Though it no longer grabs many headlines, video piracy remains a major issue for pay-TV services, according to data released last month by consumer research firm Parks Associates. If just 10 percent of pay-TV subscribers should discontinue paying for services by 2023, the loss in revenue to operators could approach $6 billion, according to the firm's report, "Video Piracy: Ecosystem, Risks, and Impact." Account-sharing is a significant part of the problem, even if many consumers don't see it as a form of video piracy. [More...]

A digital forensic analysis conducted by business advisory firm FTI Consulting concludes with "medium to high confidence" that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' smartphone was hacked through a malicious file sent from the WhatsApp account of Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman. The malware was in an MP4 file attached to a WhatsApp message. UN special rapporteurs released technical elements of the report. "It makes you wonder how many other U.S. citizens are being spied on," said tech analyst Rob Enderle. [More...]

Peach OSI's Patriot OS is a vibrant example of how a software developer can create a distribution that stands apart in the crowded Linux OS field of lookalikes. This evolving Linux OS distro, once known as "Peach OSI" but now called "Patriot OS," delivers a Linux computing platform that injects new functionality and offers something different. It is worth checking out, especially if you want to supercharge older computers. Patriot OS is a fully loaded release that exceeds most computer users' expectations. [More...]

It's hard to say with any specificity where the CRM market will move this year, but I'm a pundit so let me try anyway. After more than two decades, CRM has landed in the business landscape and spread out in impressive ways. When CRM emerged in the late 1990s social media didn't exist, and the idea of social networking was confined to a few papers from Harvard and other places. Analytics was a good idea, Bayesian analysis and machine learning and such were interesting ideas -- but we were all constrained by compute power. [More...]