Intel is introducing new ideas to secure the public cloud, offering a service in which online files can be accessed after users are verified by an authentication scheme including face and voice recognition.

McAfee, a unit of Intel, is adding a product called LiveSafe that will offer 1GB of online storage that can be accessed through biometric authentication. LiveSafe has a Web-based management dashboard, and users can be authenticated through face recognition, voice or by punching in a PIN. LiveSafe also includes antivirus and other security features.

McAfee likens the service to an online vault in the cloud where sensitive documents can be stored. The service can be accessed through tablets, smartphones and PCs, and the authentication schemes vary depending on the device.

Multifactor authentication is critical for files stored in the cloud, McAfee executives said.

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Protecting a single PC from viruses, malware, and other security risks is difficult enough. Now that the typical tech’d-out household contains multiple tablets and smartphones, as well as one or more PCs, securing all of them can quickly become a big hassle. Responding to all this hardware proliferation, McAfee has announced a new tool called LiveSafe that’s designed to be a protective umbrella for pretty much all the devices we may juggle (Windows Phones and Chromebooks being the notable exceptions).

McAfee

LiveSafe has a Web-based central interface for managing all of its functions and protected devices. For Windows PCs and Macs, LiveSafe will offer antivirus, antispyware, and anti-phishing protection, plus a two-way firewall. Identity protection and parental controls will also be available, along with safety ratings for websites.

A few of the most advanced features will be available only if you happen to be buying a new Haswell-based PC or tablet when that hardware finally goes on sale. LiveSafe will leverage the Intel Anti-Theft Technology and Intel Identity Protection Technology (IPT) that’s hard-wired into those new CPUs. The other LiveSafe features for PCs will work regardless of which CPU you’re running.

For supported mobile devices, LiveSafe will provide antivirus protection, plus data backup and restoration. You’ll also be able to locate, lock, and wipe a lost or stolen mobile device. In addition, Android devices will get Web and app protection, while both Android and BlackBerry devices will have a filtering tool for phone calls and SMS text messages.

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Hackers are finding it pays to call ahead before sending malware-laden email.

Symantec has seen what it describes as a sophisticated social engineering campaign aimed at French-speaking accounting and finance department employees. The victim is called and asked in French if they can process an invoice sent by email.

The style of attack, known as “spear phishing,” has been used against French organizations, including subsidiaries in Romania and Luxembourg.

“There is evidence to suggest that these attacks began as early as February 2013, however, it was only more recently in April that phone calls were being placed prior to sending the victim the phishing email,” Symantec wrote on its blog.

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Twitter has acquired Lucky Sort, a data analytics company, in a move that could give the social network deeper insights into its users’ tweets and how to best place advertisements on its site.

Lucky Sort’s technology is designed to “make huge document sets easier to analyze, summarize and visualize by building elegant and user friendly tools for text analysis,” Lucky Sort CEO Noah Pepper said Monday in a post on the company’s website.

Twitter didn’t say how it plans to make use of the technology, though tools that help it to analyze what users are saying on its site could clearly be useful to the company.

“Welcome aboard,” was all Twitter had to say about the deal, and terms of the acquisition weren’t disclosed.

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It’s been about six weeks since the release of Firefox 20, so assuming Mozilla stays on its usual schedule, Firefox 21 will make its debut on Tuesday.

This next version of the popular open source browser has already attracted attention for the changes brought in early versions to Firefox’s “Do Not Track” capabilities, but those are by no means the only interesting additions we’ll see.

Several changes and new features are slated to arrive in the final version of Firefox 21, in fact. Here’s a quick rundown of some of the highlights you can expect to find.

1. Three ‘Do Not Track’ options

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It looks like Groupon is adding yet another mobile payments solution to the already crowded space that includes its own Groupon Merchants app for iPhone and Android. as well as competitors such as Square and PayPal Here.

An iPad app called Groupon POS earlier today briefly landed in the iTunes store before it disappeared. Now if you click on a link pointing to it from various media outlets you’ll only receive a message that says “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the U.S. store.”

What’s behind its removal is anyone’s guess (a horrible name, perhaps?) and Groupon hasn’t officially announced it. Before it went missing, the Groupon POS app description said it “works for a wide variety of merchants from cafes and delis, to salons, spas and florists,” reported TechCrunch, which said it looked like a more simple and generalized version of Breadcrumb, a restaurant-centered iPad payments solution Groupon acquired last year.

You can expect a Groupon app for tablets to reappear because of the kind of traction Groupon is getting in mobile. In a recent earnings report the company said that 45 percent of North American transactions occurred on mobile devices, compared with only 30 percent a year earlier.

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Last week, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer was interviewed at the Wired Business Conference on a range of topics, but the question on everyone’s mind (including interviewer Steven Levy) was her impossibly unpopular edict against telecommuting.

I surely don’t have to rehash what happened when Mayer enacted the New Law against working from home. It was eventually reported that she allegedly caught wind of it when she determined people weren’t logged into the company VPN for enough hours of the day to be “working.” The backlash has sparked a furious debate on the merits of WFH, and whether Mayer has it right or is simply another victim of CEO paranoia, convinced her employees are “ripping her off” by slacking when they should be grinding out work at their desks.

Last week Mayer attempted to clarify her position, arguing that it had been misinterpreted and that Yahoos can still work from home, provided it is at night or on the weekend. (Hey, thanks!) She then gave an example of how a new mobile app called Yahoo Weather (it tells you the weather) came to be. Yahoo’s newly collaborative environment, she said, made it possible for someone from the Weather team and someone from the Flickr team to encounter one another serendipitously on the Yahoo campus. And that’s the magic of how the app came to be.

But the most important thing Mayer said is that she isn’t particularly against telecommuting, just that it is “not right for us, right now.” She has a point. Telecommuting doesn’t work for 100 percent of companies 100 percent of the time, but the positioning is a little ironic given Mayer’s earlier decisions as CEO. As one of her first orders of business last year, she gave every employee a new smartphone. In her announcement to staff, she explained the generosity saying, “We’d like our employees to have devices similar to our users, so we can think and work as the majority of our users do.”

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Traditionally, Google’s cornucopia of services were all solitary islands in Sergey Brin’s vast online sea—completely solitary, and completely cut off from one another. All that changed when the company instituted its new (and controversial) privacy policy, turning those islands of info into an interconnected web of sharing virtually overnight.

Privacy buffs squawked, as they should’ve, but the collective hand-holding enabled some killer new perks that otherwise wouldn’t have happened. Witness: The oh-so-awesome Google Now. And Monday, Google announced that it’s doing away with its previous mish-mash of cloud storage options across its major services to give users a great big, unified data dumping ground.

Before, Gmail users were given 10GB of free storage space, which was kept wholly separate from the 5GB of cloud storage handed out to Google Drive users. Now, you’ll get a flat 15GB of free storage, and you can fill it up with whatever you’d like, in whatever proportions you’d like. (Google Apps users get 30GB.)The company plans on rolling out a new storage settings visualization tool to help you keep tabs on which services are sucking up your digital data allotment.

Google

Google cuts heavy Google-ites a big break, too. Any documents, slideshows, or presentations created using Google Docs won’t count against your storage limits, nor will any uploaded Google+ photos measuring 2048-by-2048 pixels or smaller. If that sounds like your preferred use case, congratulations! You basically just received a gratisGmail storage bump.

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Computers just aren’t selling like they used to, and many critics, analysts, and longtime Windows users point the blame finger at one culprit in particular: Windows 8. Nobody’s using Windows 8, they say. It’s worse than New Coke, they say. PC shipments are cratering and it’s all Windows 8′s fault, they say.

But are they right?

Last Tuesday, Microsoft countered the doom-and-gloom by announcing that it has sold 100 million Windows 8 licenses to date. That rate puts the company’s newest OS on par with Windows 7 at the same point in its lifecycle, and Windows 7 is the most widely used PC operating system in the world.

But if global PC shipments are in free fall—IDC called the 14 percent drop in the first quarter the steepest single-quarter decline ever—how can Microsoft keep selling licenses like it’s the good ol’ days of Windows 7?

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