Starting July 15, 2015, all smartphones sold in California will be required to include a “kill switch” that can be remotely activated to disable a stolen phone and render it useless.
This is part of a strategy to end the problem of cell phones being stolen during the commission of often violent street crimes. Governor Jerry Brown signed the law into effect on Aug. 25.
Smartphone theft has been a growing problem across the U.S. as figures from Consumer Reports show there were some 1.6 million smartphone theft victims in 2012, which doubled to 3.1 million by 2013, a 94 percent increase in a single year.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and IBM continued to lead a global server market, as revenues and shipments increase in the second quarter and could be poised for a larger boost going into next year, according to IDC analysts.
According to IDC and Gartner, server revenues grew during the second three months of the year between 2.5 percent and 2.8 percent, hitting between $12.6 billion and almost $12.7 billion.
Seagate Technology announced Aug. 26 that it is now shipping the world’s first 8TB hard disk drive to its customers. This storage drive was created to help scale out data infrastructures that may be struggling to handle the amount of unstructured data that continues to pour into most enterprise systems.
Some potential uses would be to provide bulk data storage for online content, video and big data applications, such as oil and gas exploration, scientific experiments, weather and genome research.
Hewlett-Packard is recalling about 6 million laptop power cords after more than two dozen reports of overheating that resulted in some claims of minor burns and property damage.
HP has set up a Website dedicated to the recall effort. According to a statement issued by the HP and the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission, almost 5.6 million power cords in the United States are being recalled, as are another 446,700 in Canada.