Samsung says it's working “as quickly as possible” to fix an exploit in some of its Android phones, which could allow hackers to gain total control over the device. was first reported on the XDA Developers forums on Saturday, and attracted lots of attention from the tech press. It allows malicious apps to control all physical memory on the device, thereby allowing for remote wipes, access to user data and other malicious activities. , that includes the Galaxy S II on Sprint, Galaxy Tab 2, Galaxy Note 10.1 and certain Galaxy Player models. International versions of the Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Note II are affected, as well as U.S. versions of the Galaxy Note II, but U.S. versions of the Galaxy S III are not affected. , Samsung says it's aware of the issue and is working on a software update to fix it. “Samsung will continue to closely monitor the situation until the software fix has been made available to all affected mobile devices,” the company said.
I've written about this subject in years past, but it's so important I feel obligated to repeat myself for those who might have missed it. Your laptop may be choking to death. You see, like desktops, laptops can suck up lots of dust. And because everything in a laptop is packed together so tightly, dust is even more dangerous. When the cooling fans have to run constantly, it's just a matter of time before the machine start to overheat. When that happens, it may lock up. It may damage system components. And it might even kick the bucket. Fortunately, as I've mentioned before, this is easy to fix. All you need is a small screwdriver and a can of compressed air (or an air compressor—though tread lightly with that, as noted below).
Lately it seems like software developers are falling all over themselves to take the hassles out of conference calls. . , a seriously impressive service that lets you set up and host conference calls right from your smartphone. It's packed with clever features, and the basic service is free—but it also suffers from an almost tragic flaw. . You can sign up for service via an existing Google, Facebook, or LinkedIn account, or just go the old e-mail address/password route. Either way, you'll need to allow access to your smartphone contact list.
You have all of these digital photos stashed away in the corners of your hard drive. They'd make a lovely gift or year-end memento. You could print them out and slide them into a photo album—but that's so 2002, and we're down to the wire for holiday shipping as is. Why not create a slick online slideshow instead? There are several software programs and Web services that can help. Here are a few of our favorites. is as fun and friendly as the name suggests. It offers an easy way to create animated slideshows that are heavy on background art and animations, and also includes templates for creating electronic greeting cards, photo albums, and scrapbooks, too. Like most of the applications and services tested for this article, Smilebox calls attention to its free offering. All you need to do in order to use Smilebox is sign up for a free account with your email address. But, like all of the applications and services we tested, Smilebox's free offering is very limited, allowing you to do little more than create and share very simple slideshows. If you'd like to do anything more—and "more" includes accessing many of the most popular slideshow templates, such as the only plain one I could find—you need to pay $40 a year to join Club Smilebox. Doing so gets you access to all of its templates, as well as the ability to share ad-free slideshows in full screen, add music to your slideshows, and store your creations. Smilebox displays your uploaded photos in a column on the left of the screen. It arranges the photos to look like they've been scattered on a table, which is cool, but not as useful as if they were laid out in neat order. And when you add a photo to a slide, it's not removed from the pile, which can be confusing if you're working with a lot of photos.
For the second day in a row, Microsoft on Tuesday pitched one of its products to customers abandoned by arch-rival Google. In an attempt to woo users of Google Apps, Microsoft yesterday tripled the length of its Office 365 Small Business free trial from 30 to 90 days. The deal—pegged "P1" in Microsoft's of subscription plans—offers cloud-based email, shared calendars and Web-based Office app access to up to 10 employees. Normally, P1 costs $72 per user per year. Although Tony Tai, an Office 365 product marketing manager who announced the extended trial in a , did not make the target audience explicit, he referenced firms what had ditched Google Apps and replaced it with Office 365.
Nintendo will finally join the living room entertainment wars in earnest on Thursday with TVii, a service for its new Wii U game console. Nintendo had originally planned to launch TVii alongside the Wii U on November 18 but pushed the release date back, promising to launch the service in December. TVii provides a single interface for cable or satellite television and Web-based video services, using the Wii U GamePad as a universal remote. Users can search across all their video sources for a particular show, search by genre, access their favorite programs or get recommendations on what to watch. Once the user selects a show, the Wii U GamePad handles all the work, using its built-in IR blaster to select the appropriate input or change channels. TVii requires no extra equipment, and users define their cable package's channel lineup and sign into their Internet video services during the setup process.
LG has refined its Magic Remote controller with language recognition so that you can talk to your smart TV remote similar to Siri, the voice assistant feature on iOS. The remote will be compatible will LG’s 2013 range of smart TVs, Blu-ray players and cinema systems, and will come bundled with the company’s top of the line TVs, while a second slightly larger version without the backlit buttons will be included with the standard TV range. can do quite a few tricks, with the headline feature being language recognition. The remote has a microphone button. Once you press it you hold the remote a few inches from your mouth and tell it what you’re looking for. Previous version of the remote also featured voice controls but they were much more basic, as you had to use individual search queries to navigate between items. The new version understands natural language, according to LG. The company says the software will be able to understand when you ask the remote to “show Gangnam-style videos” and other such commands.
NEC's new high-end server contains swappable battery packs, intended to provide backup power without the need for an external uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in data centers. The new rack-mounted server is part of NEC's main "Express5800" line. The company said the internal batteries will cut power use, outlast traditional UPS systems and allow for more compact data centers. The rack-mountable server can hold up to two battery packs, although it ships with only one. When both are used, they can deliver 100 watts for 15 minutes and 30 seconds, or six minutes and 40 seconds with a single battery. The dual setup can provide power for 3 minutes and 40 seconds when the server is maxed out at 311 watts.
Penguin Group has become the latest book publisher to reach a settlement with the U.S. Department of Justice in a lawsuit that alleges that Apple and five publishers had conspired to raise ebook prices. Under the proposed settlement agreement filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Penguin will terminate its agreements with Apple and other ebooks retailers and will be prohibited for two years from entering into new agreements that constrain retailers’ ability to offer discounts or other promotions to consumers to encourage the sale of Penguin’s ebooks, the DOJ said on Tuesday. The DOJ filed in April an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five large publishers, accusing the companies of working together to raise prices of ebooks, in retaliation for competitor Amazon.com pricing most ebooks at $9.99 beginning in late 2007. The publishers allegedly teamed up with Apple to counter Amazon’s strategy to lower substantially the prices of newly released and best-selling ebooks to $9.99, a price that the defendant publishers saw as a challenge to their traditional business model, the DOJ said in its complaint in April. In early 2010, the defendant publishers agreed to shift to a new pricing model called the agency model, where they set the prices for ebooks, instead of retailers, the DOJ alleged.
among us, however, the holidays are a time to break out miles of electrical wiring, string up tens of thousands of lights, jump on one's PC, and spend weeks programming a light show—pulsing to the beat of the hippest pop song of the year, of course. PCWorld salutes the people who went all-out this holiday season, slaving over LEDs and Light-O-Rama controller boxes for hundreds of hours. Here are some of the most awesome holiday light shows of 2012. is the model of dedication to the holiday spirit. He specifically purchased an isolated house with no neighbors across the street just so he could create light shows of eye-popping intensity. And Storms even paid professionals to put up lights more than 15 feet off the ground.
We reported Friday of a three-hour hearing in San Francisco federal court in which the Justice Department repeatedly invoked the state secrets privilege and demanded U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White dismiss a lawsuit accusing the government of siphoning Americans' electronic communications from willing telecoms and funneling them to the National Security Agency without warrants. As it turns out, the San Francisco federal court produced two, roughly 90-minute videos of the hearing as part of a pilot project. So in the holiday spirit of things, we are posting the videos here so they may be enjoyed as a reason to drink. With friends and family, imbibe your beverage of choice every time any of the courtroom participants utters "state secrets."
Images make up roughly 60 percent of the data downloaded with the average webpage. It's great that browser makers have been focused on improving JavaScript, but if we really want to speed up the web it's time to tackle images as well.
A group of tech heavyweights, including Apple, Google and Facebook, have joined forces to purchase approximately 1,100 digital imaging and processing patents from Eastman Kodak for $525 million.
Continental has earned its infinity sticker. The parts and systems supplier for nearly every automaker on the planet has become the first company outside of Google to get DMV approval to test autonomous cars in Nevada.
The Transportation Security Administration is deciding to determine, once and for all, whether the so-called "nude" body scanners being deployed at airports nationwide are nuking passengers at unacceptable radiation levels. The TSA is commissioning the National Academy of Sciences -- a private, non-profit filled with engineer and science scholars -- to set the record straight. Too bad millions of passengers have already been screened by them.
Darpa's headless robotic mule now knows some new tricks. Like obeying soldiers' voice commands, and figuring out its own paths to haul gear.
Twitter released a long-promised feature today, the ability to download all of your tweets. Now you can see every banal thing you?ve ever written, from the beginning of time. Or at least since you signed up for Twitter.
Of all the proposed fixes for embassy security in the wake of the Benghazi disaster, the need for "non-lethal" technologies endorsed by the independent commission into Benghazi is the most exotic.
Have a blog, but don't understand the finer points of good web typography? No problem. Thanks to developer Tommi Kaikkonen's interactive guide to blog typography you'll be an expert in no time. Your readers will thank you for it.
From a nasty foodborne illness sprang a family's desire to learn more about food safety and the origins of what we eat. Now, the family is producing a film called "Food Patriots." Wired Science blogger Maryn McKenna tells their story.
Eagle picks up a kid. Is the video real or fake? Wired Science blogger Rhett Allain investigates.
After a loud outcry from people across the internet, Instagram seems to be backpedaling on the changes to their new terms of service. But even if they agree to back off, some photographers say they've been left with a bad taste in their mouths.
Even when they are very young, orangutans may start to form ideas about their world?specifically, how and when to use certain tools. That's the conclusion of a new study, which indicates that ape cultural traditions may not be that different from our own.
Marc Blank and Dave Lebling, creators of
Dutch artist Daan Roosegaarde has created a "digital campfire" out of 700 small crystalline rocks containing LEDs that light up when people interact with them.
If you were a consumer internet company, lousy would be one word to describe the IPO market in 2012. Just ask Facebook. Then again, if you were an enterprise technology outfit or a financial services firm going public this year, life was pretty good.
Automakers ranging from Audi to Mazda have promised to bring diesels to the U.S., finally giving those of us in the States the boosted fuel economy, extended range and tons of torque our European peers have enjoyed for decades.
The world has gone a little haywire -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Here are the 15 people most responsible for making it that way.
It's easy to cherry-pick quick hits off iTunes, but what moved us most this year were the musical releases that were more than just the sum of their parts -- the albums that demanded to be heard in full, like Frank Ocean's genre-defying masterpiece channel Orange, the cool sizzle of The xx returning to form on Coexist, or the lyrical thrill of Kendrick Lamar living up to his hype in good kid, m.A.A.d city.
You?ve heard about Apple?s Cupertino spaceship. Now meet the company?s Austin, Texas crash pad.
There were many really big moments in science this year. From finding a long, long sought subatomic particle to pushing the limits of extraterrestrial exploration to righting an ethical wrong, science took some major steps that will have a lasting impact on science and the world. Here are Wired Science's picks for the biggest discoveries, breakthroughs and moments in science this year.
A nearby sun-like star called Tau Ceti may contain a system of five planets, including one that orbits at the right distance to have life.
There hasn't been a 'cool' trailer since the iconic Airstream... until now.
In 20 years of making films writer/director Quentin Tarantino has created an alternate universe on screen. Here's how his latest film --
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
In April 1988, an engineer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory performed a detailed analysis of the fate in store for the Galileo Jupiter spacecraft if the Space Shuttle Orbiter that carried it to Earth orbit had tumbled out of control. Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree examines this perilous might-have-been.
The Army has brought up a one-star general on charges of forcibly sodomizing a female subordinate -- and threatening to ruin her military career afterward.
Instagram won?t be selling your food photos to Denny?s after all. The popular photo-sharing site made an abrupt about-face on Tuesday and said it will remove a portion of its updated terms of service that would have allowed Instagram to use your photographs, likeness, photo metadata (location information) and screen name to generate revenue from third-party businesses and ?other entities? without your permission, or even telling you about it.
Whether you find driving over speed bumps painful could help doctors work out whether you are suffering from acute appendicitis.