Category Archives: Windows 8

Intel Strikes Deal For NFC Technology Ahead of Windows 8 Launch

It is a well-known fact that Intel has plans to enter the smartphone market soon and it looks they have plans for doing it with Windows 8. Just ahead of the expected Windows 8 launch in mid-2012; Intel has struck a deal with Inside Secure for use of its NFC technology. NFC or Near Field Communications is much like Bluetooth in its convenience but is much more robust and secure. It has become the preferred ad hoc networking technology for almost all future smartphones. Using this technology, you can turn your phone in to a contact-less credit card, security card and much more. It is all the rage in Japan and the rest of the world is just trying to catch up.

What Intel intends to do with this technology is to integrate it in to their chips and make market for themselves in the smartphone category. With Windows 8 coming up, most people are expecting a major push from the world’s largest chipmaker in the smartphone direction with mobile chipsets.

NFC is a technology that is heralded by most industry experts and is all set to explode in the next few years. It is going to be supported by major players like Google (with their Wallet payment system), who are looking to introduce a simple and secure payment method that can be integrated in to consumer electronics. Imagine having a virtual account like PayPal and then waving your phone in front of a machine to make a payment at your local grocery store.

Windows 8 Will Have NFC At Launch

Coming up after that are ticketing services. So if Intel has its way, your Intel powered Windows 8 smartphone might be able to buy tickets online and then act as the ticket itself at the checking gate. Wave your phone at the gate and your ticket is recognized and ‘punched’.

Security is a big issue in such systems and with NFC’s 10cm range, there’s hardly any chance of eavesdropping like there is with Bluetooth. Plus there are industry standard high-level encryption methods at work here.With some tablet makers also thinking of integrating NFC (the official Windows 8 demo tablet has NFC), Windows 8 is likely to become the first mainstream OS to see real utilization of this.

Windows 8 To Help Protect Your Digital Identity

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In today’s day and life a lot of emphasis is put on securing the content that we access on the web but, with each of us having numerous accounts it becomes tedious to remember that many passwords. Also there is this constant threat of some one hacking into your account and viewing or even misusing your personal data. There are a number of different methods that attackers use to try to obtain your password. The most common methods are: phissing,guessing,cracking,keylogging.

In the latest post on the Windows 8 developer’s blog site, Microsoft’s Dustin Ingalls, who is a group program manager on the Windows 8 security and identity team, has explained this in more detail.

One big issue with securing your personal identity details on the Internet is the use of passwords.Ingalls says,” The number of unique passwords across those 25 accounts is only about 6. For folks who spend time thinking about security, that’s a worrisome finding as it shows that the average person reuses the same password quite frequently across accounts.”

To counter this situation Ingalls states,

Windows 8 simplifies the task of managing unique and complex passwords in two important ways. The first is by providing a way to automatically store and retrieve multiple account names and passwords for all the websites and applications you use, and do so in a protected manner. Internet Explorer 10 uses the credentials that we store to remember names and passwords for websites you visit (if you choose). In addition, anyone building a Metro style app can use a direct API to securely store and retrieve credentials for that app.

The second important investment in this area was covered in an earlier post by Katie Frigon, Signing into Windows 8 with a Windows Live ID. One of the great things you get when you sign in to Windows with your Windows Live ID is the ability to sync the credentials you’ve stored to all of the Windows 8 PCs that you register as your “Trusted PCs.”

Windows 8 has a number of new features that make it much easier for both users and application developers to make use of public/private key methods. Windows already provides fairly extensive support for use of key pairs and certificates; but strong protection of the private key, as I mentioned earlier, typically relied on HSMs or smart cards.Windows 8 includes a new Key Storage Provider (KSP), which provides easy, convenient use of the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) as a way of strongly protecting private keys. A TPM is a trusted execution environment found on many business-class PCs today (and we expect much broader availability of TPMs when Windows 8 ships), which enables a PC to securely store cryptographic keys. Metro-style apps have APIs that make it easy to automatically enroll and manage keys on your behalf.

He finally concludes by saying, “In a world that is becoming increasingly dependent on maintaining a secure digital identity, we are very passionate about finding ways to make your digital life safer and more secure, without making it more complex.”

Windows 8 Store Panoramic Mode Pictures Leaked !

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There is no stopping the leaks of the Windows 8 Store,yesterday we saw some leaks showing up the music beta app from the Windows 8 Store and now Win8China have added some more leaks to the Windows 8 Store list.

The latest leaked pictures of the Windows 8 Store reveals the Panoramic Mode of the Windows 8 Store.As we can see from the First Screenshot below the panoramic mode of the Windows 8 Store shows up various app tiles like the Weather app,Socialite app then the games,music and other apps in the panoramic view.

You can see the zoomed in screenshots of the App tiles from the Gallery below,The first block reads:”Have a new computer, but are not sure where to start? To your computer to install the necessary applications.”

Then it shows up the Weather and Socialite app as mentioned above,the 2nd block in the panoramic view lists the Games in the Windows 8 Store,3rd and 4th blocks shows up the Music app,video and the books and references apps while the 5th and 6th block showing up news and weather and some other stuff.

[click on the thumbnails to enlarge the images]

Windows 8 Store will launch along with the Windows 8 Beta release in February next year,but that won’t stop the flurry of leaks of Windows 8 and Windows 8 Store pictures over the web.We can expect some more leaks in coming days.

Image Credits[Win8China]

[Survey]Windows 8 Tablets Pricing Should be Lower than iPad to be Successful

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The Big Question when the Windows 8 Tablet launch next year would be what price tag would it get for the launch keeping in mind that it would be coming from different manufacturers like Samsung,Dell,HP and others who see the Windows 8 Tablet on their roadmap.

ZDNet conducted a survey actually a poll of a sorts to see what price point the end users are expecting and willing to shell out money from their pockets.According to the survey the highest price range which got maximum percentage of votes 38% is the 300-399$ price range,while 27% people think that the Windows 8 tablet should be priced at 400-599$ price range.Some highly optimistic 19% users voted in for less than 199$ price tag,while some crazy fanboys are ready to shell out over 800-900$ for the Windows 8 tablet.

If we take a look the current tablet pricing from various platforms like Android and iOS,Amazon’s Kindle Fire Tablet which is selling like hot cakes these days costs 199$ while the market is filled with many entry level as well as high end android tablets the market is still pretty much tilted towards the iPad Tablet which costs over 499 $ all the way to the over 800$ for the costliest one from Apple.

ZDNet feels that the sweet spot for the Windows 8 tablet would be around the 499$ mark and we couldn’t agree more,the 499$ mark would be the starting price tag for the lower end Windows 8 (entry level) tablets if they have to make any impact on the market which is currently under Apple’s Shadow.Well for that to happen,we have to wait and watch !

Windows 8 Store and Music Beta App Screenshots Leaked!

Asus To Release Windows 8 Ultrabook With Touchscreen Capability In 2012

Windows 8 Store Welcomes Open Source Apps !

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Microsoft Windows operating system has been the most popular system operating system in terms of global market share with the current one i.e Windows 7 being the most popular one with over 500 million licenses and counting.The successor to Windows 7 i.e Windows 8 is being designed and near to a beta release in the month of February 2012 which will also see the release of Windows 8 Store for the Metro based apps.

Last week Microsoft previewed the Windows 8 Store and along with that also opened a new contest for the developers who want their apps to be featured first when the Store is released in a couple of months time,at the time of release there will be only free apps available over the store.

Those who thought that Microsoft won’t allow open source apps to the platform,well Microsoft thinks otherwise.As spotted earlier by TheRegister in the Windows 8 Store’s Developer’s agreement Microsoft will allow developers to develop their apps using any open source licenses as long as it’s been approved by the OSI(Open Source Initiative).

Here’s what the Agreement read:

“Your license terms must also not conflict with the Standard Application License Terms, in any way, except if you include FOSS, your license terms may conflict with the limitations set forth in Section 3 of those Terms, but only to the extent required by the FOSS that you use. ‘FOSS’ means any software licensed under an Open Source Initiative Approved License.”

“If your app includes FOSS, it must not cause any non-FOSS Microsoft software to become subject to the terms of any FOSS license.”

According to The Register Microsoft indirectly denied any support for the GPL(General Public License).So it would be interesting to see if this open source love lure the open source developers to take interest in the Windows 8 Store app development.

Microsoft Confident Of Developer Interest In Windows 8

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Numbers is one thing that Microsoft has on its side. After disclosing the coming of the Windows Store before the official release was to happen, Microsoft said that they have so far served the Windows 8 Developer Preview over three million times through downloads. And we know that the actual number of downloads will increase when we count the circulation through unofficial channels. When it comes to developer support, Microsoft confidently quotes the current Windows 7 install base — 500 million. All of these machines have the ability to run Windows 8. If you are not convinced, there’s another number to be talked about — the 400 million PC’s that are sold worldwide every year. Every PC coming out now has the ability to run Windows 8.

Windows Store Icon

Senior VP of consumer channels ar Microsoft, Capossela, had all of this to say and some more about the developer interest about Windows 8 and whether there will be enough of it. According to him, there’s a lot of opportunity on the market for developers to tap in to. Considering the plausible install base that runs in to at least a hundred or two million initially, it is easy to understand why anyone would want to get in on it. Additionally, the Windows Store’s revenue models rewards higher selling apps through greater sales percentage. Whereas developers get 70% normally, any app that sells over $25,000 worth will receive 80% of the sales. Also, Microsoft is building in support for multiple ad networks for developers to use. However, they are also not going to force developers to use particular ad networks and they will be free to choose on their own.

These are all measures that Capossela talked about when commenting on why the company is bullish on gaining developer support. However, these are only features that are meant to attract developers. A platform such as this is nothing without its buyers and Microsoft has been hard at work devising strategies to ensure buyer interest as well.

The Windows Store’s policy is very much tilted towards making the consumer’s experience a smooth one. To start with, developers will have to ensure that their apps are CPU architecture agnostic, which means that they will have to develop each app for x86 and ARM processors. For users, this will mean all apps being available on anything that is running Windows 8. We have already reported on how Microsoft intends to handle the varying screen size issue.

Video streaming will be capped at 256Kb/s and audio streaming at 64Kb/s to safeguard the user against maxing out their data cap. However, Microsoft is not looking to get all big brotherly here. So if the app needs to have greater video or audio bandwidth, it will simply have to ask for permission from the user. This way, the user will be aware of the potential drain on their date usage and won’t be taken by surprise.

Best of all though is the multi-machine installation policy. Microsoft allows not just two or three, but up to five machines to have the app installed per purchase. The higher number makes sense because Windows 8 is going to have multiple devices types under it and there are 3 main classes already — PC, Tablet/Slate and Phone. So 5 installs per app is going to be a very realistic scenario once Windows 8 launches. This would be great especially for the professional people who have to buy expensive pro-level apps for their work. Now they can enjoy having them apps with them on all their devices.

So it shows that Microsoft is definitely working hard to promote the Windows Store to both the contributors and consumers. At the same time they are taking care of the finer details of user experience on both ends. Put together, it is the prefect combination to have, at least on paper. If they can actually pull this off, it will be a great store that will ride on the tidal wave of market penetration that is almost certain for the world’s largest OS platform.

[Via: TabTimes, iStartedSomething, Slash Gear]

Defend your PC Without Booting into System Courtesy Windows Defender Offline Beta

Remote Kill Switch In Windows 8 Apps: Microsoft

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There you go — Microsoft has confirmed that they have remote kill switch installed in to Windows 8 apps. using this access, they can disable and even remove an app entirely from a user’s device. This piece of information was released along with other details of the upcoming Windows Store for Windows 8.

If you are shocked or outraged, don’t be. This has become standard procedure for app stores of this kind and it is seen in both Apple and Google run app stores. So both of the market leading companies can trigger a command to wipe out an app from your system and they do not necessarily need your permission to do it. However, it is an extreme maneuver and is reserved for the times when malware has accidentally slipped through the screening process or there’s a severe amount of controversy or legal battle regarding the app. It is is sort of a last resort for the companies. And users are usually well compensated for their inconvenience through app store gift cards and so on. In fact, Microsoft has precedent for being generous in this regard. Recently there was a security glitch in the Xbox Live platform that banned people without rhyme or reason. These users were promptly reinstated in their full unbanned glory and were actually given free download codes for an entire game! Needless to say, Xbox Live gamers are now hoping to be similarly inconvenienced at the first given opportunity.

Windows 8 Apps To Have Remote Kill Switch

Microsoft has made it clear in the terms of use that this kill switch will be part of the agreement where Microsoft gets to use its discretion. The user will not be informed or asked permission from before the command is executed. This is what the company has to say about it in official terms: -

“In cases where your security is at risk, or where we’re required to do so for legal reasons, you may not be able to run apps or access content that you previously acquired or purchased a license for,”

Other than mentioning the fact that the users will be compensated, the Windows makers also mentioned one more point of interest. They may also clean out the data created by the offending app.

“If the Windows Store, an app, or any content is changed or discontinued, your data could be deleted or you may not be able to retrieve data you have stored,”

Not very convenient if you were depending on it but when it come to security risks, it is going to be quite the blessing to have Microsoft do the clean up for you.

So far, there has been no incident in the the mobile app store history where Apple has had to use their kill switch. Steve Jobs had acknowledged the presence of such a command though. iOS apps that have been removed from the app store after it was approved and put up, have so far not been removed by Apple. Those who purchased the apps could continue using it as normal. There was no remote wipe. Google however has used their kill switch multiple times, usually after discovering a malicious app on the lose.

Microsoft has not detailed the review process for the apps but they will surely be helped by the precedents set by Google and Apple. It will be easier to perfect the existing system now that there are others who are already doing it. Experts have chimed in with their opinion saying that it will most likely be much more stringent that the standards set by Google. But perhaps it won’t be as strict as Apple. It is easy to see that the best path is to take the middle path that lies between the two renowned extremes.

There has been no official word on it but the Windows Store is expected to throw open its digital gates the same time as the first beta release of Windows 8.

[Via: Computerworld]