The file-sharing cloud provider Dropbox has achieved ISO 27018 from EY CertifyPoint, “an important global standard for privacy and data protection in the cloud”.
This means that firms that are concerned about how Dropbox will use the information that passes through its services can be assured that it is sticking to data privacy standards.
Dropbox said “it will only use the personal information that an organisation gives to provide the services that were signed up for.” Firms can add, modify, or delete data from Dropbox when needed.
It has also promised to let organisations know where data resides on its servers and who its trusted partners are.
“We’ll (also) tell you what happens when you close an account or delete a file. Lastly, we’ll tell you if any of these things change”, it said in a blog post yesterday.
As well as strict rules around encryption and Dropbox’s employees’ access controls, the new security certification requires the cloud vendor to be subject to yearly audits by an independent third party.
The announcement will be welcomed by firms concerned about global compliance.
In 2012 Dropbox suffered several setbacks as it sought to move into the enterprise market following breaches across its services, but has since been officially deployed by large enterprises. Dropbox currently encrypts your data in transit and at rest, however firms taking extra precaution can use tools like Boxcryptor which encrypts files before uploading and partitions them in your Dropbox folder.
The firm is making waves in the UK, after opening an office in London in January after it claimed that one in four UK internet users are Dropbox customers.
Windows Insiders on the Fast ring, fire up your update engine as there’s a new build waiting for you today. According to Microsoft’s Gabe Aul, Build 10122 marks the start of fewer big features being introduced, as Microsoft looks to iron out bugs and polish the code in preparation of the OS’ public release later this year.
The internet can be a scary place. People can track your location, hack your personal accounts, and even steal your identity. Sometimes you might want to browse the web with a little more privacy. A VPN (virtual private network) allows you to use the internet through an encrypted network. This means all of your private data is hidden from prying eyes.
Over at AndroidArea we have a sweet deal on NordVPN. For just $39 (usually $120) you can get a 2-year subscription to this handy service. The deal ends in two days, so act fast. What exactly does $39 get you?
All data sent through NordVPN’s private tunnels is double encrypted (double data SSL-based 2048-bit encryption), keeping you anonymous and hiding your information
Secures any Internet connection: public Wi-Fi hotspots, cellular networks & more
Bypass content restrictions and stay anonymous
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43+ worldwide server locations in 25 different countries for online access anywhere
High speed connections for streaming video and content access
Easy to use and set up; custom versions for each specific device
Automatic kill switch shuts down your site as soon as the VPN connection drops, so no data is revealed
All DNS queries stay secure and protected
Secret notes that auto-destroy & encrypted chat function
Connect two devices simultaneously
No limit on data
Web proxy extension for Google Chrome
Snag this deal right here before it ends. If you’ve been looking for a VPN service, or have been curious to try one, this is a nice deal.
Windows users may not know Edge now—in early development it was called Project Spartan—but they will soon, because it will be the default browser for Windows 10.
Edge, which won’t run in older versions of Windows, is a radical break from IE, despitesporting a similar logo. “We needed to do more than produce the next version of the browser. We needed a new way of doing things,” explained Charles Morris, Microsoft principal program manager lead on Edge, in a presentation at the Microsoft Buildconference last week in San Francisco.
Here are five ways in which Edge promises to be a superior browser to the IE warhorse.
1. No legacy support (mostly)
The Internet Explorer logo.
Around since the dawn of the Web, IE carries a great amount of baggage in the name of backward compatibility. IE 11 comes with a variety of legacy modes, mostly to support enterprises who built internal applications around IE6 or some other older version.
The company needed to make a clean break, especially given how quickly Mozilla, Google and Apple were updating their own browsers with little worry about supporting older, outdated technologies. “It wasn’t a fair game,” said David Catuhe, Microsoft principal program manager, in another Build talk on Edge.
Edge will not support Microsoft’s ActiveX, Browsers Helper Objects (BHOS), VBScript and third-party toolbars built for IE11, all of which could crimp performance and bring security woes. It will support Adobe Flash and Personal Document Format (PDF).
For those organizations and people who still require, or prefer, IE, Microsoft will maintain the browser for at least as long as it supports Windows 10, providing security fixes but no longer actively developing the browser.
2. Speedier, richer browsing
Thanks to Microsoft’s decision to throw the backward-compatibility baggage overboard, Edge has a leaner, more optimized code base than IE.
For Edge, Microsoft forked the core MSHTML rendering engine, and stripped away all the code no longer needed to support backward compatibility.
As a result Edge is zippier. Using the Google Canary benchmarking software, the current build of Edge ran twice as fast as IE 11 in recent tests, according to Microsoft. It also handily beat the latest beta 64-bit builds of the Chrome and Firefox browsers in this test.
WINBETA
The fork also allowed Microsoft to be more proactive in improving Edge’s compliance with Web standards. To date, Edge has over 4,200 interoperability improvements over IE11. Built on Microsoft’s Universal Windows Platform, the browser renders pages more uniformly across different devices, and brings it more in line with other browsers in this respect.
This problem has been particularly noticeable on mobile devices, where IE on Windows Phone has struggled to render pages properly.
3. Support for extensions, finally
Unlike IE, Edge will support JavaScript-based extensions, allowing third parties to customize views of Web pages and add new functionality.
In a demonstration at the keynote, Microsoft showed how Edge could run a popular extension for Reddit, one that reformats the popular social news Web site in a much more visually appealing way. Like extensions for Chrome and Firefox, Edge extensions must be written using the Web languages of HTML and JavaScript.
Extension support won’t come with the initial release of the Edge, but will be available by the end of the year.
4. More personal
Edge is tightly wired into Microsoft’s Bing search service, and with Cortana, the company’s virtual personal assistant service. When users opt into these services, they can keep track of your actions on the browser in order to gather more context that would, in theory, help you in your travels across the Web.
“Cortana is able to infer what you need,” said Sean Lyndersay, Microsoft principal program manager lead for Edge, in another Build presentation.
Cortana, Windows 10’s digital assistant, is baked into Microsoft’s Edge browser.
As you type a question in the URL address bar, Edge starts generating possible answers. Typing in the “msft” stock ticker will instantly return the current stock market price and company information.
If the user visits a Web page for a restaurant, the browser prepares a summary of information that might be of interest, such as directions, hours, and a link to the menu. Edge can return flight arrival times, and movie show times.
In his demo, Lyndersay asked how old actor Brad Pitt was. The browser returned the correct answer: 51. It may even be able to answer technical support questions, according to Lyndersay.
Launching the browser will give you a new tab start page with links to your most visited sites, as well as links to news stories and content the user may find interesting, as estimated by your browsing habits.
5. More immersive
Edge takes a number of steps to improve the user’s reading experience.
For one, Edge has less chrome than IE, meaning that the browser frame is less festooned with distracting menu commands and widgets. “We moved things to where they naturally should be, to put your focus on the content,” Lyndersay said.
It will also offer a “reading view,” which strips away all the menus, ads and other distracting elements that run alongside the text. Advertisers may not like it, but reading view will reconstruct the page to make it “far more readable and far more interesting,” Lyndersay said.
Dropbox, the popular online file storing system and conveyed the message that it fixed a security flaw that could have allowed hackers to capture data stored in its service on Android devices via compromised third-party apps.
Dropbox, which has more than 300 million users, said it fixed the vulnerability a few months ago in the software it provides to third parties making apps that work with Dropbox.
It said most Android developers had already updated to the latest version of its software after being notified by Dropbox of the problem as early as December. Dropbox reminded any remaining developers working with the old version to update.
According to Dropbox, the software flaw meant that under certain circumstances a hacker could use a compromised third-party app to save another user’s data to the hacker’s Dropbox account. Dropbox said no data already stored on its service was ever vulnerable.
“There are no reports or evidence to indicate the vulnerability was ever used to access user data,” Dropbox said in a blog on its website.
Researchers at International Business Machines Corp initially discovered the flaw, and informed Dropbox, according to both companies.
These are the Top 5 Key application-centric factors:
1. Strong defense against advanced threats:
Enterprises and services providers face a variety of attacks, including DDoS, zero-day and application-level attacks. Hackers and cyber-criminals exploit application-related vulnerabilities in the multitude of applications in production environments and the range of deployment scenarios.
2. High service velocity:
Business stakeholders increasingly demand efficient and fast deployments of secure, and available services and applications. IT departments have leveraged trends and technologies such as agile, DevOps, cloud, and SDN to meet these requirements across development, operations, and networking teams.
3. Low cost and complexity:
Standardizing on a common service delivery platform, organizations can centrally deploy, manage and orchestrate application service topologies in a consistent manner across data center and cloud environments.
4. Programmability and automation:
A policy-based, customization approach allows organizations to create and automate services and support emerging application and network architectures. Powerful tools are available to configure and program environments dynamically.
5. Cloud enablement:
Serving corporate requirements around security, compliance, and performance, application services can be deployed in cloud environments and managed centrally alongside on-premise services. This ensures that policies governing security and performance are deployed and enforced consistently. Additionally, REST API capabilities for web application firewall solutions promote accelerated, secure cloud migration.
SSDs and other flash memory devices will soon get cheaper and larger thanks to big announcements from Toshiba and Intel. Both companies revealed new “3D NAND” memory chips that are stacked in layers to pack in more data, unlike single-plane chips currently used. Toshiba said that it’s created the world’s first 48-layer NAND, yielding a 16GB chip with boosted speeds and reliability. The Japanese company invented flash memory in the first place and has the smallest NAND cells in the world at 15nm. Toshiba is now giving manufacturers engineering samples, but products using the new chips won’t arrive for another year or so.
At the same time, Intel and partner Micron revealed they’re now manufacturing their own 32-layer NAND chips that should also arrive in SSDs in around a year. They’re sampling even larger capacity NAND memory than Toshiba, with 32GB chips available now and a 48GB version coming soon. Micron said the chips could be used to make gum-stick sized M.2 PCIe SSDs up to 3.5TB in size and 2.5-inch SSDs with 10TB of capacity — on par with the latest hard drives. All of this means that Toshiba, Intel/Micron and companies using their chips will soon give some extra competition to Samsung, which has been using 3D NAND tech for much longer. The result will be nothing but good for consumers: higher capacity, cheaper SSDs that will make spinning hard disks sleep with one eye open.
Google has bumped the storage limit for its locker service for Google Play Music from 20,000 to 50,000 songs, giving users more than double the capacity to store their own collection in the cloud, over and above the extensive streaming library that makes up Google Play Music’s own category. The extended library allowance is a free upgrade for users, meaning people get the additional capacity without having to sign up for more Drive storage or anything like that.
The bump in available space is easy to take advantage of, and applies automatically if you’re already hosting your collection in Google’s cloud. If you haven’t yet used Google Play Music’s locker service, however, it’s pretty easy to get started, using the instructions provided by Google below:
Sign in to Google Play Music with your Google account – Go to your computer and visit play.google.com/music. Sign up if needed.
Claim your free storage – If you’d like to try the Google Play music subscription service too, click “Get Started”. Otherwise, click “No Thanks” to continue with the free storage.
Add your music collection – The setup process will guide you through adding the Chrome app*, which provides seamless uploading. You can choose to simply upload your entire iTunes library or select other music folders. You can upload 50,000 songs for free.
Access your music at any time on multiple devices – You can stream or download music to your Android, iPhone, or iPad for easy offline listening. It’s also all available on the web when you’re on your computer. And when you upgrade to a new computer or the latest mobile device, your music comes along too. You’ll never be without your favorite artists again!
*Not using Chrome? The setup process at step 3 will instead guide you through installing Music Manager where you can still add 50,000 songs.
You can listen to them from all supported devices, that is.And even download them to your Android or iOS device for offline listening.
One of the things Apple had working against them when it came to creating files for use in the cloud was actually creating files in the cloud itself. Though you could save a Pages document or presentation made via Keynote in iCloud, creating one via iCloud wasn’t really a thing. Until now.
Today, Apple is rolling out file creation in iCloud, all via a browser.
Now, you don’t even need access to an OS X or iOS device to use Pages, Keynote, or Numbers.
Find your way to a browser, log into iCloud, and away you go. Though all services still have their ‘beta’ tag, creating documents in the cloud is pretty simple and straightforward.
Editing tools are all there, and closely mimic the standalone app for OS X. Though it’s not a carbon copy, it’s much more than a simple text editor in the cloud. Pages, Keynote, and Numbers are all fairly well built for the cloud.
This aligns Apple a bit more with Microsoft Office 365 and Google Drive. Though we’re sure Apple users will still want to go the normal route for file creation, this option at least lets them actually work in the cloud rather than access files stored in the cloud.
Apple says iCloud.com supports all major browsers, so there aren’t a lot of folks who will be left out, here. New web-only accounts will be limited to 1GB storage.
What we find via iCloud is free to use for anyone, but Apple is limiting some features for iOS or OS X users. If you want to save to iCloud from the desktop, for instance, you’ll need an Apple device.
Even with the beta tag, Apple’s iCloud services for Pages, Keynote, and Numbers is actually pretty good. It’s probably about as useful for simple documents as anything else out there.
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