When you check into Japan’s newest hotel, a mechanized velociraptor in a bellhop cap greets you at the front desk. “Thank you for your visitors,” it says in awkward English, as it gesticulates with its alarming claws and fangs. If it’s too off-putting, the other clerks, a female android in …
U.S. banks are steadily shipping more secure chip-embedded credit and debit cards to consumers, but industry attention is also focused on whether merchants have installed updated payment terminals to accept the new cards. Big retailers like WalMart have spent the last year installing expensive in-store payment terminals that will accept …
SANTA CLARA, CALIF. — Widespread iPhone and iPad adoption is influencing broader use of Apple products in the enterprise, namely desktops and laptops. One enterprise seeing this is University of Nevada at Reno, where academic freedom at the research university also means the freedom to choose an OS. This is …
Компания Samsung официально сообщила о выпуске смартфона Galaxy A8 на территории Китая. Стоит напомнить, что новинка оборудована 5.7-дюймовым дисплеем Super AMOLED с разрешением 1920 × 1080 точек и построена на базе 64-битного мобильного процессора с восемью вычислительными ядрами Qualcomm Snapdragon 615. Объем оперативной памяти равен 2 Гб, в то время как …
Once regarded as a freewheeling discussion forum, Reddit is now struggling with creating rules to curb offensive and obscene content on the site, risking alienating a number of users, some of them concerned about protecting freedom of speech on the site. Reddit’s new CEO Steve Huffman on Tuesday called for …
Dashlane’s password manager now taps into the fingerprint scanner on Samsung devices for quick data entry to apps and websites. The new feature works with the Galaxy S5, S6, S6 Edge, Note 4, and Note Edge. I activated the feature on my Galaxy Note 4 with relative ease by following the …
Google is getting ready to roll out its own Bluetooth-based beacon technology, letting apps and web services pinpoint your exact location. Dubbed Eddystone (apparently after a U.K. lighthouse), the project is a cross-platform answer to Apple’s iBeacon technology that arrived in 2013. It allows small beacon devices to detect when …
Moto Maker is a nice differentiator for the Moto X; you can customize many aspects of how your phone looks. According to prolific leaker Evan Blass the next version of the Moto G, Motorola’s mid-range device, will get to join the party. He offered the following screenshot on Twitter. Evan Blass …
Windows Phone isn’t going away. You might think it was doomed, following Microsoft’s reorganization of its phone business just days ago, especially after Microsoft wrote down the value of the business. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put those fears to rest, however, in an interview with ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley. Nadella has emphasized, time …
If you’re among the long-term Grooveshark users still mourning that controversial streaming service’s demise—along with the elaborate playlists you’d stored with it—you’ll be happy to hear about StreamSquid. This new streaming-music service is just as free as Grooveshark, which was recently sued out of existence. The difference is that StreamSquid’s …
It’s an all-too-common dilemma in today’s modern world: What do you do when you’re watching a livestream on your phone but need to switch to a different app? Twitch thinks it has a solution by borrowing an idea from TV—picture-in-picture. The latest update to Twitch for Android features a new “Pop-Out …
Uber has reached a confidential settlement with the family of a girl who was hit and killed by an Uber driver. In downtown San Francisco on New Year’s Eve of 2013, an Uber driver struck six-year-old Sophia Liu, killing her. The driver also hit her mother and brother. In a …
Google has expanded support for Windows workloads running on its cloud, a move that the company hopes will better position its Google Cloud Platform to court enterprise customers. Google is looking to catch up with Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure in the Infrastructure-as-a-Service market, according to researchers. Supporting Windows …
In 1995, the top-grossing film in the U.S. was Batman Forever. (Val Kilmer as Batman, Jim Carrey as the Riddler, Tommy Lee Jones as Two-Face. Yeah.) The L.A. Rams were moving back to St. Louis, and Michael Jordan was moving back to the Bulls. Violence was rife in the Balkans. …
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is delivering amazing images of Pluto, but receiving them from 3 billion miles (4.8 billion kilometers) away is no easy feat. The strength of the radio signals, the time it takes the signal to travel back and forth and the speed of the data flow all …
Oculus VR came under fire last week after its CEO said the company will fund development of about two dozen “Oculus-exclusive” games for its virtual reality headset. The company has now responded to the complaints, saying some of those games may eventually come to other VR platforms. The spat started …
ZTE isn’t exactly what one would call a household name in the U.S., although it has made a number of inroads into the pre-paid phone market. The company is now attempting to make itself more visible by offering a higher-end device with its new flagship phone Axon, which it introduced …
A Vietnamese man linked to a data breach of 200 million personal records at a subsidiary of credit monitoring firm Experian has been sentenced to 13 years in prison, the U.S. Department of Justice said. Hieu Minh Ngo, 25, was sentenced Tuesday on charges including wire fraud and identity fraud …
I’ve ventured into new territory lately: cyber-insurance. Here’s why. Hotel chains. Zoo gift shops. Amusement parks. Our own U.S. government’s Office of Personnel Management. Security breaches continue to abound, apparently undiminished. And they are all over the news, which is causing me no end of headaches at work (especially with …
A reported buyout attempt by China’s largest computer chip maker of U.S. based Micron Technology isn’t likely to succeed, according to industry analysts. Micron is one of the top five semiconductor makers in the world, and it has a lot to offer Tsinghua Unigroup, which has reportedly bid $23 billion …
The founder of the Italian surveillance software company that suffered a disastrous data breach last week sought to reassure clients on Tuesday about the gravity of the intrusion, insisting that Hacking Team’s anti-terrorism work has not been jeopardized. “If the client has followed our instructions there are no problems for …
A U.S. appeals court should immediately shut down the National Security Agency’s bulk collection of domestic telephone records because the practice is illegal, the American Civil Liberties Union said. The ACLU, in a request for an injunction filed Tuesday, asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit to …
Facebook is reportedly working on a virtual assistant for its Messenger app. According to a report in The Information, the world’s largest social network is working on the virtual assistant, which has been internally dubbed Moneypenny, presumably after the fictional secretary in the James Bond books and movies. Facebook is …
Looking for some Black Friday kind of deals in the middle of July? If you are, this is your week. Online retailer Amazon.com has dubbed Wednesday as “Amazon Prime Day,” to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the website. That means any of the company’s Prime users will have access to …
The Securities and Exchange Commission today charged 15 individuals and 19 entities for their roles in alleged schemes to manipulate the trading of microcap stocks. The 34 defendants include six firms alleged to have acted as unregistered broker-dealers catering to customers who sought to conceal their stock ownership and manipulate …
Adobe today patched Flash Player to quash a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities found in the massive cache of documents hackers stole from the Hacking Team surveillance company. Earlier Tuesday, Google patched its Chrome browser with an updated version of Flash, signaling that Adobe would soon follow suit. But Microsoft dropped …