Get the Microsoft Office 2013 Customer Preview right now

Science and techno world topic: Internet

Get your hands on the Customer Preview of Office 2013 right now, don't wait.

Microsoft announced the latest version of its popular productivity suite, Office 2013. The Office suite has been reworked with Windows 8 and touch-screen tablets in mind. One more key feature is that it will rely heavily on the cloud.

If you're eager to get your hands on this new set of tools, you'll be glad to know you won't have to wait. Microsoft has posted a Customer Preview of Office 2013 here. You'll need to be running Windows 7 or the Release Preview of Windows 8 in order to install it. You will notice the Customer Preview runs a preview of Office 365 Home Premium Preview. In the end, you're still able to use the newly announced features, but have to go through Office 365 to do so.

Microsoft previews tools for new Office, SharePoint apps

Science and techno world topic: Internet

Developers who want to sell their add-in applications in the coming Office Store can check out the preview of Microsoft's newest toolset.

Microsoft today released a preview build of a new toolset codenamed "Napa," which is aimed at those building application add-ins for the coming versions of Office and SharePoint.

The Office 365 development tools (Napa) are designed to accommodate the "new Cloud App Model" in the more cloud-centric Office 15 wave of products, according to a new blog post from Microsoft Corporate Vice President Jason Zander. This new model allows apps to be hosted on SharePoint, Windows Azure Web sites or a user's own server.

The new Office apps and add-ins -- which are codenamed "Agaves" -- can be hosted in the cloud and/or published and sold through the new Office Store. Enterprise IT users also can be privately distribute Napa-developed apps via an internal App Catalog, Zander noted.

Microsoft's definition of Office apps is worth nothing. A new MSDN Article about Office apps explains:

Facebook 'likes' and adverts' value doubted

Science and techno world topic: Internet

A BBC investigation suggests companies are wasting large sums of money on adverts to gain "likes" from Facebook members who have no real interest in their products.

It also appears many account holders who click on the links have lied about their personal details.

A security expert has said some of the profiles appeared to be "fakes" run by computer programs to spread spam.

Facebook said it had "not seen evidence of a significant problem".

"Likes" are highly valued by many leading brands' marketing departments.

Once a user has clicked on a link the company it belongs to can then post content on their news feed, send them messages and alert their friends to the connection.

Facebook makes money by charging companies a fee to show adverts designed to attract new "likes".

Some companies have attracted millions of "likes". 

Yahoo Breach Extends Beyond Yahoo to Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Users

Science and techno world topic: Internet

SAN FRANCISCO — Another month, another major security breach.

Yahoo confirmed Thursday that about 400,000 user names and passwords to Yahoo and other companies were stolen on Wednesday.

A group of hackers, known as the D33D Company, posted online the user names and passwords for what appeared to be 453,492 accounts belonging to Yahoo, and also Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users.

The hackers wrote a brief footnote to the data dump, which has since been taken offline: “We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat.”

The breach comes just one month after millions of user passwords for LinkedIn, the online social network for professionals, were exposed by hackers who breached its systems. The breaches highlight the ease with which hackers are able to infiltrate systems, even at some of the most widely used and sophisticated technology companies.

Marcus Carey, a researcher at Rapid7, a security company found that among the data were some 106,000 Gmail e-mail addresses, 55,000 Hotmail e-mail addresses and 25,000 AOL e-mail addresses. Those e-mail accounts were not hacked; instead people had used their e-mail address as user names for a Yahoo service.