AT Computers

While there’s no shortage of email providers, Gmail’s simple design, ease of use and cool features continue to attract users. Whether you’re sorting through hundreds of work emails a day or using the service to keep in touch with friends and family, keeping up to date on its latest features can help you get the most out of it.

Here’s a look at five of Gmail’s newest features, including quickly adding appointments to your calendar, customizing your background image and using advanced search to find the email you’re looking for.

1. How to add events to your calendar

If you use Gmail to coordinate or schedule meetings, Google has made adding them to your Calendar—without leaving Gmail—easy.

Beginning last week, all dates and times in emails appear underlined. Hover over them to preview your schedule for the day and change the title, date or time of the event. Click “Add to Calendar” will do just that. The entry in your calendar will also include a link back to the original email, making the details easy to reference.

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With Bitcoin all the rage and startups popping up left and right, it’s hard to know who’s an expert in the virtual currency and who just has an opinion. Most people would put Jeff Garzik in the former camp.

A Bitcoin core developer for three years, he left his job at Red Hat on Friday to start work at Bitpay, the biggest Bitcoin payment processing service. IDG News Service caught up with him at the Bitcoin 2013 conference in Silicon Valley this weekend, where he talked about the state of Bitcoin today, the parallels with open source, and Bitcoin’s pseudonymous creator, the elusive Satoshi Nakamoto. Following is an edited transcript of the conversation.

IDGNS: What’s on people’s minds at Bitcoin 2013? It feels like the Wild West right now—the exchange rate’s up and down, the government’s starting to regulate, there are startups cropping up everywhere, where are we at?

Garzik: Bitcoin’s growing up. It’s been a hobbyist-grown organic piece of software, an organic community. I was one of the hobbyists. It grew up slowly, slowly, slowly over time, and now VCs are all over the place trying to write checks. As a developer, I’ve told several people, I don’t want your check. I just started work for a startup called Bitpay, my first day is today.

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In the face of a slump in PC sales and industry debate over whether the smartphone or tablet is now the preferred tool for a large segment of domestic and even small business users, Asus continues to release a number of combined and flexible devices that try to play on both sides of the dividing lines.

Transformer AiO

The most recent, announced at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and starting to ship worldwide, are the FonePad, a large-format smartphone—or small tablet—with a 7-inch touchscreen, and an “all-in-one” desktop doubling as a tablet, the Transformer AiO.

The Transformer AiO (All-in-One) has an 18.4-inch detachable display, which runs as a stand-alone tablet, albeit a rather cumbersome one. Based on an Intel Core processor, it runs either Windows 8 or Android operating systems.

The Transformer AiO’s base station is a fully functional desktop in itself independent of the tablet-style screen and can be used through a separate monitor.

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Yahoo’s board of directors has approved spending US$1.1 billion in cash to buy popular blogging site Tumblr, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The plan is for Tumblr to operate as an independent business, the Journal reported on Sunday, quoting anonymous sources.

Asked via email about the Journal’s report, a Yahoo spokesperson declined to comment. Tumblr didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Acquisition suspected

Rumors that Yahoo might be in discussions to buy Tumblr emerged last week, and on Friday Yahoo called for a mystery press event to be held in New York City on Monday afternoon. Tumblr’s headquarters are in Manhattan.

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Google I/O got most of the attention this week, but a conference at the other end of Silicon Valley showed there’s plenty of innovation happening in the word of data centers, too.

On the exhibition floor at the Uptime Institute Symposium, I/O Data Centers showed software that lets a facilities manager navigate through a data center in virtual-reality fashion.

Using sensor readings from the equipment, staff can “fly” through aisles and in and out of server equipment, checking power and performance metrics along the way.

At another booth, 3M showed its Novec fire protection fluid, which is used in sprinkler systems and puts out fires by absorbing heat.

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The FBI has reportedly briefed bank executives on a wave of cyberattacks that have lashed the industry since last summer as part of a new policy designed to foster cooperation between the state and private sectors.

According to comments made at a Reuters event by FBI executive assistant director Richard McFeely, the Bureau had carried out a large videoconference with dozens of bank heads across the U.S. in April to urge them to share data on the attacks they are experiencing.

In the past the organization had conducted its investigations without keeping victim firms—in this case banks—informed, he admitted.

“That’s 180 degrees from where we are now,” Reuters reported him as saying of the FBI’s change of approach.

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The “Bring Your Own Devices” trend has a dual-personality problem on its hands.

How can corporate data and personal data exist on a single smartphone? Companies don’t want their deep secrets to get out, while employees don’t want to be told how to use their precious mobile gadgets that they bought with their own money.

It’s a problem that has stumped the BYOD crowd.

“Companies don’t trust that information is contained properly” on a BYOD smartphone, says Nanci Churchill, vice president of operations at Mobi Wireless Management, a software and services provider helping companies navigate mobile adoption.

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As data-transfer shifts increasingly to the cloud, the servers stacked in datacenters handling the data become increasingly crowded. Virtualization means multiple users can share a single server.

This has positive aspects: servers don’t sit idle, scalability is less of a concern, and datacenter efficiency improves. But there’s a problem with too many users on a single server.

And it’s going to get worse.

It’s called “the noisy neighbor problem,” and here’s what happens: disk I/O for one user starts to interfere with the operations of another user on the same server.

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The nation’s critical infrastructure is vulnerable to cyber attacks and better information sharing is needed to strengthen defenses.

That’s the message Charles Edwards, deputy inspector general for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, told a Congressional committee at a public hearing on Thursday.

Since 1990, Industrial Control Systems, which are used to manage components of the country’s critical infrastructure, have been connecting to the Internet to improve their operations, Edwards explained in written testimony submitted to the House Subcommittee on Cybersecurity, Infrastructure Protection and Security Technologies.

However, companies hooked their control systems into the public Internet with little regard for security. “[Security] for ICS was inherently weak because it allowed remote control of processes and exposed ICS to cyber security risks that could be exploited over the Internet,” Edwards said.

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Bitcoin is growing up.

The virtual currency that caught the public’s attention last month when its value zoomed briefly past $200 kicked off its first Silicon Valley conference Friday evening and shows no sign of losing momentum.

The event is small by Silicon Valley standards, with about 1000 attendees expected and 19 exhibitors, but it’s bustling with startups launching new exchanges, software developers looking to strengthen the Bitcoin network, and venture capitalists seeking places to invest.

There’s now $45 million a day being traded on the Bitcoin network, or $16 billion a year, according to Peter Vessenes, chairman of the Bitcoin Foundation, who talked at the start of the event in San Jose.

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