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Wednesday, August 5, 2015

#Windows10: how much of my personal information can #Microsoft access?

Microsoft is collecting user account information, credit card details and passwords following the installation of Windows 10, according to an updated privacy statement

A Dell laptop running Windows 10 Photo: Reuters

if you're one of the millions to update your PC to Windows 10, Microsoft is already collecting your personal data and behavioural patterns.

Microsoft's privacy statement has recently been updated to explain the nature of the personal information it collects from your computer when running Windows 10, including payment data, data about your interests and contact information.

Windows 10 is now running on more than 14 million devices worldwide since the software began rolling out on July 29, saving users' Bing search information, private email content and the apps they access, along with "your typed and handwritten words".

Spoken commands to Cortana, Microsoft's digital assistant, are also saved to enable a more customised user experience with more relevant suggestions, the company said.

^{Windows 10: accessing your data}

“We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services,” Microsoft said in its recently update new terms of services agreement.

“Windows does not collect personal information without your consent. To effectively provide Windows as a service, Microsoft gathers some performance, diagnostic and usage information that helps keep Windows and apps running properly. Microsoft uses this information to identify problems and develop fixes.”

The saved data is used to "improve and personalise" each user's experience of using Windows 10, for targeted adverts via a unique customer advertising ID and to inform users of new software, security and account updates. "However, we do not use what you say in email, chat, video calls or voice mail, or your documents, photos or other personal files to target ads to you," Microsoft's privacy statement reads.

It's worth pointing out that Google similarly sweeps its users' emails in order to provide them with more targeted advertising, while Apple's digital assistant Siri and Google's Google Now also collect user data in order to personalise their responses.

Microsoft collects:

Search queries submitted to Bing
A voice command to Cortana
Private communications including email content
Information from a document uploaded to OneDrive
Requests to Microsoft for support
Error reports
Information gathered from cookies
Data collected from third parties

If you're especially concerned about the kind of data you're sharing with Microsoft, you can adjust it by opening up Settings > Privacy and toggling off the various inputs. Turning off location services means Cortana will no longer work. You can opt out of personalised adverts by visiting this Microsoft page.

Telegraph.co.uk

Monday, August 3, 2015

#BMW i3 drivers get paid to delay charging

Thursday, July 30, 2015

Zuckerberg to Wall Street: Be Patient, Big Things Take Time. #Zuckerberg , #facebook , #wallstreet

Patience is a rare investor virtue. Mark Zuckerberg thinks he has the track record to ask for it.

Facebook Inc. had just reported second-quarter revenue Wednesday that beat analysts’ estimates, and on a conference call some of the same analysts asked the chief executive about applications that could be making billions on their own -- WhatsApp, Instagram and Messenger. Zuckerberg didn’t seem eager to placate his questioners with promises, projections or even updated user numbers.

“We would ask for some patience on this to do this correctly,” he said of Facebook’s Messenger.

The focus for the three applications was still on expanding their communities, he said. Messenger has 700 million users, more than double the size of Twitter Inc., WhatsApp has 800 million and Instagram has more than 300 million. Instagram started to sell advertising, but it’s not going to have an impact on Facebook’s bottom line for a long time, Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg said.

“They didn’t offer up a whole lot of new details, but that’s the kind of luxury and time you get when your core business is doing very well,” said Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester Research. “They seem to be taking advantage.”

Zuckerberg’s investors may want results -- the stock fell more than 3 percent to the equivalent of $93.83 at 9:20 a.m. in Frankfurt -- but the social network’s billionaire founder has never been in much of a hurry. On Wednesday’s call he recalled 2006-2007, when Facebook was under pressure to add banner advertising, the main way websites profited back then. But Facebook took its time to develop ads that felt more natural, he said.

‘Organic Interaction’

“What we decided was that over the long term, the ads and monetization would perform better if there was an organic interaction between people using the product and businesses,” Zuckerberg said.

Now Facebook is following a similar playbook. With Messenger, for example, the company is introducing ways for people to conduct customer-service conversations with businesses.

Zuckerberg has long been tempering investor expectations about the products. In October, he said that applications “don’t really get that interesting to turn into businesses until they have about a billion people using them.”

It was a humble brag that dug at a competitor. A few miles north of Facebook’s campus in Menlo Park, California, San Francisco-based Twitter was struggling past the 300 million user mark. Now, Twitter expects growth to stagnate for a while, its executivessaid Tuesday. Facebook, on the other hand, has a history of building or buying products with devoted user bases - - and making them lucrative.

Biggest Bet

Then there’s Oculus, the virtual-reality headset maker that Facebook owns. It’s central to Zuckerberg’s grand vision of the Internet’s future, and again, investors will have to wait for a potential payoff. Oculus expects to ship its first consumer product in early 2016. It’ll be an important event for Zuckerberg, who said immersive three-dimensional experiences will eventually replace video in online popularity. But on the call, Facebook executives declined to say how many Oculus units they thought would ship, how it might change Facebook’s cost structure, or whether it might have an app store.

Meanwhile, Facebook had its biggest quarter of hiring ever, with most of those employees brought in for research and development -- a longterm strategy for Zuckerberg that includes mastering artificial intelligence.

Facebook’s sales rose 39 percent to $4.04 billion in the quarter. That ought to buy Zuckerberg more time.

Bloomberg.com

Europe Stocks Rise on Earnings as Dollar Strengthens; Gold Falls

Stocks in Europe and Asia rose amid better-than-estimated corporate earnings. The dollar gained for a second day after the Federal Reserve said the job market is improving, while gold slumped.

The Stoxx Europe 600 Index increased 0.5 percent by 8:21 a.m. in London. The MSCI Asia Pacific Index added 0.3 percent, paced by Nintendo Co. after the Japanese gaming company returned to a profit. The dollar gained 0.2 percent versus both the euro and the yen. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index index futures slipped 0.1 percent after U.S. stocks climbed Wednesday. Gold retreated 1 percent.

With Europe’s earnings season in full swing, companies from Nokia Oyj to Deutsche Bank AG exceeded investor expectations. Traders will get another chance to speculate on the timing of U.S. interest-rate increases with an update on second-quarter gross domestic product due Thursday. More than 500 companies in Japan’s Topix index report first-quarter earnings on Thursday and Friday.

Nokia surged 7.4 percent, while Deutsche Bank gained 2.4 percent. Siemens AG, Europe’s largest engineering company, rose 3.2 percent after quarterly earnings beat estimates.

The Topix rose a second day as the yen traded at a one-week low versus the dollar. Of the companies on the index that have already posted results, and for which Bloomberg has estimates, 59 percent beat analysts’ profit expectations. Japan’s industrial production increased more than forecast in June, aiding an economy that struggled last quarter with weakness in retail sales and exports.

‘Further Improvement’

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 Index climbed 0.8 percent. South Korea’s Kospi index fell 0.9 percent amid a 3.8 percent retreat by Samsung Electronics Co. after second-quarter profit missed analysts’ estimates.

The Federal Reserve on Wednesday dropped the modifier “somewhat” in describing a decline in labor-market slack, and said it will tighten policy once it sees “some further improvement in the labor market.”

The addition of the word “some” to this sentence is a strong indicator the U.S. is inching closer toward its first rate increase since 2006, Alan Ruskin, global head of Group of 10 foreign exchange at Deutsche Bank AG, said in an e-mail.

Fed Chair Janet Yellen is guiding the central bank toward its first rate increase in almost a decade as the U.S. approaches full employment. She’s said the Fed is likely to tighten policy this year should the economy continue to improve in line with her expectations. Economists have put the chance of a September increase at 50 percent.

Goldman Positive

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which tracks the greenback against 10 major peers, rose 0.2 percent, extending Wednesday’s 0.3 percent advance. Treasuries slipped a third day, with 10-year yields up two basis points, or 0.02 percentage point, to 2.31 percent.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. Chief Executive Officer Lloyd C. Blankfein said Wednesday U.S. markets are poised for prolonged growth, and will quickly move on after the jolt that should result from the Fed’s rate increase.

The Bloomberg Commodity Index of 22 raw materials fell 0.1 percent, poised for its largest monthly loss since 2011. West Texas Intermediate headed for its biggest monthly drop this year. WTI was little changed at $48.78 a barrel, while Brent crude increased 0.3 percent. Copper declined 0.6 percent to $5,295 a metric ton.

Bloomberg.com

Russian hackers used Twitter, photos to access US computers: Report

Russian government-backed hackers who penetrated high-profile US government and defense industry computers this year used a method combining Twitter with data hidden in seemingly benign photographs, according to experts studying the campaign.

In a public report Wednesday, researchers at security company FireEye Inc said the group used the unusual tandem as a means of communicating with previously infected computers. FireEye has briefed law enforcement on what it found.

The technique, uncovered during a FireEye investigation at an unnamed victim organization, shows how government-backed hackers can shift tactics on the fly after they are discovered.

“It’s striking how many layers of obfuscation that the group adopts,” said FireEye Strategic Analysis Manager Jennifer Weedon. “These groups are innovating and becoming more creative.”

The machines were given an algorithm for checking a different Twitter account every day. If a human agent registered that account and tweeted a certain message, instructions for a series of actions by the computer would be activated.

The tweeted information included a website address, a number and a handful of letters. The computer would go to the website and look for a photo of at least the size indicated by the number, while the letters were part of a key for decoding the instructions in a message hidden within the data used to display the picture on the website.

Weedon said the communication method might have been a failsafe in case other channels were discovered and cut. Vikram Thakur, a senior manager at Symantec Corp, said his team had also found Twitter controls combined with hidden data in photos, a technique known as steganography.

FireEye identified the campaign as the work of a group it has been internally calling APT29, for advanced persistent threat. In April, it said another Russian-government supported group, APT28, had used a previously unknown flaws in Adobe Systems Inc.’s Flash software to infect high-value targets.

Other security firms use different names for the same or allied groups. Symantec recently reported another data-stealing tool used in tandem with the steganography, which it calls Seaduke. Thakur said both tools were employed by the group it knows as the Duke family.

Thakur said another tool in that kit is CozyDuke, which Russian firm Kaspersky Lab says is associated with recent breaches at the State Department and the White House.

Ibnlive.com