As HTC faces shrinking revenue, the smartphone vendor is testing ads over its BlinkFeed media aggregation app, and some users aren’t happy. On Tuesday, HTC said it had begun rolling out an update to its BlinkFeed app that would include advertisements for users in the U.S., the U.K., China and …
Apple and A123 Systems have settled a lawsuit that alleged Apple violated non-compete clauses after it hired five employees from the lithium-ion battery maker. A123 has agreed to dismiss its complaint and waive the right to appeal, according to court documents filed Monday in the U.S. District Court for the …
Windows Phone users who have been testing the upcoming version of Windows 10 for smartphones have a new build to play with. Microsoft just released build 10136 of Windows 10 Mobile to beta testers in the Windows Insider Program. It brings a bunch of improvements to the new mobile OS, …
Florida has a history when it comes to the replacement of U.S. workers with foreign workers on temporary visas. It ought to be a familiar story to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who on Monday announced plans to run for the Republican presidential nomination. In 2002 and 2003, IT workers …
Microsoft is trying to lure more startups onto its Azure cloud services by offering a substantial US$120,000 credit for companies that qualify for its BizSpark Plus program. Starting July 1, qualifying companies will receive $10,000 worth of Azure credits every month for a year, which they can spend on services …
SANTA CLARA — AT&T is considering offering bare metal switches and servers to consumers as customer premises equipment for the carrier’s services. At the Open Network Summit conference here, Andre Fuetsch, AT&T senior vice president, Architecture & Design, said the economics of commodity bare metal switching, as well as the …
The recent NetUSB flaw in routers was written up by almost every tech news organization, yet, much of the story was untold and some of what was written was flat out wrong. Here, and in my next blog, I hope to correct the record, provide additional information and offer some …
Dozens of misspelled domain names that spoof major brands are leading unsuspecting PC users to a questionable tune-up application called SpeedUpKit. Since people are unlikely to seek out the application, its promoters rely partly on people misspelling the domain name for prominent brands to lead them to it. If you …
Amazon on Wednesday will call on the U.S. Congress to embrace automated drone flights and come up with a set of simple, nationwide regulations that will allow its proposed Prime Air service to get off the ground. The company is one of several that is lobbying U.S. lawmakers hard to …
If youre looking to hire a developer, which is more important: her LinkedIn profile or samples of her code on GitHub? Many would argue the latter, which helps to explain why the online code repository is reportedly closing in on a valuation of $2 billion. “GitHub is an interesting company,” …
Etsy is trying out a Kickstarter-like crowdfunding service that, if successful, could help the company grow its business by expanding the number and type of items available for sale on its site. Fund on Etsy, announced Tuesday, comes as Etsy faces pressure to deliver returns to shareholders as a publicly …
A professor not only found redemption at the finals of the DARPA Robotics Challenge earlier this month, he might have found his robot a job at a Las Vegas hotel. The robotics team led by Paul Oh, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, took eighth …
What happens if you combine the best of Wi-Fi and cellular networks? In South Korea, consumers get gigabit-speed service to their phones. Samsung Electronics and mobile operator KT have developed a hybrid technology called GiGA LTE that can bring LTE and Wi-Fi signals together for download speeds as high as …
Two recently disclosed data breaches at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management (OPM) could endanger national security and the lives of federal workers in intelligence or other sensitive jobs, according to some lawmakers. One of the attacks compromised a database containing files of U.S. government workers and job applicants who …
Security remains a big concern for businesses considering cloud storage, but Dropbox hopes to further calm their fears by integrating its service with enterprise mobile management products. Dropbox for Business users will get the new EMM capability via upcoming applications from partners including AirWatch and MobileIron, resulting in safer mobile …
Twitter has moved well beyond its foundation of 140-character messages. The site will now host videos that play automatically in users’ feeds. Advertisers’ videos and those uploaded to Twitter natively, for example through its new video recording tool, will play automatically on the company’s desktop site and in its iOS …
Federal law enforcement officers are investigating whether the St. Louis Cardinals, one of the biggest teams in U.S. Major League Baseball, sought to gain advantage over rival Houston Astros by hacking into its computer network and accessing a key database. If the hacking is confirmed, would be the first known …
Android has an image problem. People think it’s unsafe, that’s it’s dangerous to use. It doesn’t help that its competitors perpetuate that idea. Despite all that Google has done over the years to dispel this myth, Android still gets a bad rap. That kind of publicity isn’t good for business, …
Microsoft Office Online has partnered with cloud storage service Box to remove more barriers between them. The new tie-in allows users to browse their documents in Box, load them directly into Office Online, and save any edits straight back to Box. That way, users don’t have to juggle multiple applications or …
Today, U.K.-based automotive manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover released details about its ongoing research and experimentation with autonomous vehicles, including an app that controls a Ranger Rover from outside the vehicle and a system that automatically performs precise multi-point turns in tight situations. The smartphone app, which is currently just a …
Now that the reunion of Node.js and io.js factions is a done deal, Node.js users can look forward to an upcoming version that converges the two variants of the server-side JavaScript platform. The release will feature capabilities from the ECMAScript 6 specification underlying JavaScript, which are already in io.js, said …
Hacked medical devices can pose direct dangers to patients but also serve as lairs from which malware finds its way into medical facilities’ networks and persists even after initial attacks have been cleaned up, according to a new report. Because these devices haven’t been designed with security as a priority, …
Amazon Web Services has been under fire in recent weeks from a group of activist customers who are calling for the company to be more transparent in its usage of renewable energy. In response, rather than divulge additional details about the source of power for its massive cloud infrastructure, the …
It would have been easy enough for Dunkin’ Donuts to dismiss the Internet phenomenon “Dressgate” as irrelevant to its brand. What, after all, could an online debate over optical illusions and the color of a dress possibly have to do with pastry and coffee? Turns out, plenty. In a shining …
In the future, smart home appliances could work in harmony to make money, or to provide more computing capacity, for their owners. A computer science researcher at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has devised an architecture, called Aura, that would let people harness all the unused computer cycles generated …
The Securities and Exchange Commission today announced charges against an Ohio-based self-directed IRA provider accused of ignoring red flags for accounts with investments that turned out to be fraudulent. The SEC Enforcement Division alleges that Equity Trust Company took an active role in marketing investments offered by Ephren Taylor, who …