By the early 2000s, the world wide web had sounded the death knell for the world's "online services" -- corporate-controlled creations like America Online and CompuServe that brought computer users online well before the web was created. But there was a brief time when these services were king -- and a company like AOL was powerful enough to purchase a giant like Time Warner for $164 billion.
Watch as an enormous asteroid safely careens past the Earth, giving astronomers an unprecedented view of its surface, during a live show from the Slooh Space Camera team. The program starts at 1:30 p.m. PDT/4:30 p.m. EST.
What's gonna happen at E3? We have no idea.
"For us, this isn¿t yet a question of cost. It is a question of our intended values and our collective will," says Roger Duffy, a partner at SOM.
WWDC, Apple¿s yearly developer conference, is just around the corner -- it kicks off on June 10. Following Google's I/O conference earlier this month, both developer and consumer expectations are sky high. Especially because other than a new-ish iPod, there's been nary a product-related peep since Apple's fall media event, which means there's a lot ...
Disaster memorials can veer towards the macabre or maudlin, but Brooklyn-based designer Joe Doucet managed to thread the needle.
You know those wallet cards and apps that help you make good choices about buying seafood: what's endangered, what's overfished, what's responsible to eat? This Kickstarter effort, BuyingPoultry.com, hopes to do the same for chicken.
[HTML1]Where would we be without the Smiths? Well, Earth would have been overrun by aliens. Robot squid would have destroyed humanity's last refuge. A steampunk spider mech would have killed Ulysses S. Grant. Bullies would have harmed a young man's self-esteem. And we haven't even gotten to Willow! Sci-fi thriller After Earth hits theaters May ...
A roundup of odd ways humans and wild animals crossed paths this week compiled by Jon Mooallem, author of the upcoming book
Setting up an online store has gotten exponentially cheaper and easier over the past 15 years, but handling international orders remains stubbornly difficult. That may -- finally -- be changing.
Could you replace your phone battery with a capacitor and charge it up in record fast time? Wired Science blogger Rhett Allain investigates.
Back in 2009 filmmakers Brit Marling and Zal Batmanglij spent a summer on the road living with collectives. Now they've turned those experiences into the eco-activist thriller
IMSA sits on the outskirts of Chicago, in a little town called Aurora, Illinois. It feels more like a college than a high school. The halls aren¿t lined with lockers. Instead, you find chairs and couches, where students will plop down to type on their laptops ¿ or catch an afternoon nap. U.S. students consistently rank poorly compared to students from other countries international evaluations, but IMSA students are doing work usually reserved for upper division college students or even grad students.
Today we went on a hike. A few of us barely made it home in one piece. The Gadget Lab crew reports from Wired Spring Camp.
The American military abandoned the M40 recoilless rifle after Vietnam. Yet the weapon keeps showing up in Libya and Syria, decades after its supposed retirement.
The tiny Fijian island of Tavarua is the site of the annual Fiji Pro surf contest, but televising the event is a gnarly prospect. Uncle Toad's Media Group will stream the contest in June, a feat that requires so much specialized gear, muscle power, and sheer nerve, the competition itself looks like a day at the beach. Here's how they do it.
When the NSA's brand-new $2 billion data center goes live in Bluffdale, Utah this fall, the nation's spy agency is going to need a special kind of person to keep the lights on, the networks humming, and the servers from melting down.
The psychological tendency to see meaningful images in vague visuals actually has a name¿pareidolia¿and it¿s the basis for a mesmerizing new project.
Mission Motorcycles president Mark Seeger wants to do for electric bikes what Tesla did for electric cars: Match the performance and range of gasoline-powered superbikes, but do it with a massive battery pack, an electric motor and zero emissions.
Reversing its march towards creating a phone that requires a wheelbarrow to tote around town, Samsung has announced the 4.3-inch S4 mini.
Netflix is set to increase the amount of money it spends on original content over the next few years... and it wants more
Astronauts on a round-trip to Mars would be subject to radiation levels 13 times higher than what a person working at a nuclear power plant would receive in a year, increasing the risk of such a mission.
Buy a Model S and Tesla promises that in six months you'll be able to drive from Los Angeles to New York without paying a dime to top up your batteries.
Using atomic force microscopy, scientists have imaged a molecule at single-atom resolution, caught in the act of rearranging the bonds connecting its 26 carbon atoms.
A team of scientists claims to have found the earliest known bird. But critics question whether it really is a bird, and some are not entirely convinced that it's an authentic specimen.
A California company has answered a question few people have probably thought to ask: What would happen if you combined the wearability of Google Glass with the gesture-based control of Microsoft Kinect? The answer is a pretty cool wearable interface you can control using your voice or gestures.Mountain View startup Atheer wants to make it ...
From email privacy to national security, Rand Paul is probably the Senate's premier civil libertarian. As he tours Silicon Valley, he talks about his causes with Wired.
After months of nothing, Apple has dropped a new, cheaper summertime fun iPod touch.
When Formlabs raised $2,945,885 on Kickstarter for its high resolution 3-D printer in October 2012, neither company was expecting a lawsuit. What does this portend for markers and startups?
At Google, Chris Zacharias spent his "20 percent time" building a new version of YouTube just for places with slow internet connections. It was called Feather, and the basic idea was to build a YouTube page that contained no more than 100 kilobytes of data, so that it could quickly load on machines in developing countries and other places where internet pipes were painfully narrow.
Microsoft let many cats out of myriad bags in its whopping 1,817-word talk about that's almost more intriguing. Mixed in among all the chatter was a curious screenshot of the Windows 8.1 Start screen, and tucked away in amongst its Live Tiles were four eye-opening squares. Folks, I think we just got our first look at modern-style Office apps. Or at least their Live Tiles. Check out the image above, from . Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote all make an appearance, positioned there next to the SkyDrive app. So what, you ask? Microsoft owns Office! Indeed it does—but Microsoft does offer modern UI versions of its core Office programs. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote are only offered as desktop programs as of today. And pinning those desktop productivity programs to the Windows 8 Start screen creates tiles with the same light blue background as any other desktop app—and not the colorful squares shown in Microsoft's blog post.
OCZ's newly released Vertex 450 SSD is a solid top-tier performer. It's not quite as fast as the company's top-of-the-line Vector, but it's close, and certainly fast enough for the average user. At around a buck a gigabyte it's also good deal in a fast 7mm profile, SATA 6Gbps drive. The Vertex 4 uses 20nm, MLC NAND. Unlike the Vertex 4 with its older Indilinx Everest 2 (Marvell hardware/OCZ firmware), said NAND is marshaled by a derivative of the all-OCZ IndliLinx Barefoot 3 controller used in the Vector. Whatever the designation, it's very fast. What stood out about the Vertex 450 was the nice balance between read the write performance, which placed it in the 5th spot overall of the twenty or so drives we've tested. The drive wrote our 10GB mix of files and folders at 407.9MBps and read them at 385.8. With a single large 10GB file that jumped to 626.9MBps writing and 447.5MBps reading. CrystalDiskMark placed the drive in the top ten with an excellent write performance rating buoying its slightly below-average sequential read rating. Those numbers reflect our experience with the 256GB version of the Vertex 450. The 512GB model's performance should be only a hair slower, but there will be a drop-off with the 128GB version due to fewer channels. This could be anywhere from mild to significant, but a 128GB version was not available to verify. As with all brands, the 240/256GB and larger capacities offer the best performance.
Anonymous peer-to-peer communication on the Internet isn’t just a handy tool for privacy enthusiasts; it’s critical for preserving free speech in the digital world. Anonymous file-sharing services like BitTorrent are legion, but their utility is limited—you can share only files—and their reputations are unfairly tarnished by people who use them to share media illegally. If you’re looking for a highly anonymous peer-to-peer network with websites, forums, and more, look no farther than the Free Network, one of the best-kept secrets in anonymous communication. Here’s how it works: Freenet is an anonymous peer-to-peer data-sharing network similar to BitTorrent, but with one key difference: All uploaded data is assigned a unique key, sliced up into small, encrypted chunks and scattered across different computers on the network. That form of data storage means that—unlike with BitTorrent—you don’t have to keep your Freenet client running to seed files you want to share on the network. Instead, when someone wants to access a piece of data—a document or photograph, for example—they “fetch” it from the network using the unique key assigned to that piece of data. Freenet routes fetch requests through intermediary computers on the network that don’t store records of the request, ensuring that no single computer on the network knows the contents of any one file. If that sounds familiar, it’s because this fetching system works very similarly to the way your Web browser does when it fetches websites from the Internet. In fact, once you have the Freenet client running on your PC, you can use most Web browsers to browse files and websites stored on the Freenet. For optimal security, download the most recent version of a browser you don’t normally use—say, Firefox or Chrome—and use it exclusively to browse Freenet, with private browsing enabled.
The former Union of Soviet Socialist Republics gained some Internet status in 1990 by being awarded its own top-level domain. A year later, the USSR was no more, but its domain lived on—to the delight of cybercriminals. . In 2011, Group IB said, the number of malicious websites hosted by the SU domain doubled from the previous year. In 2012, it doubled again, vaulting over a number of malicious sites hosted by another favorite domain of cybercriminals, .ru, as well as its Cyrillic counterpart. from the machines they infect.
Despite dismal forecasts for PCs and servers, tech stocks have been doing well on optimism about cloud technology and mobile devices. A fresh batch of dire forecasts for the hardware market came out this week, yet tech stocks have continued to lead markets to new heights this month. The Nasdaq Computer Index, which tracks 394 tech-related companies, was on track Friday to close out May with an approximately 4 percent gain for the month, about 9 percent up for the year. In midday trading, the computer index was at 1689.86, up 5.82 points for the day. Though tech got off to a slow start this year, it has outpaced other sectors recently as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Standard and Poor’s 500 indexes hit milestone highs. In midday trading Friday, four of the five tech companies in the Dow were trading up. Microsoft, IBM, Cisco and Intel were up, while only Hewlett-Packard was trading down from its opening.
For the moment, Microsoft has stopped charging extra for an essential piece of the Surface RT experience. versions) and Type Covers usually cost $130. The Surface RT costs $499 with 32GB of storage, or $599 with 32GB. ] for customers in Europe that kicked off a couple weeks ago is scheduled to end on June 30.
Android on PCs may be a terrible idea, but that isn’t stopping PC makers from trying it out in a desperate search for alternatives to Windows 8. Next week, Acer is expected to double down on Android PCs by announcing an overpowered and underpriced all-in-one PC that will rock a fourth-generation “” Core processor. The device has already popped up on that the Haswell-powered AIO is the real deal. We’ll update this report when we reach an Acer representative. Spec reports are incomplete, but Acer’s BDDA220HQL will purportedly feature a 3GHz Core i5 4430 processor, 1GB of RAM, and 8GB to 16GB of storage.
Cloud storage provides a very simple way of ensuring that your music is always there, wherever there is an Internet connection...but Google Drive doesn't provide a default music player upon. Sure, the files are there, but to actually hear your tunes you must rely on either portable music player applications, or whatever is installed on the host computer. Google's Chrome app DriveTunes provides another option.
that includes anything from 3D image support to a MiniMap to eliminate scrollbars, and yet ends up feeling underpowered, clunky, and disappointing. Ashampoo' Photo Commander's glut of features carries through to its default window arrangement: a menu bar, two toolbars, a file browser with its own partially-visible toolbar (that opens on Ashampoo's Pictures library, not your own Pictures folder), image metadata, and a wide timeline with many filtering options. The middle of the window has an area to display the selected image, too, crowded in by all of the other interface elements. For an application that offers so many features, Ashampoo neglects some of the very basics. For example, it doesn't automatically rotate vertical photos: If you happened to take a photo with your camera turned sideways, Ashampoo will display the photo sideways, even if it contains rotation information. Even Windows Explorer, which doesn't purport to be an image editing application, heeds this rotation metadata and shows images correctly turned. . On a Windows 8 system with an Intel i7-3770K CPU and 32GB of RAM, I had to wait for several seconds until Ashampoo finally displayed all of the thumbnails for a single folder. When I navigated into that same folder using Windows Explorer, the thumbnails appeared instantly, with no perceptible lag at all.
. Users opting to use the new security tool must now enter a code they receive via a text message sent to their cell phones each time they log into the microblogging service. . For one thing, the new security option isn’t likely to help organizations that have many staff members posting to a single Twitter account. Obviously, they don’t all use the same mobile phone. It also won’t protect users from man-in-the-middle attacks through which a user is lured to a fake Twitter login page, enters his or her login credentials and the six-digit two-factor authentication password, thereby giving a bad guy entry to the account. can even take a beating, as they did in April when the Associated Press’s account was breached and hackers tweeted about explosions at the White House.
Before I incur the wrath of non-Gmail users, let me just note that this tip also applies to Hotmail, Outlook.com, Yahoo, and so on. But because I'm a Gmail user myself, and that's where my story begins, that's where I'm putting my focus. When was the last time you checked your spam filter? I ask because until recently, I hadn't looked at mine for months. That's because I use Gmail, and the service is so good at keeping junk out of my inbox, I pretty much forgot spam existed. But a few days ago, I went searching for an email that never arrived, and wondered if perhaps it had gotten caught in Google's filter. It hadn't. However, I was surprised to discover a handful of other messages in the spam inbox that definitely weren't spam. Nothing crucial, but items I was a little bummed to have missed.
Foxconn’s Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. has set up a new research center devoted to display and touch technologies in Japan that could end up hiring staff away from Sharp. The new center, called Foxconn Japan RD Co., represents a major investment for Hon Hai and aims to recruit top talent from the country, the company said in Friday statement. The center will work in tandem with the company’s existing R&D resources in China and Taiwan to further improve its screen technology. The initial facility will be based in the Japanese cities of Sakai and New Yokohama, but Hon Hai could expand the research center to other areas in the future. Leading the center is Kouzoh Yano, who’s been listed as a general manager with Sharp, and an expert in LCD technology, according to Hon Hai. It’s unclear if Yano is still employed with Sharp. Hon Hai said it recruited Kouzoh Yano, the former general manager of a Japanese Sharp factory and LCD expert, to lead the center. The Japanese government recognized his role in leading a team that helped designed one of Sharp's most advanced factories. Sharp declined to comment on Yano's new positio
A 14-year-old worker has been found dead after working at an electronics factory in China that may make products for Asus, another potential case of underage labor abuse in the country. Liu Fuzong died on May 21 while employed at a factory in Dongguan, said the city’s local human resources office in an email on Thursday. Liu’s body had turned cold when discovered by a co-worker in his dorm, and was later pronounced dead at a hospital. Authorities have yet to elaborate on the cause of death. The factory, which is listed as a facility from Taiwanese electronics supplier 3CEMS, builds products for PC maker Asus, according to New York-based China Labor Watch, which has been investigating the incident. Chinese labor laws forbid factories from employing workers younger than 16. Liu, however, was sent to the factory through a third-party labor dispatch company that used the identification of an older worker to register his employment, according to the city’s local human resources office.
, Asus is announcing a professional-grade (read: not cheap) Ultra HD LCD monitor. , which starts Tuesday. The unit has a 16:9 aspect ratio, 176-degreee wide viewing angle, DisplayPort, dual HDMI inputs, and built-in 2W stereo speakers. Asus said it used Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO) for the active layer of the PQ321’s LCD panel instead of the standard amorphous silicon for LCD displays. Because IGZO panels can work with smaller transistors, Asus could cram smaller pixels onto the screen. That’s a good thing considering this panel has four times as many pixels as a standard 1080p monitor.
Oracle plans to make changes to strengthen the security of Java, including fixing its certificate revocation checking feature, preventing unsigned applets from being executed by default and adding centralized management options with whitelisting capabilities for enterprise environments. These changes, along with other security-related efforts, are intended to “decrease the exploitability and severity of potential Java vulnerabilities in the desktop environment and provide additional security protections for Java operating in the server environment,” said Nandini Ramani, vice president of engineering for Java Client and Mobile Platforms at Oracle, in a on Thursday. Ramani’s blog post, which discusses “the security worthiness of Java,” indirectly addresses some of the criticism and concerns raised by security researchers this year following a string of successful and widespread attacks that exploited zero-day—previously unpatched—vulnerabilities in the Java browser plug-in to compromise computers. Ramani reiterated Oracle’s plans to accelerate the Java patching schedule starting from October, aligning it with the patching schedule for the company’s other products, and revealed some of the company’s efforts to perform Java security code reviews.
The U.S. government has lifted sanctions on the export of a variety of consumer communications devices, software and services including mobile phones to Iran ahead of elections in that country. The U.S. Department of the Treasury, in consultation with the U.S. Department of State, has issued a license authorizing the export to Iran of certain personal communications services, software and hardware, it said on Thursday. Exports of the devices to Iran had been blocked since the 1990s, but the U.S. government now holds that the new license aims to empower the Iranian people as their government intensifies its efforts to stifle their access to information. The export of the equipment to the Iranian government or to any individual or entity on a Specially Designated Nationals list continued to be prohibited.
Twitter has become an essential part of the small business marketing playbook, but it remains a difficult platform to truly get your arms around. Some tweets will go gangbusters on the service, replied-to and retweeted for hours. Others will land with a thud, quickly drowned out by the chatter of the masses and unceremoniously forgotten. Wouldn't it be great if you could know whether a tweet you sent was going to be a hit or a miss? Now you can, according to , an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management who researches social media analytics. Specifically, Zaman has researched the curious phenomenon of the retweet. To a large extent, retweets are the lifeblood of Twitter, as other users re-broadcast something you've tweeted to their followers. Done right, a solid tweet can create a chain reaction of retweets as friends of friends of friends pick up your original message and give it an exponentially wider audience than you ever could alone.
Nearly three dozen computer scientists have signed off on a court brief opposing Oracle’s effort to copyright its Java APIs, a move they say would hold back the computer industry and deny affordable technology to end users. The group, which includes prominent names such as MS-DOS author Tim Paterson and ARPANET developer Larry Roberts, signed the in support of Google in its copyright lawsuit with Oracle. Oracle accuses Google of infringing the copyright on its Java APIs (application programming interfaces) in the development of Google’s Android OS, and it is seeking billions of dollars in damages. Google denies any wrongdoing and has argued, in part, that software APIs aren’t eligible for copyright protection under U.S. law. Last year, a district court in California largely and ruled against Oracle in the case. Judge William Alsup determined that the Java APIs in the case can’t be covered by copyright because they’re a functional part of the Java platform and required by others to use the Java language. Copyright law typically does not extend to works that are functional in nature.
Japan’s public television broadcaster, NHK, is working on technology that will allow people to watch TV with their fingers. NHK is developing a system that maps objects shown on the TV screen in 3D space. “Viewers” place their index finger in a device connected to several actuators that provide haptic feedback, allowing surfaces, bumps and corners to be explored through touch. The broadcaster demonstrated the technology as part of an open house at its research lab in Tokyo. NHK is also working on a new platform for interactive TV, where viewers use tablets and smartphones to make comments about live shows, which are then shared and appear on ‘the TVs of their social contacts. One demonstration allowed users to tag specific locations on screen with comments, while another let viewers upload hand drawn pictures as part of a children’s show.
Material irrelevant to police investigation that was seized from Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom and three associates in January 2012 will have to be returned to them, a court in New Zealand has ruled. The police are also required to provide to the plaintiffs clones of devices that contain information considered relevant to the investigation. New Zealand High Court Justice Helen Winkelmann also ruled Friday that the police had used “unlawful” search warrants when they searched and seized computers and hard disks at the Auckland residence of Dotcom. Dotcom and colleagues, and two companies including Megaupload, were indicted by a grand jury in the U.S. in January last year, and charged with engaging in a racketeering conspiracy, conspiring to commit copyright infringement and money laundering, and two substantive counts of criminal copyright infringement, according to the U.S. Department of Justice.
Mt. Gox is requiring all users to verify their accounts in order to make non-bitcoin currency deposits and withdrawals, less than a week after U.S. authorities said they shut down online payment processor Liberty Reserve for alleged money laundering. The world's largest bitcoin exchange instituted the new requirement on Thursday. Deposits and withdrawals using the bitcoin virtual currency, however, will not require account verification, the company said in a brief statement. . Liberty Reserve, incorporated in Costa Rica in 2006, worked by charging a small fee to help users send and receive payments anywhere in the world. Transfers were made through its own virtual currency, which could be converted into real dollars using pre-approved exchangers.
Dell has written to shareholders they are better off accepting a bid from Michael Dell and Silver Lake to acquire the company than holding on to their shares. to stockholders. “We are fully convinced that this significant, immediate and certain premium is superior to owning Dell as a stand-alone entity today—with or without a leveraged recapitalization—as well as to the other strategic and financial alternatives potentially available,” the letter said. “We believe that the risks and uncertainty of a stand-alone public company are high, and that the transaction we have negotiated offers superior value for Dell stockholders.” The board solicited rival bids from 21 strategic and 52 financial buyers, but no superior offer materialized, it said.
A 1996 podcasting patent is in the crosshairs of two digital rights groups, which are hoping the public will help them get the patent invalidated. of ideas similar to podcasting that were published before Oct. 2, 1996. for an audio program player including a dynamic program selection controller. In April, Personal Audio filed lawsuits asserting its podcasting patent against NBC and CBS, and in January, it filed lawsuits against ACE Broadcasting Network, HowStuffWorks.com and TogiEntertainment.
Intel's upcoming Atom tablet chip code-named Bay Trail will be repurposed for use in the company's Celeron and Pentium chips for entry-level laptops, desktops and all-in-ones, Intel said on Friday. , which is in low-power smartphones, tablets, and netbooks. Beyond the tablet chip, Intel will release Bay Trail-M (mobile) and Bay Trail-D (desktop) parts, which will be available under the Celeron and Pentium brands, Intel spokeswoman Kathy Gill said in an e-mail. Pentium and Celeron chips are used in low-cost PCs, and the move represents an architectural shift for those brands. It also represents Intel's wider reliance on Atom architecture for entry-level computing. Bay Trail is based on the Silvermont architecture, which Intel claims will be up to three times faster and five times more power efficient than older Atom cores. Silvermont will now power Intel Inside devices including entry-level PCs, tablets, smartphones and low-power servers. Intel is using Silvermont in its upcoming smartphone chips code-named Merrifield, which are due to ship early next year. Intel previously announced it would use Bay Trail in PCs, but did not announce branding for the new chips.
How well Internet Explorer—or any Web browser, for that matter—protects against attacks and malware greatly depends on whether you keep it up to date and have the right security settings. Here's how to take the proper security measures with Internet Explorer 9 and 10. Although switching to a new version of your browser can take some getting used to—what with its various interface and feature changes—new security features are often worth the annoyance. So it’s a good idea to upgrade to newer versions when available. IE 10 is the latest version, and it comes bundled with Windows 8. Microsoft also offers IE 10 for those running Windows 7 with Service Pack 1 installed. But if you’re running Windows Vista, you’re stuck with using IE 9.
The VAIO Fit 15 has had a makeover, emerging from Sony’s design studio with a brushed-aluminum case and an excellent touchscreen. But shiny new looks don't distract from lackluster battery life and so-so performance. This is certainly no Ultrabook, weighing in at 5.7 pounds sans power adapter, but the Fit does pack 8GB of DDR3/1600 memory; a large, 750GB hard drive; a DVD burner; and an HD touchscreen. The Vaio Fit 15 Touch lineup ranges in price from $849 to $1699. Our review unit was priced at $949. Running at a native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels, the 15-inch display is bright (we measured it at 274 lumens). Like most touchscreens, this display has a distractingly glossy finish: It shows reflections very clearly, so you can easily see if someone is sneaking up behind you. Its oleophobic coating keeps greasy fingerprints away, which is important for a computer running a touch-centric OS like Windows 8. This model uses Intel’s 1.8GHz i5-3337U (Ivy Bridge) processor. The Intel HD Graphics 4000 processor integrated into that chip drives the display but delivered relatively poor gaming performance. Serious gamers will want to opt for an upgraded model that offers one of Nvidia’s discrete GPUs. The stereo speakers in the Fit’s hinge delivered plenty of volume, but sound bounces off the display, resulting in a lack of separation, very little presence, and poor bass response. The recording of Beethoven's 9th symphony that I used to audition the audio system sounded as though it had been recorded in a dingy cellar.
June is right around the corner. You know what that means! Er, wait. You might not, actually. It means Computex is coming next week. Every year, in early June, tech movers and shakers converge in Taipei, Taiwan, for Computex, a five-day trade show celebrating all things computing-related. Computex is big—it’s often the biggest expo of the year for PC manufacturers such as Acer, AMD, and Asus. Computex is revelatory. Computex is . One of the biggest reasons for that: Computex keeps it real.