Growth in sales of enterprise disk storage slowed in the third quarter as the industry returned to normal patterns after recovering from the recession, according...
Apparently the Asus Transformer Prime is in such high demand that Amazon has had to cancel some of the pre-orders for the tablet, which hits shelves December 19.
A Kickstarter project hopes to transform your iPod and iPhone into a Walkman for ultimate retro appeal.
Facebook eyes an IPO, HP plans to give up its spot as top PC producer, far fewer are yearning for Windows 8 tablets, and more.
I expected more from the YouTube redesign--namely, real Channels, the ability to view passively, and longer videos.
Facebook is expanding its operations in the Big Apple, announcing on Friday plans to open an engineering office in New York in 2012.
Intel on Friday said it has readied Android 4.0 for smartphones and tablets based on its upcoming Atom processor code-named Medfield, raising the possibility of...
A group of U.S. lawmakers has proposed an alternative to the controversial copyright enforcement legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act, with the draft proposal...
RIM is taking a $485 million charge to write off its inventory of unsold BlackBerry PlayBooks. The RIM tablet has not lived up to expectations, and is probably on its way to the grave.
Consumer Watchdog has called for a U.S. government investigation of Carrier IQ, the maker of tracking software for mobile phones, and its users.
This new peer-to-peer search engine doesn't aim to 'out-Google' the big guys, its supporters say. Rather, its decentralized process seeks to free information from a central point of control.
3D printing goes manual with this unique printing system that requires you to lay down the material by hand.
The U.S. House of Representatives Intelligence Committee has approved a recently introduced bill that would allow greater cyberthreat information sharing between...
As SaaS (software as a service) gains in maturity and popularity, enterprise IT buyers will have to grapple with a new set of questions and considerations when...
Is there any bigger hassle than tracking your expenses? This invaluable app makes it easy to capture, manage, and file your receipts.
In the hopes of reducing the complexity of making data calls over the Web, eBay has launched a programming language, called ql.io, which bundles separate API...
A new report from McAfee points to flaws in Android's approach to security, now leaving it the most vulnerable of mobile operating systems.
Tech stocks looked strong Friday morning on the back of a week of upbeat surveys on small business and online spending, positive news about enterprise hardware...
An Illinois HTC phone customer seeks class-action status against Carrier IQ and the handset maker for allegedly intercepting private electronic communications.
Three Minecrafters recreate Super Mario Land in Minecraft frame-by-frame using 18-million painstakingly placed blocks.
Reports say Microsoft will begin beta-testing the operating system update in the first quarter, which means products are likely by the fall.
A 30-year old international treaty covering data protection is undergoing a partial rewrite to reflect new concerns in the age of the Internet.
Enterprise social collaboration software, which offer Facebook and Twitter-like capabilities adapted for workplaces, will grow strongly in the coming years...
Google has extended its Safe Browsing alerts for network administrators to include domains that host malware or exploits in addition to compromised websites and...
Catch a whiff of gingerbread, visit the Android spaceship, try a giant touchscreen, and -- oh, yeah -- shop at Androidland in Oz.
A free Android app promises to scan your phone for traces of the controversial Carrier IQ mobile diagnostics program.
Microsoft is still debating, but the apparent winning argument is that a pure Metro tablet is a better competitor to the iPad.
Microsoft's next-in-series flight simulation game (or is it a sim?) is taking applications for beta testing.
There are many options for viewing movies and TV from the cloud, unfortunately many of them require that I pay for other services I may not want or need.
SpectrumCo, a joint venture of Comcast, Time Warner Cable and Bright House, will sell mobile spectrum licenses covering 259 million U.S residents to Verizon.
Handset makers and carriers scramble to explain the tracking software on some devices, while congress demands details.
An unpatched Yahoo Messenger vulnerability that allows attackers to change people's status messages and possibly perform other unauthorized actions.
The popular video sharing site now has an easier, more intuitive interface that highlights its new Channels feature.
Opera Software will work with MediaTek, a designer of software and chipsets for low-end phones, on integrating the Norwegian company's Mini browser on feature...
Concern over the laxity of United States data protection laws has created a new market for Europe-based cloud computing services.
An Australian court has extended the sales ban on Samsung Electronics' Galaxy Tab 10.1, giving Apple more time to tell why its sale should be halted.
Beijing aims to create more free Wi-Fi hotspots across major public areas in the city, including shopping centers and subway stations as part of a city...
Electronic Arts is continuing to expand its presence in the social gaming business with the acquisition of KlickNation, the video games company said Thursday.
Hard-drive maker Western Digital has resumed the partial production of hard drives in Thailand, but warns that some operations are still under water.
The flap over the reported water utility hack in Illinois raises the question: Is the reporting system that the U.S. has set up to identify cyberattacks on critical infrastructure broken and in need of re-thinking?
We've got oddball home appliances on the brain in this installment of GeekBytes. Don't believe us? Click the headline to see what we mean.
Verizon Wireless said Thursday it doesn't add to its phones any software from Carrier IQ, the company that has come under fire in the past few days for what some...
Despite ominous predictions about how cloud computing will eviscerate IT departments, 2012 is shaping up to be a great year for IT careers.
A quick hack can give you early access to Google's newest feature.
Over a year after launch, NASA's mission that studied the effects of orbital decay comes to an end.
You can get an Ultrabook on the cheap...in a year or so.
A secret piece of software might be tracking your every move if you own an Android, Blackberry, or Nokia smartphone, a security researcher discovered recently.
Research firm Forrester has conducted a survey that supposedly reveals that consumer interest in Windows-based tablets–once quite high–is now tanking.
The fact that the voice-recognition assistant on the iPhone 4S can't tell you where to find an abortion clinic is a glitch, Apple says.
Maybe you're a college student. Maybe you're one of America's vast numbers of un- and under-employed workers. Maybe you're simply frugal.
DrXym writes "GNOME Shell has been criticized for certain shortcomings when compared to GNOME 2.x. Chief amongst them was that 2.x offered panel applets whereas 3.x is seemingly lacking any such functionality. What most people don't know is that GNOME Shell has a rich extension framework similar to Mozilla Firefox add-ons. Now, the official site to install extensions has gone live. So if you yearn for an application menu, or a dock, or a status monitor, then head on over. Extensions can be installed with a few clicks and removed just as easily."
jfruhlinger writes "Most Slashdotters — even those living in democratic countries — would probably be unsurprised to know that their governments are spying on them. But most people are not aware of how complicit security vendors, who publicly work to protect the public from such electronic eavesdropping, are complicit in such monitoring. All this and more is revealed in the latest Wikieaks document dump, the Spy Files."
An anonymous reader writes "Cognitive scientists at Simon Fraser University and UCSD are beginning to use StarCraft 2 replays to study the development of expertise and the cognitive mechanisms of multitasking. Unlike similar expertise studies in chess that consider roughly a dozen players, these studies include thousands of players of all skill levels — providing an unprecedented amount of data on how players move from 'chumps to champions.'"
seeread writes "I discovered how to hack into and secure user accounts of a rising mobile payment start-up. Account info includes credit card details and usage. The company has big name financial backing and an IRL presence, but very few in-house developers, and they don't seem terribly concerned about security. Good samaritan that I am for now, I sent them an e-mail explaining the lapse on their part, but the responses I have received thus far are confused, aloof and unconvinced. So, I am wondering: what is the appropriate next step? Should I do a proof of concept? Should I go to the investors, or should I post about it somewhere? The representatives haven't been too receptive, despite the fact that their brand seems to be at risk, not to mention all of those users' credit cards. I almost feel like it's my responsibility to blow them out of the water if they have made it this far while compromising such trusted data. And although I would love to be in the paper, this hack is just too easy for it to be respectable, though I am sure the FBI could still be interested in all those credit card numbers."
New submitter ananyo writes "A pair of diamond crystals has been linked by quantum entanglement — one of the first times that objects visible to the naked eye have been placed in a connected quantum state. 'This means that a vibration in the crystals could not be meaningfully assigned to one or other of them: both crystals were simultaneously vibrating and not vibrating (abstract). Quantum entanglement — interdependence of quantum states between particles not in physical contact — has been well established between quantum particles such as atoms at ultra-cold temperatures. But like most quantum effects, it doesn't tend to survive either at room temperature or in objects large enough to see with the naked eye.'"
adeelarshad82 writes "Chemistry's periodic table can soon welcome livermorium and flerovium, two newly named elements, which were announced Thursday (Dec. 1) by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry. The new names will undergo a five-month public comment period before the official paperwork gets processed and they show up on the table. Three other new elements just recently finished this process, filling in the 110, 111 and 112 spots."
Harperdog writes "Politico has a piece on how the Patriot Act is interfering with U.S. firms trying to do business overseas in the area of cloud computing. Here's a quote: 'The Sept. 11-era law was supposed to help the intelligence community gather data on suspected terrorists. But competitors overseas are using it as a way to discourage foreign countries from signing on with U.S. cloud computing providers like Google and Microsoft: Put your data on a U.S.-based cloud, they warn, and you may just put it in the hands of the U.S. government.'"
An anonymous reader writes "The NY Times reports, 'The field of genomics is caught in a data deluge. DNA sequencing is becoming faster and cheaper at a pace far outstripping Moore's law. The result is that the ability to determine DNA sequences is starting to outrun the ability of researchers to store, transmit and especially to analyze the data. Now, it costs more to analyze a genome than to sequence a genome. There is now so much data, researchers cannot keep it all.' One researcher says, 'We are going to have to come up with really clever ways to throw away data so we can see new stuff.'"
riverat1 writes "After AT&T dropped the Multics project in March of 1969, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs continued to work on the project, through a combination of discarded equipment and subterfuge, eventually writing the first programming manual for System I in November 1971. A paper published in 1974 in the Communications of the ACM on Unix brought a flurry of requests for copies. Since AT&T was restricted from selling products not directly related to telephones or telecommunications, they released it to anyone who asked for a nominal license fee. At conferences they displayed the policy on a slide saying, 'No advertising, no support, no bug fixes, payment in advance.' From that grew an ecosystem of users supporting users much like the Linux community. The rest is history."
helix2301 writes "Napster was one of the earliest and most popular P2P music-sharing services. After a long legal battle that saw Napster slowly gutted in the face of infringement lawsuits, it was reinvented as a legitimate music download service. The resurrected Napster is now being shut down. Rhapsody has completed its purchase of Napster and will be absorbing its subscribers and assets."
Hugh Pickens writes "Economics trumps the environment. The emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and negotiators are fighting to keep UN climate talks on track while efforts to save the Euro push the struggle to save the planet down the priority list. In the United States, seen as the biggest single obstacle to a new global climate deal, academic opinion says an 'iron law' means economics trumps the environment in times of crisis. Meanwhile, some leading voices on climate science have suggested the Kyoto Protocol be put to pasture, since clinging to hopes of a renewal of that agreement does more harm than good in achieving meaningful dialogue on how to fight climate change. When the agreement was negotiated in the 1990s, the world was more clearly divided into 'rich and poor' countries. However, China and India have seen unexpectedly strong economic growth since then, and currently make up 58 per cent of global emissions. 'Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that countries such as Japan, Canada and Russia adamantly refuse to assume new binding targets unless the other major economies at present outside Kyoto's reach — most notably, the United States and China — do so as well,' writes Elliot Diringer, executive vice-president of the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. 'And for now, the odds of that happening are nil.'"
redletterdave writes with news that Google Chrome is in the process of surpassing Firefox to become the second most popular web browser. Pinpointing the exact time of the change is difficult, of course, since different analytics firms collect slightly different data. The current crop of media reports were triggered by data from StatCounter, which shows Chrome at 25.69% and Firefox at 25.23% for November. Data from Net Applications shows Firefox still holding a 4% lead, but the trends suggest it will evaporate within a few months.
Pierre Bezukhov writes "Scientists from the California Institute of Technology have come up with a gene therapy approach that has proven effective in protecting mice (with humanized immune systems) against HIV infections. They used a genetically altered virus to infect muscles cells and deliver DNA codes of potent antibodies isolated from the blood of human HIV victims (abstract). The muscle cells then began to manufacture the antibodies in quantities that proved 'completely protective' against HIV infection. By contrast, traditional vaccines have not worked against HIV, as scientists have failed to find a molecule that induces the immune system to produce enough potent antibodies. The difficulties stem from the fact that HIV disguises some of its external structures from the antibodies."