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Today’s topics include the beginning of Microsoft’s Windows 10 rollout for the Windows Phone 8.1, Google’s search results will boost the ranking of mobile-friendly web pages, EMC’s win in court against Pure Storage and the Pwn2own challenge uncovers a total of 21 vulnerabilities.
Microsoft has confirmed that it’s begun rolling out Windows 10 Mobile to select Windows Phone 8.1 devices. However, not all Windows Phones are eligible for the upgrade, according to Microsoft officials, because it doesn’t run well on some older Windows 8.1 phone models.
Microsoft is encouraging owners of Windows Phone 8.1 devices to download the Windows 10 Upgrade Advisor app, which will tell users if the upgrade is available for their smartphone model. The Windows 10 Upgrade Advisor app is available in the Windows Store app marketplace.
Website owners have about six weeks to make sure their sites are optimized for viewing on mobile devices if they want to maintain their ranking in Google’s search results.
Starting in May, Google will put more weight on search results for Web pages where text is easily readable on mobile devices and where the page avoids unplayable content or scrolling.
Sites whose pages do not measure up can expect to see a significant decline in mobile traffic from Google Search, the company has previously noted.
One of the more interesting rivalries in the data storage industry took another turn this week when market leader EMC got a partial victory against fast-growing Pure Storage in a patent infringement lawsuit filed more than two years ago.
A federal court jury found March 15 that Pure Storage violated an EMC patent related to deduplication and found that the smaller rival should pay $14 million in damages.
However, the same jury found that Pure did not violate two other patents and its damage award was far less than $80 million that EMC was looking for from the 2013 lawsuit.
The second day of the annual Zero Day Initiative Pwn2own browser-hacking competition on March 17 went much like the first day, with researchers once more showing new zero-day vulnerabilities in modern Web browsers.
On the first day of Pwn2own, $282,500 in prize money was awarded and on the second day, $177,500 was won, bringing the two-day total for the event to $460,000. All told, 21 previously unknown vulnerabilities were publicly demonstrated at Pwn2own 2016.