Southwest Airlines on Wednesday evacuated a plane
after a Samsung Galaxy Note 7 began popping and issuing thick smoke.
Samsung last month began replacing Galaxy Note 7s globally, following
reports of several of the devices catching fire or exploding. It blamed
the problem on an "isolated" faulty battery cell issue. The latest
incident reportedly involved a replacement phone.
[More...]
October 6, 2016
Google on Tuesday officially launched Google
Home, its long-awaited wireless hub. Google Home is an interactive
personal assistant and entertainment center that takes full advantage of
the company's deep advantages in Web search, AI and machine learning.
Google's vision is to place a customized version of its Google Assistant
technology into the hands of every customer.
[More...]
October 6, 2016
The source code for Mirai, the malware behind the
botnet that launched a massive attack on the Krebs on Security website
-- the largest DDoS attack on record -- has been released in the wild,
according to Brian Krebs. A hacker who goes by the handle "Anna-senpai,"
apparently because of increased scrutiny from the cybersec industry,
last week announced the release on Hackforums, Krebs said.
[More...]
October 5, 2016
Google on Tuesday unveiled a new smartphone and
home hub that squarely aim at products from market leaders Apple and
Amazon. The company's new branded smartphone, called "Pixel," marks a
departure from past efforts. Up to now, Google's Nexus phones were made
by a variety of manufacturers that sold them under their brands. "Google
is trying to position itself as a complete supplier," said ABI Research
analyst Jeff Orr.
[More...]
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October 5, 2016
Apricity OS is a great, two-pronged Linux distro
that recently reached a milestone that will ensure its continued
success. Apricity's first public beta, which was GNOME-only, was
released more than a year ago. A choice of either the GNOME or Cinnamon
desktops later became available in the monthly development snapshot
releases. Rolling releases provided a pleasant computing experience. [More...] |
October 4, 2016
Federal authorities have been investigating
reports that hackers targeted the mobile phones of a handful of
Democratic Party staffers. The news follows a series of breaches in
recent months that revealed emails and other personal information of
party staffers and other Democratic officials.
The FBI has launched an investigation into the attacks, which may be
linked to Russia.
[More...]
October 3, 2016
Gearing up for this week's CEATEC trade show in
Tokyo, Toyota on Monday announced that its compact-sized Kirobo Mini,
pitched as a "communication partner," will go on sale early next year in
Japan. The Mini is a smaller version of the astronaut robot Kirobo,
which visited the International Space Station in 2013. The Kirobo Mini
is meant to take part in more down-to-earth affairs.
[More...]
October 3, 2016
Leaks about Google's expected family of Pixel
smartphones, reportedly manufactured by HTC, on Monday reached a
crescendo ahead of the company's Tuesday press event. Google is poised
to announce two smartphones, the Pixel and Pixel XL, according to specs
published online. The Pixel XL has a 5.5-inch 2,560 x 1,440 pixel AMOLED
display; the Pixel has a 5-inch 1,920 x 1,080 AMOLED display.
[More...]
October 3, 2016
One of the problems facing the technology
industry right now is the critical lack of strategic thinking. Hedge
fund managers and activist investors increasingly are forcing tactical
decisions that raise stock prices over the short term, largely by
destroying the firm's long-term viability. Most top executives don't
seem to understand they are destroying their companies until it's too
late.
[More...]
October 1, 2016
Roku has refreshed its lineup of media players
with lower prices, so bringing streaming video to every screen in your
home just got a little more accessible. At the lower end, the Roku
Express costs $30. The lineup includes $40, $50, $80 and $100 models
with a variety of feature combinations. At $130, the Roku Ultra,
pictured here, is the feature-loaded top-of-the-line option.
[More...]
September 30, 2016
It's no longer a question whether hackers will
influence the 2016 U.S. elections -- only how much they'll be able to
sway them. Leaked emails already have cost a Democratic Party
chairperson her job, and the FBI last month issued a flash warning that
foreign cyberadversaries had breached two state election databases.
Those two states -- most likely Arizona and Illinois -- aren't alone.
[More...]
September 30, 2016
GE and Bosch Software Innovations have partnered
to jump-start the development of an open source Internet of Things
platform. Open source will encourage greater interoperability and
application development, the companies said. Both firms have sought help
from the Eclipse Foundation to speed up the process. The companies will
create a core IoT stack comprised of open source software.
[More...]
September 29, 2016
Early hands-on previews of
Civilization VI
came out Thursday, and those who had a chance to partake in the
turn-based PC game found that it successfully built on the foundation of
the past versions, while bringing some fresh changes to the experience.
It has been 25 years since the classic debuted to great acclaim, and it
seemed that Firaxis would have to pull out all the stops.
[More...]
September 29, 2016
Social media has sharpened humans' age-old
appetite for public shaming, providing a stage and unlimited seating for
an endless stream of immorality plays. Those who share even the
simplest identifying details about themselves are vulnerable to being
pushed into the glare of the spotlight. Anonymity frees many individuals
of the consequences they might face offline for being abusive to
others.
[More...]
September 28, 2016
Research at Google on Tuesday launched Google
Neural Machine Translation system, now in production with Chinese to
English -- "a notoriously difficult language pair," according to Quoc V.
Le and Mike Schuster, research scientists on the Google Brain Team.
GNMT already is powering the Google Translate mobile and Web apps for 18
million or so Chinese to English translations daily.
[More...]
September 28, 2016
Cisco has swung into action to combat a hacker
group's exploitation of vulnerabilities in its firmware. The group,
known as the "Shadow Brokers," released online malware and other
exploits possibly stolen from the Equation Group, which is believed to
have ties to the U.S. National Security Agency. Cisco earlier this month
disclosed the vulnerability, even though patches were not yet ready.
[More...]
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September 28, 2016
The Black Panther OS is a bare-bones Linux
distribution built around the KDE desktop. The KDE environment itself is
not a minimal component, but how it is integrated within Black Panther
gives you an almost-nothing-there installation until you painstakingly
install system tools and applications, literally piece by piece. Black
Panther OS, originally forked from Mandriva Linux, is now under
independent development in Hungary. [More...] |
September 27, 2016
Federal authorities last week launched a probe of
a suspected cyberattack that targeted the private Gmail account of a
White House staffer. The employee's correspondence turned up on the
DCleaks hacktivist site, which earlier this month posted the private
emails of former Secretary of State Colin Powell. The latest dump
involves the private account of White House staffer Ian Mellul.
[More...]
September 27, 2016
The website of prominent security blogger Brian
Krebs is back online this week after sustaining one of the largest
distributed denial of service attacks in Internet history. DDoS attacks
typically disrupt service at a website by flooding it with junk traffic.
In this case, garbage traffic assaulted Krebs' site at 620 gigabits per
second. By comparison, consumer bandwidth is in the 10-15 megabit per
second range; businesses, 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps.
[More...]
September 27, 2016
Snap, the company formerly known as "Snapchat,"
on Saturday announced sunglasses that take videos through a built-in
camera in the frame. Snap's Spectacles let users take 10-second videos
by tapping a button on the top left-hand corner of the eyeframe. Users
can tap on the record button to record two more 10-second segments, for
videos of up to 30 seconds long in all.
[More...]
September 26, 2016
HPE and Apple are very different companies this
decade, having shifted their models from a strategic customer/innovation
focus to one that's more tactical -- and tied far more closely to
quarterly profit. They are hardly alone, and this unfortunate trend is
not tied to any one industry or any one country. Firms increasingly are
defined not by creative products but by complaining customers.
[More...]
September 26, 2016
Lenovo, which owns Motorola, last week released
the kernel source code for the Moto Z Droid smartphone. The move follows
this summer's posting of the Moto Z Droid Moto Mods Development Kit and
Moto Mods on Github. This is the first kernel source code made
available for the Moto Z device family. Its release seems to be another
step in Lenovo's attempt to get devs to build an ecosystem around it.
[More...]
September 24, 2016
After a bad experience when I was first behind
the wheel as a teenager, I'm only just now learning to drive, more than a
decade later. My partner and I are going through the school together,
and when asked about our dream vehicles in class, she replied that she'd
love a self-driving RV. Her wish eventually might turn true with a
device that grants vehicles more autonomy.
[More...]
September 23, 2016
The Commission on Presidential Debates, which has
run them since 1988, last week announced initiatives with social media,
academics, and media organizations to engage the American public in
substantive conversations before, during and after this year's debates.
The first debate between presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and
Donald Trump is scheduled for Monday at Hofstra University in New York.
[More...]
September 23, 2016
It appears that the Senate is poised to quash a
government shutdown threat from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, in spite of
presidential candidate Donald Trump lending his support to his former
primary opponent's cause. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on
Thursday filed a continuing resolution to fund the government without
any language geared toward blocking the administration's IANA
transition.
[More...]
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