How conflict minerals funded a war that killed millions, and why tech giants are finally cleaning up their act - Feature - TechRepublic - Aurora. Photographs by Fiona Lloyd-Davies (supported by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting) | Additional reporting by Toby Wolpe "The conditions were inhuman. The armed groups saw themselves as outside the law -- no one could control them. " Axel Mutia Mburano is describing life in a mine in the Walikale region of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), a central African country gripped by conflicts that have killed more than 5.4 million people since 1998.
The money that helped prolong the suffering of Mburano and his countrymen flowed from the likes of you, me, and just about anyone else who bought a PC, phone, or electronic gadget in recent memory. Inside many of these electronic devices are components that began life as minerals dug at gunpoint from mines in the DRC. SEE: Photos: The dangerous work of conflict mineral mining in the Congo 'There were no rules' Mburano's story reflects the misery that war and mineral wealth has brought to the DRC. The U.S. Cleaning up the tech industry.
Isis (mobile payment system) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - Aurora. Isis is a joint venture between AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon in the mobile payment space, announced on November 16, 2010. The system is based on near field communication (NFC) and allows users to pay by tapping their mobile device to a payment terminal. Notably, Sprint is not part of the consortium. The CEO of Isis is Mike Abbott. The Isis mobile system has partnered with the Discover network and Barclaycard US. On April 4, 2011, Isis announced it will pilot the Isis mobile commerce program in Salt Lake City in early to mid-2012. On July 19, 2011, a partnership was announced[1] between Isis, Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express. On August 29, 2011, the three wireless carriers announced plans to invest more than $100 million in the project.[2] Isis uses several underlying technologies: C-SAM mobile wallet platform[3]Gemalto mobile commerce platform[4] Currently, the service competes with two main competitors.
ALCATEL ONE TOUCH - Products - Smart phones - ONE TOUCH FIRE - Aurora. European launch of Firefox OS Smartphone at Deutsche Telekom - Aurora. Alcatel One Touch Fire with Firefox OS available from July 12 in PolandMagyar Telekom in Hungary and COSMOTE in Greece to follow this autumn, along with congstar, Telekom Germany’s second brandMobile Internet for all: smartphones at a smart price Deutsche Telekom has given the go-ahead for the new mobile Firefox OS and launched sales of the Alcatel One Touch Fire in Europe.
This device is one of the first to support the new mobile operating system from Mozilla. T-Mobile Poland will offer the Firefox OS-powered smartphone via its online sales channels already from tomorrow on and from July 15 nationwide in 850 shops. Market launches in further European countries will follow in autumn. In Germany, the phone will be marketed via DT second brand congstar. The company’s subsidiaries in Hungary (Magyar Telekom) and Greece (COSMOTE) will also begin sales this autumn. Through this launch, DT is bringing an "affordable" smartphone to the market. European launch of Firefox OS Smartphone at Deutsche Telekom - Aurora.
NFC. Semantic Web. UX & CX. M2M. Connected Car. App/HTML5 Tools. Recommendation Systems. Learning Center. John Maeda: How art, technology and design inform creative leaders. Cisco IP Phones Vulnerable. Video: Charles Q. Choi How to Hack a Cisco IP Phone: Columbia computer scientist Ang Cui helped uncover a weakness in Cisco IP phones that can let a hacker take complete control of them. 18 December 2012—A vulnerability inside all current Cisco IP phones [PDF]—one of the top selling brands of voice over Internet Protocol telephones—allows hackers to take complete control of the devices, according to computer scientists at Columbia University.
“Once in, the attacker can use the phone’s microphones to stealthily exfiltrate audio data at any time, regardless of whether a phone call is in progress,” says Ang Cui, one of the Columbia computer scientists who discovered the vulnerability. The Columbia researchers reported the vulnerability to Cisco on 22 October, within a few days of discovering and verifying the bug. “We could turn a phone into a walkie-talkie that was always on by rewriting its software with 900 bytes of code. Cisco phones run operating systems based on Unix. Top 25 European Cloud Computing Rising Stars To Watch – Complete List. Over the past couple of months, CloudTweaks offered to its readers corporate profiles of some of the most innovative and fast developing start-ups in Europe.
Some companies on the list are already well-known in the cloud computing sectors while others are still developing their services. What distinguishes them is the fact that all the companies are based in Europe, although some of them have offices in North America and Asia, and are involved in developing innovative products that are almost entirely cloud-based. This is not a complete list of all promising European cloud start-ups but a series of profiles of those companies that already set foot on the market and are rapidly growing.
Some of them will succeed in their efforts while others might disappear in time but all of them are worth watching in the foreseeable future… The companies are listed in alphabetical order 3 – BlueTeach - BlueTeach is a knowledge sharing community in the Cloud, offering a virtual classroom called Eclass.
Cloud + API. APIrepositories. Mobile. New Operating Systems. Apps Madness. SmartTV.