Posts Tagged ‘ ’
Microsoft To End Bing Cashback
Microsoft has announced that it will end its Bing Cashback program due to a lukewarm response.
The program, which was launched with Live Search back in May 2008, offered cash rebates to online shoppers who bought items by searching them on Bing. It initially attracted more than a 1000 sellers offering rebates.
The technology was originally developed by Jellyfish.com, which Microsoft acquired in 2007.
Microsoft also launched a strong marketing campaign to promote the feature and claimed that it was showing traction with advertisers and consumers, but the program kept facing financial issues.
In a blog post,Yusuf Mehdi, Senior Vice President, wrote , “When we originally began to offer the cashback feature, it was designed to help advertisers reach you with compelling offers, and to provide a new type of shopping experience that would change user behavior and attract a bunch of new users to Bing”.
“But after a couple of years of trying, we did not see the broad adoption that we had hoped for”, he admitted.
The Cashback program will expire on July 30that 9:00 pm PST and Microsoft will continue to provide customer support for 12 more months.
In April 2010, Bing held 9.43% of the US search engine market share, down from 9.62% in March.
Badass Dell Gaming Pc With Intel 6-Core, Rips Benchmarks
When you think about the market for a pre-built, proverbial “Killer Gaming Rig,” you have to consider the class of consumer that would have interest in this type of system.For the most part, the average do-it-yourselferisn’t going to take much interest here, save for perhaps the appreciation of all the bleeding-edge technology and design quality that is the hallmark of such a system. That said, there is obviously a significant market opportunity for consumers that want top-of-the line components and build quality for enthusiast-class gaming performance and head-turning aesthetics, without the hassle of going at it the home-grown way. Dell obviously saw this market opportunity when they snatched up the then not-so boutique system builder Alienware, back in March of 2006.
Historically, Alienware had been known for the same impeccable build quality and top-shelf components that put many a performance PC start-up on the map. However their chassis designs were a bit over the top for some folks to handle. With a pair of bulbous alien eyes looking back at you like a hood ornament with a bad attitude and bubbly, rounded high gloss chassis designs, Alienware machines were a “you either love ‘em or hate ‘em” sort of thing. That said, four years later, Dell has managed to assimilate the Alienware colony and what has emerged is a significantly more refined and stylish chassis design along with the same bleeding edge component selection and build quality.
Also, being one of Intel’s largecustomers, Dell more recently afforded their Alienware division the inside track on Intel’s benchmark crushing Core i7-980X Gulftown 6-core processor and the resources to get it validated for delivery to market quickly. We’ve had the new Dell Alienware Area-51 in for testing for a week now and have spent some quality time with the machine, helping it break its first sweat, globally we might add. In the following pages we’re happy to give you a first look at what Dell likes to think of as their Killer Alien gaming rig. First we’ll serve you up a quick video preview and then make sure to journey on for a deep dive look and benchmark analysis of the new Alienware Area-51 gaming PC.
Don’t miss our deep-dive look and detailed performance analysis on the pages that follow…
A quick rundown of the system specs let you know that the build-out we received means business. From the Core i7-980X, with its self contained water cooler to its dual Radeon HD 5970 graphics card with 4 high-end AMD ATI graphics processors under the hood, this machine is hell-bent for high frame rates and very little compromise. In graphics cards and Intel processors alone, you’re looking at $2200 – $2300 worth of components. The “as tested” price for our system comes into focus a bit more when you consider the horsepower under its hood, though we might suggest an SSD might have been in order as a boot drive, though there are obvious pros and cons to this, not the least of which is added cost. Regardless with a pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 1TB drives in RAID 0 and 6GB of DDR3-1333 memory on board, this machine is well-rounded enough in all the right places. If you’re looking for bone-crushing gaming performance or perhaps a workstation that looks good and tears through just about anything you can throw at it, the Area-51 model we’ll show you in the pages ahead, should fit the bill nicely.
U.s. Declassifies Part Of Secret Cybersecurity Plan
The Obama administration declassified part of the governments cybersecurity plan Tuesday, publishing parts of it that discuss intrusion detection systems for federal computer networks and the governments role in securing critical infrastructure.
The declassification announcement was made by Howard A. Schmidt, a former Microsoft security executive who in December was appointed cybersecurity coordinator by President Barack Obama. Schmidt was speaking at the RSA Security Conference in San Francisco, an annual industry conference for computer security professionals.
The governments Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative was launched in 2008 by President George W. Bush under a shroud of secrecy. The plan has 12 directives that cover the governments strategy to protect U.S. networks including military, civilian, government networks and critical infrastructure systems as well as the governments offensive strategy to combat cyber warfare.
Civil libertarians criticized the Bush administration for failing to disclose the contents of the plan or allowing independent oversight of its implementation. Schmidt said that Obama recognized the need for some transparency.
There are a lot of legal issues about what were doing, he told the 2,000-member audience, adding that the government was currently working on a list of about 40 legal questions related to the cybersecurity initiative.
Obama said last May that he planned to appoint a separate official to ensure that the implementation of the cybersecurity plan doesnt violate privacy and civil liberties and insisted that the governments plan would not include spying on the public.
Our pursuit of cybersecurity will not include I repeat, will not include monitoring private sector networks or internet traffic,he said. We will preserve and protect the personal privacy and civil liberties that we cherish as Americans.
A White House spokesman said Tuesday that the administration had appointed Tim Edgar to oversee the privacy aspects of the cybersecurity initiative. Edgar, a former attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, has been working as the deputy for civil liberties for the Civil Liberties and Privacy Office of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The declassified portion of the plan published Tuesday includes information on only part of the initiative and does not discuss cyberwarfare. The plan instead discusses the deployment of Einstein 2 and Einstein 3, intrusion detection systems on federal networks designed to inspect internet traffic entering government networks to detect potential threats.
DHS (Department of Homeland Security) is deploying, as part of its EINSTEIN 2 activities, signature-based sensors capable of inspecting Internet traffic entering Federal systems for unauthorized accesses and malicious content. The EINSTEIN 2 capability enables analysis of network flow information to identify potential malicious activity while conducting automatic full packet inspection of traffic entering or exiting U.S. Government networks for malicious activity using signature-based intrusion detection technology.. . . EINSTEIN 2 is capable of alerting US-CERT in real time to the presence of malicious or potentially harmful activity in federal network traffic and provides correlation and visualization of the derived data. . . .
The EINSTEIN 3 system will also support enhanced information sharing by US-CERT with Federal Departments and Agencies by giving DHS the ability to automate alerting of detected network intrusion attempts and, when deemed necessary by DHS, to send alerts that do not contain the content of communications to the National Security Agency (NSA) so that DHS efforts may be supported by NSA exercising its lawfully authorized missions.
The Einstein programs have raised concerns among privacy and civil liberties groups, such as the Center for Democracy and Technology, because they involve scanning the content of communications to intercept malicious code before it reaches government networks.
In 2008, the Department of Homeland Securitys Privacy Office published a Privacy Impact Assessment on early versions of Einstein 2 (.pdf) but has not published one on Einstein 3. The assessment left many questions unanswered, such as how much of a role the National Security Agency will play in the programs and whether information obtained in scans be shared with law enforcement or intelligence agencies.
What may be the most controversial part of the declassified plan is a discussion of a need for the government to define its role in protecting private critical infrastructure networks. Critical infrastructure includes the electrical grid, telecommunication networks, internet service providers, the banking and financial industry, and others.
The document indicates that DHS and private-sector businesses have already developed a plan of shared action with an aggressive series of milestones and activities but doesnt discuss the nature of those shared actions other than to say that the two sectors are focused on developing a public-private sharing of information regarding cyberthreats and incidents.
The U.S. Government depends on a variety of privately owned and operated critical infrastructures to carry out the publics business. In turn, these critical infrastructures rely on the efficient operation of information systems and networks that are vulnerable to malicious cyberthreats. This Initiative builds on the existing and ongoing partnership between the Federal Government and the public and private sector owners and operators of Critical Infrastructure and Key Resources (CIKR). . . . It addresses security and information assurance efforts across the cyber infrastructure to increase resiliency and operational capabilities throughout the CIKR sectors.
Additionally, the plan calls for a strategy to increase the security of classified networks and to develop and implement a government-wide cybercounterintelligence (CI) plan, but provides little detail about what that would involve.
A government-wide cybercounterintelligence plan is necessary to coordinate activities across all Federal Agencies to detect, deter, and mitigate the foreign-sponsored cyberintelligence threat to U.S. and private sector information systems, the plan says. To accomplish these goals, the plan establishes and expands cyber CI education and awareness programs and workforce development to integrate CI into all cyber operations and analysis, increase employee awareness of the cyber CI threat, and increase counterintelligence collaboration across the government.
Photo: huertk/Flickr
Source: www.wired.com