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Tuesday, September 10, 2013

Intel’s Extensive Makeover

While Apple talked about a couple of new products on Tuesday, Intel, with much less fanfare, talked about the transformation of a world, and itself.

Wisely, it did not guarantee the success of its own changes, but showed the steps it is taking.

“We got mired down in the here and now, with this fixation on phones and devices,” Renee James, Intel’s president, said in an exclusive interview at the annual Intel Developers Forum. “We needed to step back and say there is a broader transformation going on.”

The changes include not just products, she said, but a transformation of Intel itself, from a client-server era company to a cloud era company. It is a work in progress, she said, that has involved consultation with Google, Facebook and other cloud companies about how they work. Everything, including how employees design products and compensation, is being rethought, she said.

“This is bigger than any device,” Ms. James said. “It’s a cultural transformation. We’re trying to be thoughtful about it.”

Intel’s chief product announcement to the developers was a new small, low power line of sophisticated chips aimed at wearable computers and sensors connected to the Internet. In other words, a product for a world where Internet-based computing intelligence is deployed anywhere and everywhere. Intel is hoping it can equip this world with chips at a huge scale, remaking a market usually associated with low-priced, low-margin chips.

Called Quark, the new line of chips is initially aimed at the low-priced end of AMD’s “system on a chip” business. Intel did not provide many specifics about price and functionality, other than to say that it will be one-fifth the size and use one-tenth the power of a low-power mobile processor, code-named Silvermont, which will come out at the end of this year.

Silvermont was planned long before last April, when Brian Krzanich took over as Intel’s chief executive and Ms. James became its president. It is part of the Atom line of chips, intended for tablets and lightweight laptops. As such, it is part of that “fixation” on Intel’s historical reliance on personal computers that Ms. James mentioned.

Quark was a product line that Intel’s researchers had in prototype when she became president, Ms. James said, but because these chips are usually associated with cheap microcontrollers, “we hadn’t decided what to do with it. You could look at the business and say ‘Why do we want to be in this?’” Given the growing reach of the Internet, she said, the question became “Why do we not?’”

Quark chips will become available in significant volumes in the first quarter of 2014, Intel said. That’s when the real performance specifications will be known, and when it can start to move out into the field. What it grows into, and what it means for Intel, is what matters most.

The change was even reflected in the form of the conference: Intel is used to showing developers new chips for personal computers and computer servers, which have fairly straightforward deployments in well-understood machines. Quark is a product for a world in which fitness companies, shoe makers, hackers â€" basically, anyone â€" can become an outlet for Intel products

At Tuesday’s forum, Intel deployed more of its engineers than ever so it could talk directly with more individuals. Mr. Krzanich and Ms. James talked in turn about products, and about the hyperconnected world. The two spent 30 minutes taking questions from the audience, a first at this event.

To be sure, the old world still mattered. Mr. Krzanich showed Intel chips in phones, tablets, and laptops that doubled as tablets. The combination products would be available in 60 styles by the end of this year, he said, at prices as low as $400, adding that some Intel-powered tablets would be $100.

Ms. James talked about cities with millions of sensors monitoring every imaginable condition, and cheap genomic analysis of millions of people. Both argued that Intel’s strong design and manufacturing would give it an edge in this world to come.

In some ways, that is the same argument Intel has made for the past couple of years, even as it fixated, and lost money, on trying to preserve its PC-centered business.

Speaking after the event, though, Ms. James said there was no turning back. On Wednesday Intel is expected to make joint announcements with Google that will show a new ability to move away from its old PC model, which was dominated by a relationship with Microsoft, toward addressing a much broader world.

“Intel is redefining what its role is,” she said. “We have a new relationship with Google. There are hobbyists and hackers we’re talking to. We go to maker faires and talk with developers there.”

What remains to be seen is whether Intel can sustain the kind of profit margins it had when it worked in a duopoly with Microsoft.



Government Announces Steps to Restore Confidence on Encryption Standards

SAN FRANCISCO â€" The federal agency charged with recommending cybersecurity standards said Tuesday that it would reopen the public vetting process for an encryption standard, after reports that the National Security Agency had written the standard and could break it.

“We want to assure the I.T. cybersecurity community that the transparent, public process used to rigorously vet our standards is still in place,” The National Institute of Standards and Technology said in a public statement. “N.I.S.T. would not deliberately weaken a cryptographic standard.”

The announcement followed reports published by The New York Times, The Guardian and ProPublica last Thursday about the N.S.A.’s success in foiling much of the encryption that protects vast amounts of information on the Web. The Times reported that as part of its efforts, the N.S.A. had inserted a back door into a 2006 standard adopted by N.I.S.T. and later by the International Organization for Standardization, which counts 163 countries as members.

For encryption to be secure, the system must generate secret prime numbers randomly. That random number generation process â€" which is based on mathematical algorithms â€" makes it practically impossible for an attacker, or intelligence agency, to predict the scrambling protocols that would allow it to unscramble an encrypted message.

But internal memos leaked by a former N.S.A. contractor, Edward Snowden, suggest that the N.S.A. generated one of the random number generators used in a 2006 N.I.S.T. standard â€" called the Dual EC DRBG standard â€" which contains a back door for the N.S.A. In publishing the standard, N.I.S.T. acknowledged “contributions” from N.S.A., but not primary authorship.

Internal N.S.A. memos describe how the agency subsequently worked behind the scenes to push the same standard on the International Organization for Standardization. “The road to developing this standard was smooth once the journey began,” one memo noted. “However, beginning the journey was a challenge in finesse.”

At the time, Canada’s Communications Security Establishment ran the standards process for the international organization, but classified documents describe how ultimately the N.S.A. seized control. “After some behind-the-scenes finessing with the head of the Canadian national delegation and with C.S.E., the stage was set for N.S.A. to submit a rewrite of the draft,” the memo notes. “Eventually, N.S.A. became the sole editor.”

Cryptographers have long had mixed feelings about N.I.S.T.’s close relationship with the N.S.A., but many said last week’s revelations had confirmed their worst fears and eroded their confidence in N.I.S.T. standards entirely.

“We’ll have to re-evaluate that relationship,” Matthew D. Green, a cryptography researcher at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in a blog post Thursday. “Trust has been violated.”

(Mr. Green said on Twitter Monday that Johns Hopkins asked him to remove that blog post.  He was allowed to reinstate it hours later after the university realized the content was based on public news reports. The university later apologized.)

On Tuesday, N.I.S.T. attributed the allegations to confusion and noted that it was required, by statute, to consult with the N.S.A.

“There has been some confusion about the standards development process and the role of different organizations in it,” the agency’s statement read. “N.I.S.T. has a long history of extensive collaboration with the world’s cryptography experts to support robust encryption. The National Security Agency (N.S.A.) participates in the N.I.S.T. cryptography process because of its recognized expertise. N.I.S.T. is also required by statute to consult with the N.S.A.”

The agency said that because of cryptographers’ concerns, it would reopen the public comment period for three publications â€" Special Publication 800-90A and drafts of Special Publications 800-90B and 800-90C â€" which all use the random number generator in question.

“If vulnerabilities are found in these or any other N.I.S.T. standard, we will work with the cryptographic community to address them as quickly as possible,” the agency’s statement said.

“I know from firsthand communications that a number of people at N.I.S.T. feel betrayed by their colleagues at the N.S.A.,” Mr. Green said in an interview Tuesday. “Reopening the standard is the first step in fixing that betrayal and restoring confidence in N.I.S.T.”



New iPhone’s Fingerprint Scanner Prompts Concern and Nervous Laughter Online

Coming just one day after leaked documents suggested that the National Security Agency is able to hack into smartphones, the unveiling of a new iPhone with a built-in fingerprint scanner prompted dismay and mockery online from privacy advocates and journalists.

In an article published Monday by Spiegel Online, the German magazine’s English Web site, Marcel Rosenbach, Laura Poitras and Holger Stark reported that documents obtained from the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden boasted of the agency’s ability to capture photographs, location data, contacts and even drafts of text messages from iPhones.

According to the documents reviewed by the Spiegel journalists, the agency’s ability to spy on iPhone users is already so extensive that an internal presentation even compared Steve Jobs with Big Brother, the all-seeing presence in “1984,” George Orwell’s novel about an advanced surveillance state. The presentation included three slides with images from Apple’s famous 1984-themed television commercial and a photograph of the Apple founder, who died in October 2011, holding an iPhone accompanied by a caption that asked: “Who knew in 1984 … that this would be Big Brother … and the zombies would be paying customers?”

After the initial flurry of jokes, Jacob Appelbaum, a developer and spokesman for the Tor project, which allows users to browse the Web anonymously, suggested that the fingerprint scanner could soon make it impossible for political activists to keep information private.

Apple’s developers stressed that the new phone’s fingerprint data would be encrypted and stored locally on the phone, not uploaded to the company’s servers. But, as The Times, The Guardian and ProPublica reported last week, the N.S.A. “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world,” according to documents from the Snowden archive.



Daily Report: Judges Seem Dubious Over F.C.C.’s Open-Internet Rules

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New iPhone’s Fingerprint Scanner Prompts Concern and Nervous Laughter Online

Coming just one day after leaked documents suggested that the National Security Agency is able to hack into smartphones, the unveiling of a new iPhone with a built-in fingerprint scanner prompted dismay and mockery online from privacy advocates and journalists.

In an article published Monday by Spiegel Online, the German magazine’s English Web site, Marcel Rosenbach, Laura Poitras and Holger Stark reported that documents obtained from the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden boasted of the agency’s ability to capture photographs, location data, contacts and even drafts of text messages from iPhones.

According to the documents reviewed by the Spiegel journalists, the agency’s ability to spy on iPhone users is already so extensive that an internal presentation even compared Steve Jobs with Big Brother, the all-seeing presence in “1984,” George Orwell’s novel about an advanced surveillance state. The presentation included three slides with images from Apple’s famous 1984-themed television commercial and a photograph of the Apple founder, who died in October 2011, holding an iPhone accompanied by a caption that asked: “Who knew in 1984 … that this would be Big Brother … and the zombies would be paying customers?”

After the initial flurry of jokes, Jacob Appelbaum, a developer and spokesman for the Tor project, which allows users to browse the Web anonymously, suggested that the fingerprint scanner could soon make it impossible for political activists to keep information private.

Apple’s developers stressed that the new phone’s fingerprint data would be encrypted and stored locally on the phone, not uploaded to the company’s servers. But, as The Times, The Guardian and ProPublica reported last week, the N.S.A. “has circumvented or cracked much of the encryption, or digital scrambling, that guards global commerce and banking systems, protects sensitive data like trade secrets and medical records, and automatically secures the e-mails, Web searches, Internet chats and phone calls of Americans and others around the world,” according to documents from the Snowden archive.



Have Apple Questions? Ask Them Here

There have been weeks of rumors and speculation about Apple’s product announcements on Tuesday. Will there be fingerprint logins? Will there be gilded iPhones? Now that the day has come, what do you want to know about the new iPhones, operating system or other products Apple is introducing?

Drop your questions in the comments below and we will answer them here, as the Apple event continues through the day.



Have Apple Questions? Ask Them Here

There have been weeks of rumors and speculation about Apple’s product announcements on Tuesday. Will there be fingerprint logins? Will there be gilded iPhones? Now that the day has come, what do you want to know about the new iPhones, operating system or other products Apple is introducing?

Drop your questions in the comments below and we will answer them here, as the Apple event continues through the day.



Freed Captives Differ on Claim Syrian Rebels Framed Assad With Gas Attack

The Italian war correspondent Domenico Quirico, who reported sympathetically on the uprising in Syria before being taken hostage in April by rebel fighters, told reporters on Monday following his release that two years of bloody, armed conflict had changed the nature of the rebellion. “I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by the revolution that no longer exists and has become fanaticism and the work of bandits,” he said.

The veteran reporter added, “It is not the revolution that I encountered two years ago in Aleppo â€" secular, tolerant. It has become something else,” in remarks published by his newspaper, the Turin daily La Stampa.

La Stampa also published video of Mr. Quirico’s emotional return to his newsroom and an English translation of his statement taking issue with part of an account given by a fellow captive, the Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin. As the Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported, Mr. Piccinin said in a television interview on Monday, after he too returned home, that “it was not the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin or some other gas during combat in the Damascus suburbs” last month.

According to the Belgian â€" who described himself as a previously “fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in their just struggle for democracy” â€" at one stage during their captivity, he and Mr. Quirico overheard rebels saying that the deadly gas attacks last month had been carried out by anti-Assad forces to frame the government and provoke intervention.

Mr. Quirico confirmed the incident but disagreed sharply with Mr. Piccinin on what it meant. “We heard some people we didn’t know talking through a half-closed door,” he said. “It’s impossible to know whether what was said was based on real fact or just hearsay.”

According to La Stampa, the Italian reporter called it “madness” to say that the overheard conversation was definitive proof of a rebel plot.

“During our kidnapping, we were kept completely in the dark about what was going on in Syria, including the gas attacks in Damascus,” Quirico said. “But one day, we heard a Skype conversation in English between three people whose names I do not know. We heard the conversation from the room in which we were being held captive, through a half-closed door. One of them had previously presented himself to us as a general of the Syrian Liberation Army. The other two we had never seen and knew nothing about.”

“During the Skype conversation, they said that the gas attack on the two neighborhoods in Damascus had been carried out by rebels as a provocation, to push the West towards a military intervention. They also said they believed the death toll had been exaggerated,” Quirico said in his statement.

“I don’t know if any of this is true and I cannot say for sure that it is true because I have no means of confirming the truth of what was said. I don’t know how reliable this information is and cannot confirm the identity of these people. I am in no position to say for sure whether this conversation is based on real fact or just hearsay and I don’t usually call conversations I have heard through a door, true,” Quirico said.

“You must bear in mind the conditions in which we were; we were prisoners and heard things through doors. I have nothing to judge whether the things that were said are true or not. I am used to checking my facts before I speak and confirm something as true. In this case I was unable to check anything. It is madness to say I knew it wasn’t Assad who used gas.”



Freed Captives Differ on Claim Syrian Rebels Framed Assad With Gas Attack

The Italian war correspondent Domenico Quirico, who reported sympathetically on the uprising in Syria before being taken hostage in April by rebel fighters, told reporters on Monday following his release that two years of bloody, armed conflict had changed the nature of the rebellion. “I was a hostage in Syria, betrayed by the revolution that no longer exists and has become fanaticism and the work of bandits,” he said.

The veteran reporter added, “It is not the revolution that I encountered two years ago in Aleppo â€" secular, tolerant. It has become something else,” in remarks published by his newspaper, the Turin daily La Stampa.

La Stampa also published video of Mr. Quirico’s emotional return to his newsroom and an English translation of his statement taking issue with part of an account given by a fellow captive, the Belgian academic Pierre Piccinin. As the Belgian newspaper Le Soir reported, Mr. Piccinin said in a television interview on Monday, after he too returned home, that “it was not the government of Bashar al-Assad that used sarin or some other gas during combat in the Damascus suburbs” last month.

According to the Belgian â€" who described himself as a previously “fierce supporter of the Free Syrian Army in their just struggle for democracy” â€" at one stage during their captivity, he and Mr. Quirico overheard rebels saying that the deadly gas attacks last month had been carried out by anti-Assad forces to frame the government and provoke intervention.

Mr. Quirico confirmed the incident but disagreed sharply with Mr. Piccinin on what it meant. “We heard some people we didn’t know talking through a half-closed door,” he said. “It’s impossible to know whether what was said was based on real fact or just hearsay.”

According to La Stampa, the Italian reporter called it “madness” to say that the overheard conversation was definitive proof of a rebel plot.

“During our kidnapping, we were kept completely in the dark about what was going on in Syria, including the gas attacks in Damascus,” Quirico said. “But one day, we heard a Skype conversation in English between three people whose names I do not know. We heard the conversation from the room in which we were being held captive, through a half-closed door. One of them had previously presented himself to us as a general of the Syrian Liberation Army. The other two we had never seen and knew nothing about.”

“During the Skype conversation, they said that the gas attack on the two neighborhoods in Damascus had been carried out by rebels as a provocation, to push the West towards a military intervention. They also said they believed the death toll had been exaggerated,” Quirico said in his statement.

“I don’t know if any of this is true and I cannot say for sure that it is true because I have no means of confirming the truth of what was said. I don’t know how reliable this information is and cannot confirm the identity of these people. I am in no position to say for sure whether this conversation is based on real fact or just hearsay and I don’t usually call conversations I have heard through a door, true,” Quirico said.

“You must bear in mind the conditions in which we were; we were prisoners and heard things through doors. I have nothing to judge whether the things that were said are true or not. I am used to checking my facts before I speak and confirm something as true. In this case I was unable to check anything. It is madness to say I knew it wasn’t Assad who used gas.”



Coming Soon: Live Updates From Apple’s iPhone Event

It’s game day at Apple’s campus in Cupertino, Calif. The rumor mill has running nonstop the last few weeks with talk of new Apple products and software. As faithful Apple followers know, September announcements usually mean a new iPhone.

And this year, two new phones are predicted. Apple is expected to announce a lower-priced iPhone that would come in a variety of colors, possibly including blue, yellow and red. Apple is also expected to announce a higher-end iPhone that could even come in gold. (No, not real gold. It would look more like a spray tan.) Finally, we will most likely get a glimpse into the new features of iOS 7, the company’s latest mobile operating system.

So stay tuned as we cover the updates as they are announced, starting around 1 p.m. Eastern time.



Former Czech President Pushes Back Against European Integration

Former Czech President Vaclav Klaus, a rock star among American neo-conservatives and a polarizing force in his own country, has always had a flair for generating controversy and grabbing the spotlight.

He has blamed a foolhardy battle against global warming for helping to create the financial crisis and accused the European Union of behaving like a communist state.

Now, the fiery former president is causing ripples in Prague, the Czech capital - and indigestion among European officials in Brussels - by launching a new campaign against adherents of greater European integration. The move has been interpreted by analysts in Prague as Mr. Klaus’s first salvo before a run to become a member of the European Parliament, where he could prove to be a potent wrecking ball from within. Elections for the European parliament are in May. Mr. Klaus recently disappointed his many supporters when he decided against a political comeback in his own country.

Reacting to a manifesto by proponents of greater European integration led by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Franco-German left-wing firebrand and prominent member of the European parliament for the Green party, Mr. Klaus this week published his own manifesto titled “Democrats of Europe, wake up!”

In it, he warned against efforts to transform the E.U. into a superstate and compared supporters of that effort like Mr. Cohn-Bendit to dangerous Marxists. The appeal was signed by several Czech economists and academics close to the former President as well as Nigel Farage, the Brussels-bashing leader of Britain’s U.K. Independence Party, who has spent more than two decades campaigning for Britain to leave the European Union.

Outlining the dangers of those who want to overturn the European nation state, Mr. Klaus wrote: “That is why we appeal to all the democratic elements in Europe, to all those who still believe that Europe must not become the laboratory of another social-engineering experiment of eternal revolutionaries, to oppose these attempts in an equally fierce, vociferous and uncompromising manner as that of our opponents.”

Jarda Plesl, a long-time Klaus watcher, who is deputy editor of Tyden, a Czech weekly political magazine, predicted that if Mr. Klaus ran for the European Parliament, he would likely win, giving him a new stage from which to pour vitriol on Europe. A divisive figure who has long polarized the country, Mr. Klaus nevertheless has a legion of ardent supporters on both sides of the Atlantic.

“He would love to have such a stage and for people to show him respect or at least attention,” Mr. Plesl said by phone from Prague. “Lots of Czechs will be happy to send him to the European Parliament to get him out of the Czech Republic. And he would, of course, be very entertaining.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Klaus’s ten-year presidency ended in ignominy after his granting of amnesty to dozens of business people accused of financial corruption spurred the Czech Senate to accuse him of high treason. He was later exonerated. But not before mayors and teachers across the country removed his portrait from their offices to show their discontent.



Beyond Passwords: New Tools to Identify Humans

As everything around us becomes connected to the Internet, from cars to thermometers to the stuff inside our mobile phones, technologists are confronting a tough new challenge: How does a machine verify the identity of a human being?

Authentication has been a tough nut to crack since the early days of the Web. And despite the notorious risks they carry, user names and passwords have held on.

Now comes a new generation of authentication alternatives. Apple is said to be incorporating a fingerprint sensor in the new iPhone that it plans to introduce this week. Motorola executives have said they were experimenting with electronic tattoos as a way to authenticate users for its future phones.

Technologists are toying with a variety of other ways to verify identity. Some involve the immutable properties that we are encoded with: irises, heartbeats, voices. Others are developing new techniques that use our mobile devices to verify who we are.

The new efforts come at a time when existing ways of doing things have become notoriously risky. Buckets of user names and passwords have been stolen from a variety of popular sites. Last month came news that even passwords as long as 55 characters can be broken.

A start-up in San Francisco, called Clef, has developed a mobile app that lets you send an encrypted key from a mobile app to a desktop computer. The Web site you are trying to enter can effectively recognize you based on your phone, instead of a typed-in password.

LaunchKey, a start-up in Las Vegas, is also trying to use your mobile phone as your authentication device. It requires that you register a user name along with your cellphone. When you are trying to log into a Web site or mobile app that accepts LaunchKey’s authentication service, it sends a push notification to that phone. You open up the LaunchKey app and slide your finger to authorize authentication. It creates a unique password for each site and app. You are not required to remember it. LaunchKey’s service is in beta and not widely adopted.

In Redwood City, Calif., a start-up called OneID is offering a single sign-on for a variety of Web sites and devices. In a video, an engineer at OneID demonstrated how he used it to open his garage door at home.

Jim Fenton, an engineer with OneID, demonstrated how to open a garage door using his company’s technology.

“The Achilles’ heel of the Internet of things is, how do you secure access to all these things?” said the engineer, Jim Fenton. “If you connect all these things to the Internet you need to have good ways â€" good from a security standpoint and a convenience standpoint â€" good ways to control access to things. Having user names and passwords is not a good solution for every device.”

Trouble is, not very many things â€" online or off â€" have yet adopted the OneID system, which means Mr. Fenton must still use a lot of user names and passwords. He keeps them in a couple of password managers on his computer, along with an encrypted USB stick. “It’s not fun,” he said.

Potentially more fun â€" also potentially more strange â€" is a new wristband developed by cryptographers at the University of Toronto. It contains a voltmeter to read a heartbeat. “You put it on. It knows it’s you. It communicates that identity securely to everything around you,” says Karl Martin, one of its co-creators. Security is a primary selling point of the wristband, called Nymi, which is available for preorder. While a heart can be broken, Mr. Martin promises a heartbeat cannot.

A promotional video for the Nymi wristband.

It faces the same problem as OneID’s product. Its success in the market depends entirely on how many companies adopt it as a way to verify identity. Mr. Martin envisions it as a way to eventually unlock cars, homes and Internet-enabled devices of all sorts.

A more fantastical solution has been developed in a lab at the University of California, Berkeley. Computer scientists there say a simple and cheap headset can read your mind to verify your thoughts â€" and save you the work of typing in a password.

Facebook has arguably had more success than anyone in becoming a one-stop identity verification service. Millions of Web sites allow users to log in with their Facebook credentials, which also, of course, is a way for Facebook to get to know you better â€" and serve you more tailored ads.

Mozilla has been trying to popularize an alternative to that single sign-on system, called Persona. Mozilla makes sure that your e-mail provider verifies that the account belongs to you. Then for every site that accepts a Persona log-in, you can log in with the original verified e-mail. Passwords are not required.

Mozilla’s identity product is linked to only a small number of Web sites â€" “thousands” is all a Mozilla spokesman would say â€" compared with several million sites that support Facebook log-in.

Johnathan Nightingale, a vice president of engineering at Mozilla, said the emergence of Internet-connected devices all around us brings a new urgency to the need to develop alternatives to passwords.

“The idea that all the things around us are going to be intelligent is great but they don’t all have screens and keyboards and password managers,” he said. “They can’t always count on 12 upper-case letters, three lower-case letters, two punctuation marks and a percent symbol.”

He regretted that his fellow tech colleagues had been stymied by the problem for so long. “We tell ourselves as a group we are predicting the future,” he said. “Mostly we are hoping for the future.”

A coalition of hardware and software companies, calling itself the Fido Alliance, is working on a set of specifications for password alternatives that the industry can rally around. Their guidelines are expected to be released at the end of the year. Already companies affiliated with Fido are testing products, from fingerprint readers to software that recognizes faces and voices. One day, you could log into, say, your favorite e-commerce site by speaking into your computer, and when you’re ready to buy something gaze at the PayPal app on your phone.

Yubico, a company affiliated with the Fido Alliance, has been testing a new authentication device, called the YubiKey.

PayPal is a member of the alliance, as is a Palo Alto software start-up that has developed the facial recognition and voice software, called Nok Nok Labs.



Workday Weaves In Big Data

Workday is making its Big Data play, and it says a lot about where the enterprise technology business is going â€" making software that is easier to use and trying to be the trusted place for corporate data.

Workday, a fast-growing company that offers online human resources and corporate financial software, announced a product that nontechnical managers can use to figure out quickly how their companies are performing on things like hiring objectives, employee attrition or revenue per worker for every division.

Other features include tools to compare payroll with overall market averages, ways of judging the possible cost to a company of losing a specific employee, and analysis of a high-performing employee’s characteristics and work history. Future uses, the company says, include ways of measuring the health of the company against independent metrics, and tools for raising worker productivity.

“This is analytics for mere mortals,” said Dan Beck, the company’s product manager for financials and analytics. For nontechnical companies, he said, “this kind of stuff is overwhelming.”

You might think it would be easy for a company to figure out how much money it is making per employee. That is, if you had not worked in your typical large company. In reality, people are spread across a number of locations, databases can be hard to merge and most of the tools that companies use require significant training.

Cloud-based software companies like Workday hope to address that â€" and win the hearts and minds of customers â€" by being relatively simple-to-use repositories into which lots of data can be poured. The first version of Workday Big Data Analytics, as Workday’s product is called, can draw information from a company’s SAP database, and make it part of the Workday corpus of data.

It can also use outside data sources, from places like Twitter, to analyze what suppliers and others are saying about a company or product.

“If the Workday data becomes the bedrock for analysis,” Mr. Beck said, “it eliminates a lot of moving parts. The customer can build their own human resources data mart.” A data mart is a place where data resides for potential use in analysis.

The product is being delivered as part of the company’s latest update, Workday 20. Unlike earlier enterprise software, the newest versions of cloud software can be automatically delivered to all customers, no matter when they first started using the product. The company said Workday 20 had more than 200 new features.



Workday Weaves In Big Data

Workday is making its Big Data play, and it says a lot about where the enterprise technology business is going â€" making software that is easier to use and trying to be the trusted place for corporate data.

Workday, a fast-growing company that offers online human resources and corporate financial software, announced a product that nontechnical managers can use to figure out quickly how their companies are performing on things like hiring objectives, employee attrition or revenue per worker for every division.

Other features include tools to compare payroll with overall market averages, ways of judging the possible cost to a company of losing a specific employee, and analysis of a high-performing employee’s characteristics and work history. Future uses, the company says, include ways of measuring the health of the company against independent metrics, and tools for raising worker productivity.

“This is analytics for mere mortals,” said Dan Beck, the company’s product manager for financials and analytics. For nontechnical companies, he said, “this kind of stuff is overwhelming.”

You might think it would be easy for a company to figure out how much money it is making per employee. That is, if you had not worked in your typical large company. In reality, people are spread across a number of locations, databases can be hard to merge and most of the tools that companies use require significant training.

Cloud-based software companies like Workday hope to address that â€" and win the hearts and minds of customers â€" by being relatively simple-to-use repositories into which lots of data can be poured. The first version of Workday Big Data Analytics, as Workday’s product is called, can draw information from a company’s SAP database, and make it part of the Workday corpus of data.

It can also use outside data sources, from places like Twitter, to analyze what suppliers and others are saying about a company or product.

“If the Workday data becomes the bedrock for analysis,” Mr. Beck said, “it eliminates a lot of moving parts. The customer can build their own human resources data mart.” A data mart is a place where data resides for potential use in analysis.

The product is being delivered as part of the company’s latest update, Workday 20. Unlike earlier enterprise software, the newest versions of cloud software can be automatically delivered to all customers, no matter when they first started using the product. The company said Workday 20 had more than 200 new features.



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