Microsoft will furnish malware assassin to XP users until mid-2015 Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) to scrub infected XP PCs for more than a year after Microsoft ends patches

Microsoft confirmed on Friday that it will continue to offer its malware scrubbing program to Windows XP users for more than a year after it stops patching the operating system.

"Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool is aligned with the company's anti-malware engines and signatures, and as such the removal tool will continue to be provided for Windows XP through July 14, 2015," a company spokesperson wrote in an email reply to questions.

The Malicious Software Removal Tool (MSRT) is updated monthly as Microsoft targets specific major malware families it believes are the biggest threats at the time. It's distributed through Microsoft's Windows Update service and the business-grade Windows Server Update Service (WSUS) on "Patch Tuesday," the date each month when the company ships security patches and other fixes to customers. The MSRT automatically installs and then runs in a seek-and-destroy mission.

Users can also manually download the MSRT from Microsoft's website. click for more

IBM pumps $1.2 billion into global cloud data centers...IBM will build 15 new data centers, giving the company a total of 40 around the globe for cloud services

Dispelling any lingering doubt that IBM sees cloud computing as the way of the future, the company announced that it will invest $1.2 billion this year in expanding its global cloud infrastructure.

"Having lots of data centers in lots of different countries around the world will be important in the long term," said IBM SoftLayer CEO Lance Crosby. "We want the world to understand that cloud is transformational for IBM."

The company plans to open 15 new data centers this year, more than doubling the cloud capacity it acquired when it purchased SoftLayer last year for $2 billion. It plans to combine the new data centers, the existing SoftLayer data centers, and the data centers it already ran before the SoftLayer purchase into a single operation that would provide public and private cloud services to its customers, as well as provide services for internal operations.

While IBM has remained relatively quiet about its cloud plans, at least in comparison to Microsoft and Amazon Web Services, it has been busy preparing for the cloud-centric future, said Rebecca Wettemann, a vice president at the enterprise IT analysis firm Nucleus Research. This announcement is the logical next step for the company, Wettemann said.

"IBM has always taken a measured approach to announcements. But IBM has quietly been running data centers for a long time, and the IBM cloud has been established," she said. "We've seen a slow transformation of IBM from a services company to a software company, and now to a cloud company."

Since 2007, IBM has acquired more than 15 companies with cloud computing software or expertise, spending more than $7 billion in the process. "Through acquisition, IBM has really done a good job of retaining people who can grow this business," Wettemann said.

In fact, the SoftLayer acquisition of last August plays a key role in the new expansion. Thanks to its easy scalability, the architecture and supporting software that SoftLayer developed for its own operations will serve as the foundation for this unified IBM cloud.

"Everything at IBM going forward will reside on the SoftLayer infrastructure-as-a-service," Crosby said.

Building on SoftLayer's services, IBM will offer a global IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service) as well as the hundreds of IBM PaaS (platform-as-a-service) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) offerings. IBM's recently announced initiative tocommercialize Watson-style cognitive computing, for example, will take advantage of the global cloud.

Initially, IBM will open data centers in Washington, London, Hong Kong, Toronto, Mexico City and Dallas, as well as in cities in Japan and India. Additional locations will be announced later in the year. IBM plans further expansions next year, setting up new locations in the Middle East and Africa.click here for more

Researchers aim to revolutionize 3D printing, global manufacturing Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientists are researching additive manufacturing techniques such as building multiple materials into the same product

One day a 3D printer, using a mix of materials, will be able to create body armor for U.S. soldiers that is more lightweight and stronger than anything could be made with traditional manufacturing and materials today.

That's the word from researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, who are working to revolutionize 3D printing, as well as the way that companies build products ranging from jet engines and satellites to football helmets.

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Scientists at the laboratory, a federally funded center in Livermore, Calif., that focuses on national security research, are working on architecting new materials to be used in a process calledadditive manufacturing, more commonly known as 3D printing, and developing a technique for building multiple materials into the same product.

They're also studying the physics and chemistry at the base of the process in order to better understand how manufactured parts will stand up to conditions such as heat and stress, so they can predict a product's behaviors and performance.

Their research could provide critical information to any company building parts for machines ranging from automobile engines to planes, satellites and spacecraft.

"It's going to revolutionize manufacturing," said Eric Duoss, a materials scientist and engineer at the lab. "It's going to revolutionize it in terms of manufacturing itself. It's about the ability to tailor properties and achieve property combinations that would have been previously impossible to create."

Additive manufacturing, or 3D printing, is the process of creating a three-dimensional object by laying down successive layers of material. The technology has received wide media attention over the past year with 3D printers that build handguns, phone parts and toothbrushes among other things.

Duoss emphasized that the work they're doing won't change the landscape of 3D printing, but it will change the way many companies think about creating their products.

"Hopefully it will be a new way of manufacturing with a lot more possibilities and less cost, time and real estate needed to manufacture things," he said.

Pete Basiliere, a research director at Gartner Inc., said many universities and labs are working on 3D printing, but Lawrence Livermore has the resources to push the technology ahead.

"The key is that this opens the door for designers to create items that were not possible before," Basiliere said. "Engineers and designers would have another set of tools that enable them to be more creative in coming up with a product."click for more stories

New API will simplify Google Drive integration with Android apps, says Google The Google Drive Android API lets apps combine local and cloud-based storage

Google wants more developers to integrate their Android apps with its storage service Drive, and has released a new API that aims to make it easier.

While Drive integration on Android was possible in the past, the new API offers developers better performance and more features, Google developer advocate Magnus Hyttsten said in a blog post on Thursday.

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The native, Java-based Drive Android API is still under development, but developers can now test a preview version that's included in Play Services 4.1.

The API includes the ability to temporarily use storage on the device if it is not connected to a network. The upshot for developers is that they don't have to worry about failed API calls when the phone is offline or experiencing network connectivity problems, according to Hyttsten. Data stored locally will then be automatically transferred to Drive by Android's sync scheduler when connectivity is reestablished.

The API also includes Android user interface components and specialized functionality for interacting with files stored on Drive.

Smartphones and tablets running Android 2.3, also known as Gingerbread, or later versions of the operating system are all compatible with the Drive Android API. The addition of the API will have little effect on the total size of an app, Hyttsten said.

Applications compiled using the preview version will continue to work on devices using future versions of Play services. However, changes to the interface are expected in future releases, which means that developers have to rewrite their apps to take of that.

Online storage is a crowded field, and Google isn't the only company that wants to make its service more useful by opening the door for third party app integration. For example, competitor Dropbox offers a number of APIs for developers of Android apps, as well as other platforms. The ability to save files from third party Android or iOS apps to Dropbox is coming soon, according to Dropbox's website.

This data will self-destruct: Snapchat meets encrypted messaging Snapchat's model of deliberately ephemeral data is becoming a selling feature for commodity messaging and data storage

The only thing better than encrypting messages, it seems, is also setting them up to self-destruct. Cue the "Mission: Impossible" theme.

That's the premise behind a few newly minted messaging services that are touting the ephemerality of your data as a selling point. Send a message (via an encrypted channel, one hopes), and once it's been received and read, all traces of it on the device are deliberately destroyed.

The number of such apps that have appeared in the last year alone is striking. Wickr can send self-destructing text messages or sound files, and it makes a point of how personal information or metadata is either scrubbed, deliberately destroyed, or never collected. Burn Note (launched in 2012) allows notes sent to others to self-destruct and can even be commanded to blow up a message before it's read if you have second thoughts. Confide offers self-destructing messages and claims to guard against attempts to take a screenshot. And OneShar.es lets you create one-time viewable messages, kept in an encrypted store and accessed through a hyperlink; the message is destroyed after it's read.

It's tempting to describe all this as having been inspired by the wild -- and unexpected -- success of Snapchat, with its "shoot and forget" policy toward data retention. Actually, there's no small amount of irony in that Snapchat data is not really destroyed, just allowed to be overwritten -- itself a cautionary tale about how apps like this need to be constructed.

The concept of self-destructing data isn't new. Cryptographic concepts like the one-time pad made it possible to send messages that could never be decrypted, effectively destroying their readability. What does seem new is the presentation: The apps-and-services culture of smartphones and mobile IT make this technology useful to the end user without requiring heavy lifting. The same goes for why encrypted email didn't take off with end-users, since the applications often proved too complicated to set up and use. Now, however, there's renewed interest in secure email as a transparently hosted service, as long as it proves to be truly useful and doesn't just cover half the bases (as Lavabit was accused of being).

Two things need to be guaranteed with any self-destructing data service. The first is properly implemented cryptography, which is hard enough to get right. The other is some way of verifying whether or not the data in question has actually been erased, which is well beyond the capacity of the average end-user.

To that end, if such services come into wide use, any one of them that has a third-party security audit conducted to ensure that deleted really does mean deleted will have a major leg up on the competition. Wickr has a bug bounty in play, but as InfoWorld's Roger Grimes pointed out, it's hard to say such competitions -- as opposed to a more systematic, disinterested audit -- are the best solution.

This story, "This data will self-destruct: Snapchat meets encrypted messaging," was originally published at InfoWorld.com.