Xpertfeed

It's raining lawsuits in India: Micromax and OnePlus face off in battle of the Cyanogens Summary: After the Ericsson-Xiaomi fracas, this is the second lawsuit between phone makers in less than a month in India. Just when you were done reading about Ericsson stopping the Xiaomi juggernaut in its tracks, another lawsuit between rival smartphone makers has dominated headlines in India in the last few days. This time, it's a confrontation between Indian phone giant Micromax and Chinese company Shenzhen OnePlus Technology. Late last week, Micromax filed a lawsuit against OnePlus, stopping it from selling its line of phones featuring Cyanogen software. (Cyanogen software is based on the Android operating system, and has gained traction because of its popular customisation possibilities over stock Android.) Apparently, Micromax has an exclusive deal with Cyanogen that prevents anyone else in South Asia from flogging phones with this software on it. The complication is tha...

Spain's Google link tax: 'Clearly insane' law may hurt the news companies it seeks to protect Summary: The upcoming closure of Google News has reawakened the debate over the consequences of a law that experts have described as quite simply "nonsense". "It's a disaster. The evidence that Spain is a 'corruptocracy' in which any lobby can write laws at will (even ones as openly and clearly as insane as this one), in which certain media make its editorial line conditional upon government funding, and where the government has no idea how internet works," says  Enrique Dans , consultant and professor at IE Business School. "The media is going to lose clicks, visits, and, of course, advertising revenues. But mostly they will lose credibility because the role of the press is to monitor the power, not to support it," adds Carlos Sánchez Almeida, a lawyer specialising in ICT for  Bufet Almedia . A recent reform of Spain's I...

Microsoft makes its MSN consumer apps available on iOS, Android, Amazon devices Summary: Microsoft is continuing its cross-platform push, bringing a number of its MSN-branded consumer apps to iOS, Android and Amazon devices. The team inside Bing that built some of the best "Metro Style" Windows 8 and Windows Phone apps have ported those same apps to iOS, Android and Amazon devices, as promised. In September, Microsoft officials said to expect the handful of Bing consumer apps -- which Microsoft has rebranded as MSN apps -- to come to iOS and Android "in the coming months." These touch-enabled apps, which include News, Weather, Sports, Money, Health & Fitness, and Food & Drink, previously were available only for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. The new iOS, Android and Amazon versions of these apps are available for download as of December 11 from the Apple App Store, Google Play Store and Amazon App Store, as well as the Windows and Windows Phon...

Sony hires FireEye's Mandiant following internal security breach Summary: After cyberattack resulted in internal networks being shuttered and confidential files leaked across the web, Sony has pulled in the professionals.  in Sony has tapped security firm Mandiant to assist in the clean-up after yet-another damaging cyberattack. Last week  , reports surfaced that the electronics giant was dealing with the aftermath of network intrusion, and as a result, was forced to shut down Sony Pictures Entertainment computer systems. FireEye's Mandiant forensic team, in conjunction with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), is assisting with the aftermath and subsequent investigation the security breach,  according to Reuters . Mandiant is a well-known security incident response arm of FireEye which deals in forensic analysis, repairs and network restoration. The company was also asked to assist in the catastrophic security breach experi...

Android One hits the UK with Karbonn Sparkle V launch Summary: The UK has its first official Android One launch with a Karbonn device, despite Google's lack of interest in bringing the platform to developed markets. n The UK has become the latest country to get Android One handsets. The Android One-powered Sparkle V will be one of four handsets by Indian manufacturer Karbonn to launch on Amazon today. Karbonn is hoping the Android One device will appeal to price-sensitive consumers and those making the move from feature phone to smartphone. The Karbonn Sparkle V will be priced at £129, or £99 as part of a Black Friday promotion on Amazon, pitching it against stiff competition from the likes of the Moto G, Microsoft's Lumia 635, and a range of other Android devices from smaller makers. The Android One platform,  launched in September  in India, sees Google taking the reins of both handsets' hardware and software. With Android One, Go...

Getting a digital detox, the Swiss way: One app shows you how to dodge smartphone addiction Summary:  If you're worried you're getting a little too attached to your smartphone, one telco is offering its customers an app for switching off. Every since the BlackBerry became the exec's status symbol of choice, smartphone addiction has started to take hold among mobile users. Can't stop checking your messages? Real life events like going to the cinema or taking your partner to dinner getting in the way of reading your emails? Then the solution to your problem could well be at hand, in the form of a digital detox that offers you time out from the online world. How do you do that? With an app, of course. The higher your My Time score the better, as it shows more focused, less frequent use of your phone. Your score is boosted, for example, if you use the phone for a concentrated period of time. Reading or talking on your phone for half an hour ranks as highly ...

Microsoft says Storage service performance update brought Azure down Summary:  Microsoft officials are attributing a nearly 11-hour Azure outage across a large part of the world earlier this week to a performance update the company made to its Storage services. The nearly 11-hour outage that hit Microsoft Azure customers earlier this week was due to a performance update Microsoft made to Azure storage services, according to company officials. Microsoft Azure Corporate Vice President Jason Zander acknowledged the problem and explained the root cause in a November 19 blog post . On the evening (US Pacific Time) of November 18, customers across the US, Europe and parts of Asia  experienced problems with various Azure services . The issue also affected Xbox Live and MSN.com — parts of which rely on Azure — as well as Visual Studio Online and Search. Further exacerbating the problem was the fact that the Service Health Dashboard and Azure Management Portal b...

Microsoft to open source more of .NET, and bring it to Linux, Mac OS Summary:  Microsoft is porting its server-side .NET stack to Linux and Mac OS X, and is making more of that stack available as open source. Microsoft is planning to open source the full server-side .NET core stack and to take that open-sourced .NET core to Linux and Mac OS X, alongside Windows.  Microsoft officials announced the company's latest .NET programming-model plans on the opening day of the Connect(); developer-focused event on November 12. In April 2014, Microsoft announced plans to open source a number of its developer technologies, including ASP.NET, the Roslyn .NET compiler platform, the .NET Micro Framework, .NET Rx and the VB and C# programming languages. Microsoft officials said they planned to make these technologies available via a newly created .Net Foundation. Today, the company is adding more pieces of .NET to its open-source list under the MIT open-source ...

Android Lollipop rollout delayed due to battery drain bug Summary:  Android fans will have to wait another week to get their hands on Android 5.0 as Google fixes a bug that was causing severe battery drain. In news that will come as a mixed blessing for Android fans, the rollout of Lollipop has been put on hold due to bugs that were causing severe battery drain. If you were wondering why your Nexus or Google Play Edition phone hadn't received   an over the air (OTA) update delivering Android 5.0 , the answer appears to be that Google is ironing out some serious bugs that would have made it unwelcome in the first place. The good news is that the issues are now fixed. The bad news for Android users is that Google has pushed the Lollipop rollout back as a consequence, from its originally scheduled date of November 3 to November 12. News of the delay arrived yesterday via Artem Russakovskii, founder of Android Police.  According to Russakovskii , the first OT...

NetApp launches cloud version of its ONTAP operating system Summary:  NetApp will offer its popular storage operating system on top of Amazon Web Services as well as under a licensing model. The aim: Make moving data from public to private clouds easier. NetApp on Tuesday launched a cloud-based version of its ONTAP storage operating system as the headliner of a series of offerings designed to simplify hybrid deployments. With the move, NetApp is setting itself up to be more of a neutral software-provider as data shuttles between enterprise data center and the public cloud. The news, announced at NetApp's Insight conference in Las Vegas, gives customers of the storage vendor two ways to consume ONTAP---as a service on top of Amazon Web Services infrastructure for $5 an hour or as a license. George Kurian, executive vice president of product operations at NetApp argued that current hybrid cloud deployments have been hampered by data silos that don't interoperate we...