Ken Garen, CPA, Co-Founder and President, UBCC

March 16, 2012 6:41 pm Bleak outlook for US newspapers By Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson The headlines about the US newspaper industry have never been so bleak. In recent weeks, LinkedIn, the networking website, and the Council of Economic Advisers have reported that the press is “America’s fastest-shrinking industry”, measured by jobs lost; the Newspaper Association of America has shown that advertising sales have halved since 2005 and are now at 1984’s level; and the Pew Research Center has found that for every digital ad dollar they earned, they lost $7 in print ads. As media from television to billboards bounce back from the recession, newsprint is being left behind. Zenith Optimedia this week predicted that internet advertising would pass newspaper advertising next year around the world – but in the US, where internet penetration is high and newspaper audiences are shrinking, digital will overtake newspapers’ and magazines’ combined ad sales this year, eMarketer estimates. “There...

By  Associated Press ,  Published: March 15 LINCOLN, Neb. — When Karen Williams’ son died in a motorcycle crash, the Oregon woman turned to his Facebook account in hopes of learning more about the young man she had lost. Williams found his password and emailed the company, asking administrators to maintain 22-year-old Loren Williams’ account so she could pore through his posts and comments by his friends. But within two hours, she said, Facebook changed the password, blocking her efforts. “I wanted full and unobstructed access, and they balked at that,” said Williams, recalling her son’s death in 2005. “It was heartbreaking. I was a parent grasping at straws to get anything I could get.” Now lawmakers and attorneys in at least two states are considering proposals that would require Facebook and other social networks to grant access to loved ones when a family member dies, essentially making the site contents part of a person’s digital estate. The issue is growing increa...

By   Ryan Naraine   | March 16, 2012, 6:52am PDT Summary:   The code publication has set off alarm bells in the corridors at Redmond because there are clear signs that Microsoft’s pre-patch vulnerability sharing program has been breached or has suffered a major leak. Chinese hackers have released proof-of-concept code that provides a roadmap to exploit a  dangerous RDP (remote desktop protocol) vulnerability   that was patched by Microsoft earlier this week. The   publication   of the code on a Chinese language forum heightens the urgency to apply Microsoft’s MS12-020 update, which addresses a remote, pre-authentication, network-accessible code execution vulnerability in Microsoft’s implementation of the RDP protocol. It also sets of alarm bells in the corridors at Redmond because there are clear signs that Microsoft’s pre-patch vulnerability sharing program has been breached or has suffered a major leak. [ SEE:  Microsoft makes dari...

SAP aims to become major database software maker Reuters 6:19 p.m. CDT ,  March 15, 2012 (Reuters) - German software maker SAP AG says it intends to become a major provider of database software in a move that would heat up its long-running rivalry with  Oracle Corp , led by Silicon Valley billionaire  Larry Ellison . SAP said it will disclose its plans at an April 10 news conference in downtown San Francisco, not far from Oracle's headquarters in Redwood City, California. The German company is the world's biggest maker of business management software, which includes programs that manage tasks such as accounting, manufacturing and payroll. While Oracle is the No. 2 player in that market, it sells more software, thanks to its leadership in the multi billion-dollar market for databases. "SAP will unveil its unified data management portfolio and demonstrate how we will become a leading database vendor," the company said in a press advisory. SAP acquired  Sybase ,...

By   Chris Kanaracus ,   IDG News Salesforce.com is set to unveil new products for employee performance management and rapid website development on Thursday during the Cloudforce conference in San Francisco. The first announcement concerns a product Salesforce.com gained through the   acquisition of startup Rypple   in December. The deal caught some extra attention, coming shortly after SAP and Oracle's moves to purchase cloud-based human-resources-software vendors SuccessFactors and Taleo, respectively. Salesforce.com had originally said Rypple's software would be rebranded as Successforce, in a seeming jab at SAP, but those plans have changed. It will now be marketed as Salesforce Rypple. In a statement, Salesforce.com said it decided to keep the Rypple brand name due to its ample supply of "goodwill and equity." Rypple's approach to employee performance tracking does away with the notion of periodic reviews, instead applying a social networking milieu that allo...

Twitter removed all but one account using Syrian president's name and half of those using first lady's after complaint guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 March 2012 14.07 EDT Twitter closed down a string of accounts purporting to be authored by the Syrian president and the first lady, emails reveal. A senior aide to Asma al-Assad, Fares Kallas, took issue with the site over 11 accounts. Half of the accounts using the first lady's name and all but one of those using the president's name were closed down. The author of one account, @Syrianpresident, described it as a "parody account" and said it had attracted 2,500 followers. Kallas wrote to Twitter complaining that this and other accounts were "fraudulent Twitter accounts purporting to be the president of Syria and the first lady of Syria and we would like to officially request for these accounts to be removed or suspended. We believe that each of the following are clearly intending to mislead people via im...

Published: March 13 A New York man is suing Apple for allegedly being “misleading and deceptive” about Siri, iPhone 4S’s virtual personal assistant. The Post’s Hayley Tsukayama reports: “For example,” the suit reads, “in many of Apple’s television advertisements, individuals are shown using Siri to make appointments, find restaurants and even learn the guitar chords to classic rock songs or how to tie a tie.” According to the plaintiff, Frank M. Fazio, the commercials have misled him to buy the iPhone 4S to get Siri but that he has had a lot of trouble using the software. The lawsuit claims that Apple’s advertisements are “fiction.” Apple declined to comment on pending litigation. The company has said — as the lawsuit notes — that Siri is a beta product and that the software is evolving. Personally, I haven’t had that much trouble getting Siri to set appointments and alarms for me, though I have trained myself to request that Siri “Search the Web for...” because that’s normally whe...