The White House hopes a Friday summit between senior government officials and Silicon Valley tech leaders will find common ground on ways to work together to combat extremism and radicalization. Government officials will seek to convince tech executives that they need to heed President Barack Obama's call to action and step up to help the U.S. in its fight against militants. But some tech executives are still wary of assisting the government after former National Security Agency (NSA) contractor Edward Snowden
CES week is all about gadgets, but some new Android apps are worth exploring too.
The themes of this week’s picks parallel movies now in theaters.
A sneaky crew of 13 apps with relatively high ratings have vanished from the Play Store after security researchers discovered their hidden motives. The apps had another scheme: they were able to assign themselves good reviews using the infected devices. This is how games like Cake Tower and Honey Comb were able to amass an average review score of 4.5 stars.
Imagine getting a call from your company's IT department telling you your workstation has been compromised and you should stop what you're doing immediately. You're stumped: You went through the company's security training and you're sure you didn't open any suspicious email attachments or click on any bad links; you know that your company has a solid patching policy and the software on your computer is up to date; you're also not the type of employee who visits non-work-related websites while on the job. So, how did this happen? A few days later, an unexpected answer comes down from the security firm that your company hired to investigate the incident: Hackers got in by exploiting a flaw in the corporate antivirus program installed on your computer, the same program that's supposed to protect it from attacks. And all it took was for attackers to send you an email message that you didn't even open.
Haier’s Magic Mirror is one of the few products at CES that I could actually imagine buying for my house. This crazy smart mirror looks like any other, but when you tap on the glass, it comes to life. The display has built-in apps that show you the weather and offer health tips, plus connect to social platforms like Facebook. The mirror connects to Haier’s U+ Smart Life Platform, which is used in China but hasn’t yet arrived in the States. It also connects to Bluetooth devices like a bathroom scale that displays your weight and BMI on the mirror, and then tells you what to do about those numbers if they’re not to your liking. Haier plans to launch the Magic Mirror in China later this year. The company hasn’t said how much the mirror will cost or when it might come to the U.S., but I’ll be first in line to try it out.
Nearly a year ago, Twitter cofounder Biz Stone sat on stage at SXSW and admitted that his social In what Stone calls an “un-pivot,” the Jelly team is doubling down on the Q&A concept, but this time with more enthusiasm. “We have an audacious grand plan—the complete re-imagining of how people get answers to everyday stuff,” Stone said announcing the app’s reboot on
Sensoria is setting out to dominate the fitness wearables market—at least for runners—without even needing a traditional fitness band. No, Sensoria is all about clothing. We’ve tested out the company’s
If there's one thing that can make you look bad to your colleagues—I mean, besides that giant coffee stain on your shirt—it's weak writing. You know what I'm talking about. All those emails that start out, "I just wanted to check...", or "I'm no expert, but shouldn't it be...." A new Chrome extension for Gmail called Just Not Sorry aims to help you make stronger statements in your email correspondence and eliminate all those weak qualifiers. The extension was designed with the intention of encouraging women in the corporate workplace to make stronger statements. But it can be used by anyone who needs help making their emails more direct and to the point.
Once you’ve had kids, you can’t help but see the Virtuix Omni as one of those baby bouncer activity centers, just for adults. What the Omni actually is, of course, is an extremely realistic virtual-reality harness that The setup remains largely unchanged: $699 buys you a pair of slippery shoes (in your size, of course) which slide smoothly over the concave bowl that is the “floor” of the Omni. The idea is that as you run (or “moonwalk,” really) in real life, you remain in place but your strides are measured as movement by the game itself: you can run, sidestep, or move backwards. Virtuix recently asked a player to “run” across the Wasteland of Fallout 4; it took 20 minutes, he said.
When was the last time you actually got excited over a network management app? For most of us, the answer is probably “never.” But as our Gordon Ung shows in the above video, Asus’s Router app might actually turn some heads. The Asus Router app lets you manage your Asus-branded router from the comfort of your smartphone. With it, you can view various stats about your home network and your router—you can monitor your network’s traffic, see how many devices are on your network, your router’s Wi-Fi network status, and more. You can switch network features on and off, change your Wi-Fi password, update your router’s firmware...you name it. You can also get info on individual devices connected to your network, limit their bandwidth use, or kick them off your network entirely, This last one might be useful if your kid is up way past their bedtime and you want them to quit watching skate videos on YouTube.
I know. I keep droning on about this wedding that I’ve been planning for the last year. But the fact of the matter is that throwing a wedding is not only a huge expense, but a major pain in the ass. I was curious when I heard I could virtually try on my wedding dress at Modiface’s booth on the CES show floor with its new Wedding Dress Studio. And that’s exactly what I did: take a photo of myself on an
The 2017 Chevy Bolt finally solves a big problem for EVs: Unless you were wealthy enough to afford a Tesla Model S, you were stuck with EVs whose range hit 100 miles at best. Even though most people don’t drive more than 100 miles per day, that number still gives us pause, because But 200 miles: Even someone like me, whose weekends are filled with errands of all shapes and sizes, sometimes including long drives—I could live with 200 miles of range in all but truly extreme exceptions. While I wouldn’t call a car that’s going to cost about $30,000
