Here are your top news stories from eWEEK. Today’s topics include Oracle’s revival of a copyright infringement lawsuit with Google, market speculation that Apple is planning to introduce three new iPhone models in 2017, the cyber-security recommendations of a panel of experts to defend against ransomware attacks and Microsoft’s security enhancements to its Windows, Office and Azure Cloud applications.
Oracle has revived its long-standing Java copyright dispute with Google in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
In a massive 155-page appeal on Feb. 10, Oracle alleged that the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the Northern District of California repeatedly undermined its side of the story during a jury trial last year.
The jury in that trial had concluded that Google’s Android operating system did not violate Java copyright. According to Oracle, the jury only reached that verdict because Oracle was prevented from presenting evidence at the trial showing all the markets where Android and Java overlapped.
Apple is preparing to release three new iPhone models this fall, including a premium device designed to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, according to a leading mobile industry analyst.
Apple will release two updates to the iPhone 7 and a new phone which may be called the iPhone 8 or it may be called the iPhone X, according to the leading analyst for Apple products, Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities.
The iPhone X is expected to be a new premium phone that comes with a lot of innovations, including wireless charging, according to Kuo. The other two models are expected to be the typical second year updates of the features included in the iPhone 7 under the brand names iPhone 7S and iPhone 7S Plus.
Ransomware will continue to cause pain for companies in 2017, but there continues to be no single successful strategy to prevent or reduce the damage caused by this disruptive malware, according to a panel of security experts at the RSA Conference in San Francisco.
For many companies, backups will provide a reliable fall-back measure if the company’s data is encrypted via ransomware. Yet, recovering data from backups is expensive and not always successful, panel members asserted.
There is no single measure to prevent a ransomware attack and no single product at the conference that will save a company from a ransomware infection, Gal Shpantzer, CEO of Security Outliers, told attendees.
The IT industry’s attention is laser focused on security this week as the RSA Conference 2017 conference gets underway this week in San Francisco.
Just before the event kicked off, Microsoft announced on Feb. 10 several new offerings and product updates aimed at helping its customers fend off hackers and keep their data safe.
Examples include the forthcoming addition of Windows Hello, the biometric login technology in Windows 10, to environments that take an on-premises Active Directory (AD) only approach to user identity and access management.
Microsoft also offers Azure AD for cloud-based and hybrid-cloud implementations. The forthcoming Windows 10 Creators Update will also feature a Dynamic Lock function that automatically locks a user’s PC when they step away from it.
Customers seeking to secure their Azure hybrid cloud environments will soon have new Azure Security Center and Operations Management Suite options.
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