I have another hundred miles of Australia to explore today, and On the docket this week? Blizzard ditches Battle.net, This is gaming news for September 19 through the 23. Speaking of
Yahoo’s announcement that state-sponsored hackers That’s because Yahoo, unlike MySpace, LinkedIn and other online services that suffered large breaches in recent years, is an email provider; and email accounts are central to users’ online lives. Not only are email addresses used for private communications, but they serve as recovery points and log-in credentials for accounts on many other websites.
Anyone who has looked at automatically-generated subtitles on YouTube can tell you that asking a computer to describe what a human says can lead to hilarious results. Now, Apple has brought that issue to iOS 10 with support for transcribing voicemails. It’s a cool feature that makes it easy to know what your Aunt Matilda said about the gastrointestinal problems her dog is having, without actually having to listen to a three-minute-long, blow-by-blow description. But be careful about trusting it—or reading the transcriptions around sensitive eyes. I learned that the hard way Thursday when someone left me a message about a reorder special on a wine club shipment. Except my iPhone didn’t hear it that way, proudly telling me about “wearing your c**k s**t.”
Apple is reportedly still hard at work on a Gurman doesn’t say what the smart home device will be, but presumably it will be some kind of speaker. The aim is for the Siri device to control smart home appliances—presumably via
Here's a device any gamer or video enthusiast may want to have on hand. Connect a game console, DVD, or any video source to this gadget via its HDMI input, and with the push of a button it captures and saves the video stream to any attached USB flash drive, with no PC required. Advanced hardware H.264 encoding captures your live gameplay or video playback in 1080p Full HD, while keeping the file size low and capturing speeds high. Averaging 4 out of 5 stars on Amazon from over 170 customers (
Samsung Electronics may have some comfort after its debacle with faulty batteries in the Galaxy Note7 smartphone. The South Korean company reported Thursday that about 500,000 devices, or half of the recalled Galaxy Note7 phones sold in the U.S., have been exchanged through its program. Interestingly, “90 percent of Galaxy Note7 owners have been opting to receive the new Galaxy Note7,” since the phones became available on Wednesday, Samsung said. That figure suggests that most of the users of the Note7 have chosen to stay with the smartphone model, with new batteries, rather than go in for a refund or exchange the phone with another Samsung model.
Vint Cerf is considered a father of the internet, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things he would do differently if given a fresh chance to create it all over again. “If I could have justified it, putting in a 128-bit address space would have been nice so we wouldn’t have to go through this painful, 20-year process of going from IPv4 to IPv6,” Cerf told an audience of journalists Thursday during a press conference at the Heidelberg Laureate Forum in Germany. IPv4, the first publicly used version of the Internet Protocol, included an addressing system that used 32-bit numerical identifiers. It soon became apparent that it would lead to an exhaustion of addresses, however, spurring the creation of IPv6 as a replacement. Roughly a year ago, North America officially
Technology has considerable potential to make the world better, but those benefits are far from guaranteed. Plenty of downsides can pop up along the way, and some of them have Turing Award winners especially worried. "Technology by itself is not evil, but people can use it for bad things," Barbara Liskov, an Institute Professor at MIT, told an audience of journalists Thursday at the The ability to selectively filter out news and opinions that don't agree with one's own viewpoint is one of Liskov's top concerns.
Finish off the week with these fresh Android apps and games.
I usually start this column with “so and so needed something done to their PC,” but if I were to include the names of all the people who have written me about how unhappy they are with their Windows 10 “upgrade” the file would be so large the server that hosts this page would need a new hard drive. I’ve been inundated with unhappy Windows 10 users for the past two months, and my heart goes out to these folks. A lot of them were upgraded unsuspectingly, and Microsoft deserves a ton of scorn for its
Fitbit owns the activity tracker market, but its most popular fitness band was in need of a reboot. The Fitbit Charge HR has everything you could want in an inexpensive fitness tracker, but its tiny display was outdated and its features were in need of an upgrade. So Fitbit launched the Charge 2, which offers a suite of new features in a package that’s just as chunky as its predecessor. That may be unfair. I was hopeful that the
Take your outdoor events to the next level with the Coolest Cooler, JBL Xtreme Bluetooth speaker, GoSun Sport Solar Stove, Goal Zero Nomad 20 solar panel, and Thermacell Trailblazer mosquito-repelling lantern.
Dell wants to prove that you don't need a high-end GPU in your computer to create content for virtual reality headsets. Instead, the company wants to move VR content creation into the cloud with new computing products it plans to release. The goal is to add more mobility and security to VR content creation. Among the new products planned are thin clients that run applications stored in remote servers or appliances. The servers will have GPUs that power VR content creation on virtual desktops. Virtual reality is an interesting market, and Dell will have products to talk about in the future, said Jeff McNaught, executive director of cloud client computing at Dell.
