Mike Wheatley
Latest from Mike Wheatley
Swedish cops shut down The Pirate Bay again
Anyone trying to access the popular torrent sharing website The Pirate Bay is going to be disappointed today. The site has been taken offline following a raid by Swedish police on the premises where its servers are kept, according to reports. The controversial website went offline sometime around 2AM Pacific Time, and the police confirmed ...
Google fesses up: Over half of its ads are never seen by humans
Online ads are massive, accounting for about 20 percent of total spending in the advertising industry, and more than 90 percent of Google’s and Facebook’s revenues. But a new report from Google admits that more than half of them – 56. 1 percent – are never seen by anyone. Google said more than half the ...
Forrester: Hadoop to become an enterprise priority in 2015
It’s been over a decade since Google’s engineers first developed MapReduce to process massive datasets using distributed computing. That technology rapidly evolved into the Hadoop platform for processing and storing Big Data, which for years been hyped as the “next big thing” in IT. Now, it looks like the hype is finally giving way to ...
Angry Birds’ creator wields the axe, lays off 110 of its staff
Angry Birds creator Rovio Entertainment Ltd. has just laid off almost 15 percent of its staff – some 110 workers – but has put a positive spin on the situation as it had originally planned to dump more than this number. In a statement, Rovio said its “ workforce will be reduced by approximately 110 ...
Serious security flaw found in popular social login schemes
Security researchers from IBM’s X Force have found a glaring flaw in the way some social login features are configured that could allow attackers to gain easy access to people’s web accounts. Social login is a way to sign in to websites without creating account. Instead, netizens can use login details from a social network ...
Uber claims fresh funding puts its value at a staggering $41 billion
Whatever misgivings people have about Uber Inc., they’re certainly not shared by venture capitalists, who’ve just ploughed another $1.2 billion into the popular car-sharing app. Uber says it generated the cash in a private equity fundraising round, which apparently put the firm’s valuation at a staggering $41 billion. If true, Uber is now right up ...
SoftBank plunks down $250M to fund Uber rival in Asia
Japanese telecom giant SoftBank might become a target for Uber Inc’s aggresive executives after it invested $250 million into the citizen taxi service’s biggest rival in Southeast Asia – a startup called GrabTaxi. The GrabTaxi app has seen massive growth in Southeast Asia, and is now Uber’s biggest rival in the region. With SoftBank’s backing, the ...
20M businesses face Windows Server 2003 end of support risk
About 20 million businesses will face a major security risk in the next 221 days that could leave their IT systems wide open to vulnerabilities and threats from cyberattackers. That’s the assessment of Dell Inc. anyway, which this week took the opportunity to warn businesses that Microsoft will be ending support for its Windows Server ...
Google’s just killed CAPTCHAs with fluffy kittens and mouse clicks
Google has developed a new recognition system to let humans and not automated ‘bots’ access websites with a single click, replacing the hated “captchas” that have plagued the web for over a decade. Somewhat fittingly called the “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA”, the system alows humans to effortlessly click a single tick box to prove they are ...
Blab raises $8.8M to help brands know where and when to advertise
Predicting the future has been extremely profitable for social intelligence startup Blab Inc, which has just raised $8.8 million of its targeted $11.6 million series B funding round, pushing its total funding over $15 million. Blab doesn’t possess any magic crystal balls, but what it does have is a smart predictive algorithm that helps advertising ...