Carlo Orlando

Have you ever wondered why casinos in Las Vegas are able to survive when offering dinners for 99 cents? It's a marketing tactic designed to lure consumers, with the hopes that they will stay and purchase regular-priced items out of convenience. ... Microsoft is now using a similar strategy to attract curious individuals to an all-new revamped version of their Bing search engine . Bing to Offer TV, Games, and Music Bing now features an entertainment page that will let users watch TV shows, play games and listen to music -- all without leaving the website. This, Microsoft hopes, will entice users ... (view more)

The seemingly unstoppable oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is a reoccurring public nightmare for the company at the forefront of the situation, BP (British Petroleum). As many continue to look for ways to repair the problem, others still are left ... asking why it took so long for news of the spill to reach the public. For many critics, BP's failing to use social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter was a huge mistake. It's been suggested that the company could have used these sites to spread awareness and more quickly develop solutions for the issue. (Source: computerworld.com ) BP does ... (view more)

Microsoft is making it easier to help spread the word on incidents of Internet fraud and stolen personal data. In its latest corporate venture, the company has teamed with the National Cyber-Forensics and Training Alliance (NCFTA) to establish a ... centralized service called "Internet Fraud Alert." Security researchers now have one universal location for which to report any kind of stolen data, ranging from online account login information to credit card numbers. The service can also be used to warn financial institutions immediately after a security breach has been identified. Program ... (view more)

With almost a half-billion users worldwide, the popularity of the social networking medium Facebook is at an all-time high. In reflecting upon the success of her company, Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg has made a rather bold ... statement, claiming that it is only a matter of time before traditional email goes the way of the floppy disk and cassette tape. Texting and Social Networks Outpace Email While it might be hard to imagine a world without Hotmail or Gmail, the demographics tell a different story. According to Sandberg, only 11 percent of teenagers continue to use ... (view more)

Microsoft recent criticized Google for publicly disclosing a remote code execution vulnerability affecting Windows XP and Server 2003. The problem was first reported to Microsoft on June 5th, but most of the world knew about it only four days later. ... This did not sit well with Microsoft, as the company believes that they were ousted before any meaningful repairs could be made to combat the issue. Worse yet, the company believes that revealing the situation to the public could have put users in danger. Windows XP, 2003 Consumers At Risk In an emotionally-charged rebuttal, Microsoft spokesperson ... (view more)

Thousands of legitimate websites have fallen victim to a widespread web attack. While the full extent of the attacks remain unknown, security analysts suspect that the hackers used what is called an "SQL injection attack" in an attempt to fool ... legitimate web sites into running malicious database commands. In short, the attack injects malicious HTML content into a web browser while users are viewing an otherwise legitimate site. If the malware is successfully installed, it opens a gateway which allows hackers to remotely control a PC. (Source: networkworld.com ) Up to 114,000 Sites ... (view more)

Apple has given the world a glimpse of their latest smartphone offering, the iPhone 4, unveiling the product at the company's recent Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) this past Monday in San Francisco. Apple is anticipating great things for the ... new smartphone, even going so far as to call it the "biggest leap" since the original model back in 2007. Among its many impressive features, the iPhone 4 boasts a much sharper display, the new Apple iAd mobile advertising platform, and video capture. All of the features are eclipsed, however, by Apple's crown jewel: video chat. iPhone 4 Users Get ... (view more)

Facebook users are once again being warned of a new online scam designed to send unsolicited messages to all of their friends via the social network site. The warning comes from Sophos, a well-trusted security developer and vendor of anti-virus, ... anti-spyware and anti-spam software. Sophos announced that "hundreds of thousands" of Facebook users have already been duped by what is being referred to as the "likejacking" scam. The most common form of the likejacking reported by victims starts with a message carrying the tagline "This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!" The ... (view more)

A researcher at the UK's University of Reading has given new meaning to the term "having caught a virus." Dr. Mark Gasson has actually self-implanted an RFID (radio frequency identification) chip into his wrist, and then purposely infected it with a ... computer virus. The virus itself was installed onto a corrupt RFID tagging chip. This is the same kind of tracking mechanism that is sometimes embedded into pets to help identify them if they become lost. The device works by using electromagnetic energy to transmit small amounts of data. For pets, however, the data is simple code that corresponds ... (view more)

New research suggests that a number of major corporations are unwilling to update their web browsers to Internet Explorer 8, instead deciding to continue the use of the ever-aging and ever-dangerous Internet Explorer 6 (IE6). The reason for the ... resistance is not a question of cost; rather, companies are willing to stick it out with IE6 not only because of compatibility reasons for use with their own internal applications -- but also because Internet Explorer 6 lacks social networking features. "Companies are happy to stay with Internet Explorer 6 because a lot of the social networking sites ... (view more)