Following Google?s rollout of a new Hangouts service for mobile and Google+, the company is giving Gmail users the opportunity to replace Google Chat with Hangouts integration. But heavy users of Google Voice may want to hold off on the switch, because the new Hangouts feature kills your capability to send SMS messages and make voice calls to landline and mobile numbers from Gmail.

The good news is this may be just a temporary, yet annoying step, although we confirmed it. We've also sought comment from Google, and will update this when we learn more.

Google has offered Hangouts integration in Gmail since last July when the company simply added Hangouts to your Gmail Chat options. You could still call your Gmail contacts from your inbox, make private video calls, and, of course, trade instant messages.

The new version of Hangouts for Gmail eliminates Google Chat and replaces it with Hangouts. This feature supports video calls with up to ten people at once, and lets you trade emojis and send photos.

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A recent intrusion on the computer network of Norwegian telecommunications company Telenor was the result of a large cyberespionage operation of Indian origin that for the past few years has targeted business, government and political organizations from different countries, according to researchers from security firm Norman Shark.

Researchers from Norman analyzed the malware samples used in the attack on Telenor, which started out with spear-phishing emails sent to the company's senior management, after receiving information about them from the Norwegian Computer Emergency Response Team (NorCERT).

During their investigation, the Norman researchers established correlations between that attack's command-and-control infrastructure and other malware and domain names, uncovering what appears to be an ongoing large-scale cyberespionage operation of Indian origin that has been active for almost three years.

The operation was dubbed HangOver and dates back to at least September 2010, Norman said in a report released Monday. The attackers targeted business, government and political organizations, including targets of national security interest from Pakistan, separatist groups from India and companies from different industries from the U.S. and other countries.

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Retina who? Not to be outdone on the display front, Samsung is showing off a 13.3-inch LCD notebook panel with a whopping 3200-by-1800 resolution screen.

Samsung Display will showcase the high-resolution screen during Display Week 2013 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Samsung's panel has a pixel density of 276 pixels per inch. If Samsung or other PC makers bring this display to market, it would easily outshine Apple's MacBook Pro with Retina Display (227 ppi), Toshiba's Kirabook (221 ppi), and Google's Chromebook Pixel (239 ppi).

But that's a big ?if? in the near term, considering that Samsung hasn't actually announced any products that use the display. Last August, the company showed off a prototype 13.3-inch laptop with a 2560-by-1440 resolution panel (pictured above), but that hasn't come to market yet, either.

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Alloystory asked the Laptops forum about speeding up a PC by replacing the hard drive with something faster.

Hard drives are classic bottlenecks, and they definitely slow down computers. But whether you can significantly open up that bottleneck depends on the speed of your current drive, how many available drive bays you have, how much storage space you need, and how much money you're willing to spend.

You effectively have three options (four if you include leaving things as they are). You can buy an SSD, buy a faster hard drive, or set up a RAID. I've already discussed RAIDs in Multiple hard drives working together: All about RAID setups, so I won't cover that here.

[Email your tech questions to answer@pcworld.com or post them on the PCW Answer Line forum.]

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After being accused of a lack of transparency by an independent watchdog, the European Privacy Association (EPA) has confirmed that Google, Microsoft and Yahoo are backers.

The Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO), which works to expose privileged access in E.U. policy making, said in a complaint Thursday that the European Privacy Association is working to represent industry interests in the debate on data protection in Europe, even though it has not listed any corporate backers on the E.U.'s "Transparency Register."

The register, which is operated by the European Parliament and European Commission, requires all signatories to disclose their interests, objectives or aims and, where applicable, the clients they represent.

The EPA is listed in the category of think tanks, research and academic institutions and claims to have only 10 private (non-corporate) members. However, EPA managing director Pietro Paganini confirmed to the IDG News Service that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft are members.

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Bob Metcalfe, Dave Boggs and the rest of the scientists at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in 1973 were a lot like young developers at a Silicon Valley startup today.

"Beards, Birkenstocks, blue jeans, T-shirts," Metcalfe said earlier this month, recalling how he and his colleagues looked and dressed when they went to work at the cluster of modern, low-slung buildings amid suburban fields during its heyday 40 years ago. He was 27 then. "I had a big, red beard," the gray-haired Metcalfe said. When he and his colleagues padded over to PARC's main conference room in their German hippie sandals for a meeting, they flopped down into beanbag chairs, the only seating in the room. And as in a startup, the relaxed setting disguised an intense environment. "We worked around the clock, generally."

The proto-Silicon Valley geeks even had the Internet, once Metcalfe had set up the connection soon after arriving at PARC in June 1972. At that time it was in an early form called Arpanet, over which researchers at PARC and other institutions could log on to other computers over long distances.

But Facebook, Netflix cat videos and even the Web were still many years away. The staples of the modern Internet would require a much faster network. It would start with one fast enough to send memos to the laser printers PARC was inventing. The rest would come later: email, images, voice, music and video, all in little bundles of moving data called packets.

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The continuing NatWest debacle has highlighted the IT systems risks faced by British banks, springing from a lack of investment in back-office staff and a reluctance to abandon legacy systems

(ZDNet UK - IT Strategy)

The Nexus 7 is the first tablet that Google will sell directly to the public, starting at £159 for the quad-core device running the next version of Android, Jelly Bean

(ZDNet UK - Mobile Devices)