Info World

Salesforce.com has made a series of changes to its support services that include the removal of certain features from the Standard tier, but which the company says overall will provide a better experience for customers.

Google today patched 20 vulnerabilities in the desktop edition of Chrome and added new anti-malware download warnings to version 17. The company called out a pair of new features in Chrome 17, including the expansion of anti-malware download warnings and pre-rendering of pages suggested by the address/search bar's auto-complete function.

Spammers are impersonating well-known Android software developers in order to distribute rogue apps through the official Android Market. Security researchers from antivirus firm Trend Micro have identified a developer named Rovio MobiIe Ltd. in the Android Market, which had a significant number of rogue applications in its portfolio.

Femtocell developer Airvana is charging Ericsson with breaching their contract over femtocell technology, in a lawsuit (PDF) filed in the Supreme Court of the State of New York. Femtocells like those Airvana developed extend capacity and coverage of mobile networks, which are under increasing strain. The market for such technologies has grown rapidly over the past few years as the use of mobile phones for both voice and data access has also grown.

Google plans to remove online certificate revocation checks from future versions of Chrome, because it considers the process inefficient and slow. Browsers currently check if a website's SSL certificate has been revoked by its issuing Certificate Authority (CA) when trying to establish an HTTPS connection. These checks are done by querying CA-operated servers through a special protocol known as OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol).

Enterprise coders can now use an open source Web application that lets them consolidate software vulnerability data from a range of scanning and test tools. With a centralized view, and reporting and management tools, ThreadFix speeds the work needed to fix software bugs and vulnerabilities, including those in proliferating mobile apps.

Rambus and Nvidia have settled past lawsuits and signed a patent agreement covering a broad range of integrated circuit products, Rambus said on Wednesday. Under the patent agreement, Nvidia will be able to use Rambus technology in its products. The patent agreement is for five years. A Rambus spokeswoman declined to provide financial terms of the agreement.

European researchers may have found a way to speed up data storage 100-fold, breaking one barrier holding back how fast data can be transferred. If successfully translated to a storage product, the new technology alone would theoretically cut the time to store a bit of data on a hard disk drive from a nanosecond -- a billionth of a second -- to a hundred-billionth of a second.

Aren't you glad you didn't rush out and buy an Ultrabook?

When two Boston-area organizations rolled out an interactive data visualization website last month, it represented one of the largest public uses yet for the open-source project Weave -- and more are on the way.

Digital Certificate Authority (CA) Trustwave revealed that it has issued a digital certificate that enabled an unnamed private company to spy on SSL-protected connections within its corporate network, an action that prompted the Mozilla community to debate whether the CA's root certificate should be removed from Firefox.

Oracle is hoping to carve out a prominent place in the world of R, the open-source statistical modeling language with roots in academia but an increasingly high profile in enterprise IT shops. It announced a new Advanced Analytics product on Wednesday that ties R to its database and family of software-hardware appliances.

Technology companies are not just making their products less carbon-intensive; they are also increasingly designing products to improve energy efficiency in the industries that they serve, according to the latest in a series of Greenpeace ratings of the sector's energy practices. The international environmental organization gave its most favorable ratings to Silicon Valley stalwarts Cisco Systems and Google as well as to Swedish mobile vendor Ericcson, U.K. mobile company Vodafone and Japanese hardware company Fujitsu.

In a picturesque spot overlooking San Francisco Bay, the U.S. Department of Energy's Berkeley Lab has begun building a new computing center that will one day house exascale systems. The DOE doesn't know what an exascale system will look like. The types of chips, the storage, the networking, and programming methods that will go into these systems are all works in progress.

Google is planning to send a letter to standards setting organizations, stating that Motorola Mobility's standards-essential patents will continue to be available on FRAND terms after its acquisition of the company, a person close to the situation said late Tuesday.

As part of an ongoing effort to recover from a downward spiral, Yahoo said on Tuesday that four board members, including its chairman, will step down. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang left the board earlier this month. With the additional departures announced today -- including that of chairman Roy Bostock -- more than half of the board's membership will be fresh blood.

Internet Explorer 9 should be the go-to browser for organizations concerned about protecting machines from malicious downloads, according to a new study from NSS Labs: Microsoft's browser trounced rivals Chrome, Firefox, and Saf

Google today began offering a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android smartphones, finally beginning the move to unify its computer, tablet, and smartphone browsers. The browser, however, is only available for smartphones and tablets running Android 4.0 "Ice Cream Sandwich." As of Feb. 1, just 1 percent of Android devices in use are running "Ice Cream Sandwich."

VMware has introduced a new software platform that makes it easier for service providers to wholesale their cloud-services infrastructure to other providers.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has sent warning letters to the makers of six mobile apps used for background checks, saying the apps may violate a consumer credit protection law.