Apple has stopped tagging apps as “free” in its app store. This is in response to requests from European regulators, who have been actively fighting labels on apps that say they are free but ultimately can involve in-app purchases.
Apple has relabeled the formerly “free” apps with the label “get,” which still allows consumers to download them but clarifies that they are not necessarily free for all functions and options.
Cisco Systems officials spent much of the past week quickly ramping up the company’s collaboration abilities. The company unveiled everything from a new mobile app designed to make it easier in these days of greater worker mobility for workers to meet to a new room-based TelePresence system that is powerful yet energy-efficient.
Cisco also partnered with carrier AT&T to bring a cloud-based collaboration service that gives business users an avenue for connecting with colleagues, partners or customers wherever they are and on whatever device they’re using.
IBM announced that it has patented the design for a data privacy engine that can help businesses protect personal data as it is transferred between countries, including across private clouds. The engine enables enterprises to aggregate international and organizational requirements for data transfers and apply them to individual projects. This allows organizations to see what restrictions have been put in place for different types of protected information when transferring it between two countries, including data stored in a private cloud.
The nation’s top security administrator recently told a congressional committee that China has been identified as a key international player that has the cyber power to take down the U.S. power grid section by section if it chooses to do so.
Admiral Michael S. Rogers, chief of the U.S. Cyber Command and Director of the National Security Agency, told committee members in testimony that hackers already have performed reconnaissance-type missions to determine how networks function and to find the weaknesses in them.