, energy and healthcare.

But many analysts say information sharing is a key challenge for cyber defences. Last year saw a steep acceleration in attacks on businesses. These included the largest ever breach of personal data at a retailer at Home Depot, as well as the attack on Sony Pictures that the FBI has said was orchestrated by North Korea.

The Corliss Group: White House Cybersecurity Event to Draw Top Tech, Wall Street Execs

Government to Call on Companies to Help Improve Information Sharing as Breaches Get More Sophisticated

President Barack Obama will convene top executives from Silicon Valley, Wall Street, and a number of other industries on Friday in a first-of-its kind cybersecurity “summit” taking place as the government and corporate executives each struggle to adjust to persistent and sophisticated breaches.

Mr. Obama will be joined at the Stanford University event by top officials at the Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Secret Service, and Federal Bureau of Investigation. The officials will call on companies to share more information with the government in an effort to combat future cyberattacks, a plea officials have made for months with limited success.

Mr. Obama’s presence at the event has drawn what has emerged as a Who’s Who of corporate leaders, reflecting a growing acknowledgment that many companies need to rethink their cyberdefenses.

Apple Inc. Chief Executive Tim Cook will deliver remarks about his company’s push toward a more secure payment system, a theme the White House is expected to try to reinforce for other companies throughout the event.

An Apple spokeswoman confirmed that Mr. Cook will be speaking at the summit. He is expected to focus on Apple’s experience with mobile payments. Apple introduced Apple Pay in October, touting a security feature aimed at reducing the chances of credit-card theft.

Mr. Cook will be joined at Stanford on Friday by the CEOs of Bank of America Corp., U.S. Bancorp, American Express, Kaiser Permanente, Visa Inc., MasterCard Inc., and PayPal who also will speak on panels at the daylong event, along with representatives from Facebook Inc., Google, Intel Corp., and a numerous other companies.

Input from these executives is notable, as they collectively hold health, financial, search-engine, and social-media records on tens of millions of Americans. A number of the firms, particularly the technology companies, have sparred with the federal government over privacy concerns in recent years.

To acknowledge those concerns, the White House is expected to make privacy a central theme at the summit, in addition to consumer protection and cybersecurity techniques.

In addition to remarks from Messrs. Obama and Cook, the seven-hour event will include multiple panel sessions, including separate discussions of public-private collaboration, consumer protection, and payment technologies.

The entire event will be live-streamed on the White House’s website.

Senior administration officials see the event as a continuation of two years’ worth of cybersecurity initiatives, but the issue has taken on more urgency in recent months as the number of cyberattacks has increased dramatically. And recent large-scale breaches at Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc. and Anthem Inc. have led to an internal debate among government officials over whether the government should heighten its response to cyberattacks carried out by foreign countries.

Also notably, the White House’s list of panelists and speakers at the summit doesn't include representatives from many of the large companies that have suffered major breaches in recent years, such as Home Depot Inc., J.P. Morgan Chase & Co., Target Corp., Sony, or Anthem. A senior administration official said these companies weren't excluded from panels at the event.

Also missing from the list of panelists and speakers are officials from the U.S. intelligence community, such as the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. Intelligence officials often collect information about cyberthreats, and the White House on Tuesday announced a new office that is meant to collect and analyze their data.

But many technology companies remain skeptical about the operations of these agencies, particularly the NSA. A senior administration official said officials from the intelligence agencies would be at the event but officials from the agencies like the FBI and DHS were tapped to speak because they interact directly with the public to discuss cyber issues.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Security experts offer online shopping tips

As Americans spend billions on holiday shopping this month, online security experts say a little caution can go a long way when it comes to avoiding identity theft.

“In general online shopping is good. It’s safe for the most part, but it’s the safest when you initiate the contact, when you log onto a known website,” said Rick Avery, president of Boston-based Securitas Security Systems.

Directly visiting trusted, reputable online retailers is just one way to attempt to avoid the cyber criminals who try to steal sensitive information from vulnerable computers and unsuspecting consumers.

“There is a risk in commerce …” said Sam Ransbotham, an information systems professor at Boston College. “There is also a risk from walking around with a wad of cash. We’ve got years and years of experience walking around with wads of cash that we just don’t have with these newer mechanisms.”

Purchases at brick-and-mortar stores aren’t immune to data breaches either. Last year, hackers stole data from 40 million credit cards from Target, while cyber thieves got information from 56 million credit cards from Home Depot earlier this year.

To reduce the chances of fraud, Avery advises that shoppers be wary of offers sent via email. Criminals, he said, may send legitimate-looking emails that appear to be from online merchants or banks. Rather than clicking on a link in an email, he recommends directly typing the website address into your browser.

“One of the most dangerous ways people get involved with credit card fraud or theft on the Internet is they get emailed a link offering 50 percent off, or saying it’s from the bank, and it’s actually a false website made to look like the authentic website,” he said.

Cyber criminals can use fraudulent websites to gather financial information from a person or install malware on their computers.

“If you’re shopping around and find an extra, extra really good deal, that might be the online equivalent to buying cheap speakers out of the back of a truck,” Ransbotham said. “If it’s too good to be true, it is.”

Avery also recommends using credit cards or one-time use credit cards instead of debit cards.

“Some banks have protections on a debit card, but not all do at the point of an ATM,” Avery said. “Usually, your debit card is tied to your other banking accounts, and it’s a lot more difficult to get your money back. It may be weeks before you get your money back.”

In some cases, a victim might never get that money back.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Top tips to stay safe while shopping online on what promises to be one of retail's biggest days of the year

Cyber Monday is set to be among the biggest shopping days of the year - but how can you avoid becoming the victim of online shopping fraud on Monday?

Experian found that last year saw a huge lift in Black Friday’s significance, with a 19 percent increase in visits to retail websites last year (29 Nov) compared to 2012. Cyber Monday is also increasing, with a 9 per cent increase last year on 2012’s figures.

Meanwhile, the rise of ‘click & collect’ services, and a greater trust in retailers being able to deliver well in time for Christmas, has resulted in a trend for people being more comfortable leaving their Christmas shopping until a Monday later: Manic Monday, you might call it.

A few things to remember if you are doing the bulk of your Christmas shopping online, according to Experian:

1. It’s best to use websites that you know and trust. Always look for a security padlock icon in the top left hand corner of a page before you register financial or personal information on a website. And if an online deal you find, or have been emailed, sounds too good to be true, it quite probably is.

2. Use strong passwords, especially if you have stored payment details, and it’s a good idea to change them every now and then. If possible, install the latest anti-virus and firewall software. If you’re out and about, make sure you can’t be overlooked when you make a mobile payment – be especially careful around wi-fi, even at home.

3. Keep an eye on your bank and credit card account balances. Your credit report can also show you if there are any irregularities, such as suspect applications for credit and rises in card balances. As a CreditExpert member you can get unlimited views of your Experian Credit Report and alerts to credit activity in your name so you can spot potentially fraudulent activity.

4. Buying on credit can give you protection. If you buy goods or services on your credit card, you have extra protection if things go wrong (clothes don’t fit, unwanted gifts etc.) compared with paying by cash or even debit card, under section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act.

Corliss Tech Review Group provides some tips and reviews on how to secure you through online and technical issue. Our substance is short yet to the point, and intended to challenge you to live in and nurture with IT technologies. For more update, just visit our blog site.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review on Bitdefender Total Security 2015

Regarded as one of the best technical Windows internet security suites for PC and laptop, and Total Security 2015 lives up to that rep.

Bitdefender is widely regarded as one of the best technical Windows internet security suites. Its Total Security product offers a very good range of the features you rightly expect in a security suite. The 2015 version aims to make life even easier for customers by introducing Profiles, which adapt the software for particular tasks, like playing games, watching movies or general office work. Also see: Best internet security software 2014.

After installation, you’re presented with a very Windows 8-looking tiled interface. Rather than having a lot of tiles slide awkwardly through the Bitdefender window, as in the 2014 version, here there are three large tiles and four subsidiary ones, giving quick and easy access to all the program’s key functions.

The modules provided by Bitdefender Total Security 2015 cover AV, anti-malware and anti-spam, tune-up, online banking protection, a 2-way firewall, parental control, online backup and anti-theft provision.

Online backup, which Bitdefender Total Security 2015 refers to as Safebox, is handled from the My Bitdefender online site, which is unusual – it’s more usually set up and managed locally. 

It works by syncing the files and folders you select with off-site storage and offers 2 GB of space. This is paltry in a Bitdefender Total Security 2015 package catering for three PCs, though you can, naturally, buy more. 

System optimisation looks at three different areas that might need attention: disk, Windows Registry and privacy. 

After we’d adjusted the default settings to leave browser caches and history alone, Bitdefender Total Security 2015 still managed to recover 8.7 GB from our test system, which is worth having back. You can run the optimiser with a single click.

The anti-theft features include locating, locking down and wiping a stolen laptop, although still no facility to take a photo of the person using it. While testing on a desktop PC, we tried the locate facility, which repeatedly reported we were in a suburb of Doncaster, a place we’ve never knowingly visited (although we’re sure it’s very nice). Since this writer is based in Devon that’s not very encouraging.

The Profiles, apart from the Standard one applied by default, are for work, games and videos. They postpone protection and maintenance tasks which impair performance and put off automatic Windows updates. Like many tasks in Bitdefender Total Security 2015, you can leave selection of the correct profile to AutoPilot, which automatically manages the IS suite when engaged.

Our tests showed a fairly low scan rate of 54.5 files per second, but good file fingerprinting, dropping the number of files scanned from 79,145 to 14,703 on a second scan.

We measured very little resource hit, too, with just a 10 percent impact on our copy test, when also running a background scan with Bitdefender Total Security 2015.

The German test site AV-Test (www.av-test.org) has awarded Bitdefender Total Security 2015 top marks in its test groups for the last three years, which is a notable achievement.

Most recently, using the 2014 product, the product managed an overall score of 17.5/18.0, which breaks down into a perfect 6.0/6.0 for Protection, the same for Usability and 5.5/6.0 for Performance.

Performance looks at how much the software affects the overall speed of the system it’s run on, and here it gave just a 1 second knock-back, against 5 sec for the group Bitdefender Total Security 2015 was tested in, as a whole. A very good result.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Logitech K480 Keyboard Works with Anything You Own

It’s a truth as universal as it is annoying; if you want all your devices to work with a specific keyboard, well, you’ll probably need either one for each, sign on for precisely one device ecosystem, or get used to swiping in words. Travelers in particular are driven insane by this problem, so Logitech decided, quite cleverly, to solve it with the K480.

Swiss Army Keyboard

There are two problems with modern portable keyboards. The first is, as we noted, device compatibility. Ask anybody who’s had to install drivers just to get a basic keyboard to work, the various device ecosystems out there don’t play well with each other and seemingly want to drive you insane.

Logitech solves this with some clever design. You can switch between three different places to send your words, so that regardless of whether you’re all Apple, or a mix of Apple, Chrome, and Windows, you’ll be able to use the keyboard and get the point across. Basically, if it uses Bluetooth, you’re all set to type.

At The Trough

The second problem is keeping all your stuff organized; you’ve got your phone over here, your tablet over there, and your laptop in front of you… and many keyboards want to be docked solely at your tablet. How does Logitech solve this? Simple: It puts a trough at the top of the keyboard that can easily be used to stand up both your tablet and your phone, and to type away at both of them with ease.

A Keyboard For The Multitasker

Multitasking, or at least sorting through your various tasks properly, can be a profoundly annoying experience, and Logitech deserves credit for looking at how we actually use our gadgets and creating a keyboard that fits in with them. If that’s something you need, it starts at just $50.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review on How Anqor Gets You Online

If you travel, you know the pain of getting online wherever you go. Either you pay offensive tethering charges when you really shouldn’t be, or, in some cases, it’s just impossible to access the Internet unless you’ve got an in-country SIM card. As we’re increasingly global, this is increasingly annoying, but there’s one Kickstarter, Anqor, that supposedly has the solution.

Always Online

The Anqor itself is fairly straightforward, as a device. It’s about the size of a novelty paperback you get as a gift, and relatively light, although that’s just the prototype; the end goal device is roughly the size of an iPhone. And it works relatively simply, as well; it connects to a 3G or 4G network in the area you’re in, connects to up to ten of the devices you have handy, and we’re off to the races. It’s how it connects that’s more interesting.

SIMulated Card

As we all know, to access a local mobile network, you need a SIM card, which is profoundly annoying. What the Anqor does is determine where you are, riffle through the company’s library of SIM cards, upload the profile, and you’re done. The tradeoff, of course, is that this doesn’t come cheap. Global travelers looking for this convenience will be paying roughly $52 a month for the library, although you can pause a subscription at any time, and for just one country, it’ll be a more reasonable $16 a month.

Online Anywhere

If you’re a world traveler, you know from experience that you’ll be running around juggling SIM cards anyway, so you may as well clean some of the clutter out of your life. And, if you never leave the country but your job requires constant Internet access, this might be worth it as well. The device, without data plan, will start at around $270 if you get in early on the Kickstarter.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: The Bluetooth Tracking Gadget

The only thing missing from Tile, the Bluetooth tracking gadget, is more users (review)

In 2013, a crowdfunded project known as the Tile became a smash hit, racking up over $2,500,000 in funding from nearly 50,000 backers. The secret to its success? Simple: The Tile promised to help users locate any object attached to the coin-sized Bluetooth-connected tag priced at $20.

I signed on as a backer mostly out of curiosity. After all, compared to some crowdfunded tech projects like the Pebble, the 3Doodler or the Micro 3D printer, the $20 Tile seemed like a no-brainer.

So I committed my cash and then, just like thousands of others, I began a very long wait for my Tile to arrive. I had almost given up hope of ever seeing a Tile in the flesh when finally — nearly a year after having backed the project — my Tile showed up last week.

“So far we’ve delivered to over 50,000 people,” Nick Evans, Tile’s co-founder and CEO said in an interview with VentureBeat.

I guess I was lucky to be amongst the first third of buyers. Evans sympathizes with those who feel the wait has been too long, “I’ve pre-ordered items too and there can be a lot of frustration, like, where is this thing? We’re working as hard as we can to get everyone’s Tiles to them.”

First impressions

My neighbor ordered a Tile at the same time I did and his showed up the same day as mine. “It’s a lot bigger than I expected,” he said. It’s true: The Tile looks and feels a lot larger in real life than it did in the photos and videos that Tile posted to its website during the funding period.

Wondering why both my neighbor and I (and other reviewers) had the same reaction, I checked one of the ads that was — and is still — used to promote the Tile. Sure enough, the image Tile chose does an excellent job of masking the Tile’s thickness. The ad makes it appear as though the Tile is barely thicker than a coin — or a key for that matter.

The actual dimensions are 37mm x 37mm x 5.3 mm. The effect is that, when attached to a keychain, the Tile feels more like the largest object on your ring, not just another key.

Evans claims there was no attempt to mislead customers and that the Tile used in these promotional images is the same size, shape and thickness as the units that have been shipped: “That’s the actual size. We of course wanted to advertise the correct size […] we didn’t want people to be disappointed,” he says.

How it works

Getting a Tile set up is very easy. After you download the free Tile app (iOS only, for now), enable Bluetooth and location services, and register for a free Tile account, the app prompts you to add your first Tile.

To do so, simply press and hold on the “e” portion of the “tile” word on the Tile until the Tile emits a little tune and hold the Tile close to your iOS device when prompted to do so. Your Tile is now paired. You can add up to 8 Tiles per account.

The Tile app will always show you the last place it “saw” (i.e., where it was in direct Bluetooth contact with) your Tile and how long ago it saw it.

A killer community

I gave my Tile to my neighbor to take with him to work. My Tile app was able to locate it perfectly.

Above: I gave my Tile to my neighbor to take with him to work. My Tile app was able to locate it perfectly.

So what happens when your Tile can’t be located by going back to the last place your app saw it?

Tile calls it the “Community Find” feature. Turns out, every person who keeps the Tile app open on their iOS device becomes a node in a much larger Tile network.

Annual renewal

The other drawback to the Tile is its non-user-replaceable battery. Because Tiles are sealed, which gives them a splash-proof exterior, there’s no way to access or replace any of its innards, including the battery. Tiles are only good for one year, after which Tile will get in touch to facilitate the return of your now-dead Tile and presumably give you the option to re-up for another year for another $20.

This works out to about $1.66 per month per object tracked, on an indefinite basis. Is it worth it? I guess it depends on what you’re tracking and how often you think you might misplace it.

Conclusion

The $20 Tile is a device that does exactly what it claims: It helps you locate misplaced objects using your smartphone in a way that is easy and intuitive.

For most people, even though the Tile is only effective for a year, it offers a convenient, expandable and soon — according to Evans — shareable way to track your most commonly lost articles.

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The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review: Closing the High-Tech Gender Gap

This year’s Lemelson-MIT Prize winner discusses grassroots ways for boosting the number of women in technology and business.

I have a confession to make: I’ve been living under a rock.

I’ve actually been busy under here — running a bioengineering lab at MIT, starting companies, teaching, consulting, being a mom. But I’ve been so focused on keeping all the balls in the air that, until recently, I hadn’t noticed that women typically aren’t the ones starting technology companies.

To be fair, I had recognized that:

• Girls choose engineering less often and drop out of engineering disproportionately (the so-called “leaky pipeline”).

• The percentage of women computer science majors peaked 30 years ago.

• The higher I climb, the fewer other women there are at the table with me.

I’ve also seen progress in gender equity in higher education. I just didn’t realize until recently that the technology industry is light years behind.

In case you’ve also been under a rock, here are some numbers that I found truly astonishing. Women lead only 3 percent of tech startups, account for only 4 percent of the senior venture partners funding such startups and represent only 5 percent of the founders, advisors and directors at MIT technology spinoffs.

Are you as shocked as I was? What if I tell you that more than 50 percent of students in some MIT undergraduate science majors are women — and that’s been the case for almost 20 years? Where do these talented women go, and what are the implications of that drain?

If we believe that entrepreneurship is a fundamental engine of progress, that it is a path to getting ideas into the world, then what does it mean for our society if the ideas that germinate in the minds of all those young women rarely turn into companies with products? (By the way, women-led private tech companies have 12 percent higher revenue and 35 percent higher return on investment than those led by men, according to the Kauffman Foundation. This shouldn’t have to be true to make us care, but it actually is.)

The Lemelson-MIT Prize is an award for invention, for making discoveries useful through commercialization, and for inspiring the next generation. As the 2014 recipient, I am truly honored and grateful to the many people who have contributed to our collective track record using miniaturization tools to impact human health.

Here are three things that made a difference for me:

Great expectations: My biggest fan and mentor has always been my dad, himself a serial entrepreneur. When I became a professor, he had mixed feelings about me climbing the ivory tower. To encourage me, he asked one simple question: “When will you start your first company?”  (As it turned out, I started my first company within five years. Since then, my students and have founded 10 companies between us.)

Microclimate: Many have noted the chilly climate for women in engineering. I’ve been extraordinarily lucky. Of my college tribe of girlfriends, four of us are now successful entrepreneurs. My best friend is among that 4 percent of women venture capitalists; in fact, she was named one of Fortune’s Most Powerful Women. I’m fortunate to work alongside female founder colleagues, MIT’s Technology Licensing Office, and the ever-inspirational Professor Robert Langer. Indeed, my microclimate is actually pretty warm.

Men who believed in me: Much has been written about visible role models for women. I try to be one, even when it’s hard to put myself “out there.” Along the same lines, I appreciate having had a working mom who was a trailblazer, having been one of the first women in India to receive an MBA. However, it’s worth noting that the people in my life who have seen more for me than I saw for myself, who believed in me and promoted me, were mostly men, including my graduate advisor, my first investor, and my husband. The truth is that changing the face of technology requires the involvement of men who care about it.

I will donate some of the prize money to the MIT Society of Women Engineers. This organization runs fabulous outreach programs designed to keep young girls interested in the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math). I also look forward to supporting a program for women’s entrepreneurship in MIT’s upcoming Innovation Initiative.

I hope other institutions will follow suit and such initiatives spread as quickly and far as the ideas set forth in the gender equity report championed by MIT’s beloved former president Charles Vest. I encourage you to also do your part: If you believe strongly in a talented woman you know, why not ask her when she will be starting her first company? It could be just the kind of great expectation that makes a real difference.

The Corliss Group Latest Tech Review on Neuroscientists Object to Europe’s Human Brain Project

More than 180 neuroscientists have signed an open letter to the European Commission calling on it to reconsider the technical goals and oversight of one of the world’s largest brain-mapping projects, predicting it is likely to fail.

The European Union agreed last year to invest more than one billion euros in the Human Brain Project (HBP), a 10-year effort involving dozens of research institutions to create a simulation of how the human brain works, using supercomputers.

But according to a letter released by dissenting scientists, the project is doomed by opaque management and the pursuit of goals not widely shared by neuroscientists. “We believe the HBP is not a well-conceived or implemented project and that it is ill suited to be the centerpiece of European neuroscience,” the letter says.

Governments, including those of the United States and China, have all launched large neuroscience projects to study the brain (see “Brain Mapping”). But the brain is so massively complex—it has roughly 86 billion neurons and trillions of connections—that there’s little consensus on how to study it.

Europe’s HBP has been particularly controversial because it emphasizes large-scale mapping of the brain and computer simulations over traditional, small-scale bench research. The project’s core goal, according to its website, is “to build a completely new information computing technology infrastructure for neuroscience.”

Signers of the letter, including neuroscientists from the University of Oxford and the Institut Pasteur, intend to boycott 50 million euros per year of neuroscience research grants that have been linked to the EU project.

“Why should an information technology project determine neuroscience funding?” says Zachary Mainen, a researcher at the Champalimaud Centre for the Unknown in Portugal, which gathered the signatures after a component of the project it was involved with was cancelled. “It’s not a project that was planned by the neuroscience community. They say they are going to simulate the brain, but I don’t think anyone believes that.”

According to a report in the Guardian, the neuroscientists hope to influence a review of the project by European officials that is expected to be complete by the end of the summer.

The HBP is led by Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland, who says critics are upset because there’s a scientific “paradigm shift” under way that threatens their way of working.

“It’s a natural reaction when you move from an old paradigm to a new one. It happened with the Human Genome Project,” says Markram. “That was also about large-scale, systematic teams working together, and you also had the individual labs saying ‘Oh my, I am going to be out of business.’ It’s very similar to that.”

Within two years, Markram says, the HBP will release the first phase of its technology platform, which will let any scientist contribute data and run simulations. He says this will bring neuroscience up to speed with disciplines like astrophysics or climate research, where scientists use simulations all the time. “You can’t measure everything in the Universe, but you can simulate it,” he says. “You can’t measure all of the brain, either, so we are going to have to predict a lot of it.”

That focus on computer simulations is what’s generating the most withering criticism. Konrad Kording, a neuroscientist at Northwestern University, calls the European project “useless and misleading” and says there is “genuine concern that the neuroscience community in Europe will be damaged by a very high-profile project that is deeply misguided.” Continue reading…