Latest stories · Page 189

Amazon just keeps making it easier for you to buy everything on the web. If the company continues to have its way, you’ll never need to go to the store again. Today, Amazon is announcing a new feature inside its mobile shopping app that lets you scan items in your home using your smartphone’s camera

Twitter today reported its first quarter as a publicly listed company. And while the market may be punishing the company abit for slower overall user growth, the mobile story continues to be a strong one. Twitter said that mobile monthly active users stood at 184 million for Q4 2013, up 37% on a yea

We geeks all have the same platonic prosthesis ideal: Luke Skywalker’s badass Star Wars mech-hand. We’re getting there, bit by bit. Dennis Aabo Sørensen’s new hand is almost there; it let him feel again. The hand is the subject of an in-depth paper published in the journal Science

Todd Bradley and Dave Donatelli are two high-profile, hard-charging HP execs who’ve been a lot less visible lately. Now Reuters reports that they’re on their way out altogether. Donatelli raised a ruckus when he left EMC for HP in 2009. EMC sued over the move and he was unable to work on HP storage

The Obama administration is pushing ahead with its vow to mitigate the effects of climate change. Today, the US government announced plans to create seven “climate hubs” that will offer information and resources to communities in rural regions across the country. Specific details on the

Nintendo released a handful of Game Boy Advance games for the Nintendo 3DS back during the early days of the handheld’s lifetime, and it gracefully called these games gifts through their “Ambassador Program.” It was a fancy way of saying nobody wants this thing yet because there are no decent games

As the human population explodes across the globe, there are certain areas where we live which is more prone to the desertification process, which has proven itself to be quite a massive headache to clear up. Basically the core “ingredients” are there – unsustainable agricultural practices, mining,

This probably won’t surprise a lot of people. Word on the street is that Samsung is also preparing multiple variants of its upcoming flagship smartphone, the Galaxy S5. The company has already sent out invites for its Unpacked 5 event, which is presumably where the Galaxy S5 will finally be unveiled

There aren’t many network-attached hard drives for the home, and those that exist aren’t always easy to use… not unless you enjoy drive mapping, anyway. Toshiba may just make the experience simpler with its just-shipped Canvio Home, though. This sequel to the Canvio Personal Cloud

The European Union police are reportedly developing a system that would allow officers to remotely kill the engine of any can from a central control facility. The technology for such a system already exists and is even baked into select vehicles as part of their navigation system but the EU is looki

The connected car got a major push from the federal government today, as the Department of Transportation announced plans for a regulatory proposal that would require vehicle-to-vehicle communication devices in a future year. The proposal comes after a yearlong pilot program by the National Highway

As 3D printers continue to become more popular, more and more retail outlets are beginning to carry the devices. Staples became the first major retailer to carry 3D Systems’ Cube 3D printer in retail stores, and Office Depot offers in-store demonstrations for those who want to buy the 3D printer fro

The last time Sprint made a major acquisition in the wireless space, it turned out to bean unmitigated disaster for both its own customers and for the company itself. Sprint’s 2005 merger with Nextel was the start of a downward spiral for Sprint that saw it lose millions of wireless subscribers to A

PC powerhouse Dell is to axe over 15,000 jobs this week as part of a restructuring effort aimed at addressing its place in the ailing PC market. The decision will see 15 per cent of Dell’s work force getting the chop, according to sources cited by The Register. Apparently no one is safe, with

As governments around the world refuse to act in the wake of revelations about global spying, more and more people are launching legal actions to force them to address the problem. Back in December we wrote about several that had been filed in the UK, and now the well-known Chaos Computer Club in Ge

Parents that have kids that like to roam the neighborhood or just want to keep a close eye on where the kid is any given moment can now buy the AT&T FiLIP. The FiLIP device was first unveiled in October of last year. It is a wearable smartwatch for kids that has GPS tracking services built in. T

Sure, your stereo may go up to 11 and beyond, but you probably couldn’t murder your listeners with it. The European Space Agency has a bigger budget, however, and its Large European Acoustic Facility has a 36-foot wide by 54-foot high wall of sound designed to simulate the level of noise durin

Nintendo is set to buy back as much as 7.4-percent of its shares from the family of Hiroshi Yamauchi, the company’s third president (out of four) and the grandson of founder Fusajiro Yamauchi. The share buyback has an estimated value of roughly $1.1 billion, though Bloomberg notes that it’s not clea

For the music business, Twitter holds a vast haystack of data with no easy way to find the most valuable needles — like which acts are attracting the most attention and where. To help find them, Twitter has turned to 300, a new company started by Lyor Cohen, one of music’s biggest power brokers. Coh

The creativity of Italians in parking their cars and scooters – on traffic islands, the pavement or simply in the middle of the street – knows few limits. But now police in the capital Rome have enlisted the power of social media to help them get to grips with the endemic problem. Citize

It has grown apparent to NASA scientists, if human beings are ever going to colonize the Moon or Mars, it begins with the vital production of water and oxygen. Mars, a planet rich with carbon-dioxide has the potential to reform its volatile atmosphere to a life-sustaining, earth-like atmosphere. The

The Syrian Electronic Army, a notorious hacking group, says it claimed two big-name victims Saturday: eBay and PayPal. While a hack on PayPal could put millions of peoples’ bank information at risk, the hackers said this attack was a “hacktivist operation,” and that they did not ta

The next major update for the PlayStation App has arrived. Sony released the latest update on Friday, which adds a new ‘Live from PlayStation’ tile to the app, giving users the ability to watch live streams of their favorite games on Ustream or Twitch. Unfortunately, the app does

Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden released more documents that reveal remote spying operations that include bulk data collection and user tracking, this time concerning the Canadian public, CBC News reports. According to a presentation dating back to May 2012, the Communications Security Establis

Verizon Wireless has set up shop in New York City this week to demonstrate LTE Multicast, a technique that’s designed to beam live TV feeds wirelessly to smartphones and tablets without gobbling up all of the wireless network’s bandwidth. Instead of delivering a bunch of bandwidth-eating unicast vid

Today, Politico Magazine published a tell-all expose of the TSA by a former officer. The article ridicules airport security, depicting scanners as futile and humiliating. But if you read between the lines, you can learn useful lessons about how to craft and deploy technology that respects privacy an

The door-knocking days for Mormons spreading the Lord’s word may be coming to a close, the Mormon Church has started to integrate the internet into its missions. During the traditional, two-year Mormon proselytizing, new missionaries have only been allowed minimal access to the outside world,

As computers enter ever more areas of our daily lives, the amount of data they produce has grown enormously. But for this “big data” to be useful it must first be analyzed, meaning it needs to be stored in such a way that it can be accessed quickly when required. Previously, any data that needed to

Carriers in the United States are mandated by law to maintain and offer copper-based landline phone service even though the technology is well over half a century old. The FCC is taking its first steps today to modernize that system with a new order that calls for companies like AT&T and Verizon

Japan is attracting all of the attention when it comes to Google Street View, the service that provides 360-degree images of locations, landmarks and cities, in Asia. That’s according to data released by Google for the first time today. Now with nine countries from Asia on the service

UK pay-TV giant BSkyB announced better-than-expected half-year operating profits this morning in London, and a major deal to expand its existing relationship with HBO. The pair has been cozy since 2010 when the Sky Atlantic channel became the “home of HBO” series. hat exclusive first-run output deal

The art of camouflage is more than throwing paint at a soldier, and it’s not one-size-fits-all. That’s a lesson the US military has learned to its chagrin, as it phases out what was supposedly going to be a “Universal Camouflage Pattern” which cost a reported $5 billion to de

The possibility of Wikipedia being taken over by attackers was just foiled by quick action on the part of Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that operates Wikipedia, with the help of Check Point, the security firm that discovered the critical security hole in its code. “It is conceivable that someo

Amazon might still be working away on its far-out delivery drone project, but it’s also reportedly cooking up something else, admittedly a little tamer, too: a Kindle checkout system and a P2P payment service. Yes, the former’s exactly what it sounds like, a Kindle tablet equipped with p

An app developer who had a rare Twitter username revealed he has been hacked by a person that wanted to own the @N handle at all costs, with PayPal and GoDaddy serving as unsuspecting accomplices in the ordeal. After blocking Naoki Hiroshima out of his PayPal and GoDaddy accounts, the hacker demande

When you ask Siri or Google’s voice search a question, no matter how simple it is, they have to think about it for a second or two. As you likely know, those brief moments of tedium are spent sending your question to the mass-consciousness of supercomputers through the Internet and waiting for

EVE Online has its own economics, politics, and trade systems, built almost entirely by players in the ten years the game has been running. It also has its own wars, as huge alliances vie for control of tracts of space in the massively multiplayer online game. One such conflict came to a head yester

Imgur has slowly but steadily been adding a host of features over the last year or so. After making a big move to become the YouTube of viral images, the company built new Android and iPhone apps as well as a full-on meme generator — and its latest new feature could resonate equally with hardcore Im

Rechargeable, energy-dense bio-batteries running on sugar might be powering our electronic gadgets in as little as three years, according to a US team of scientists. The battery, created by the group of Y H Percival Zhang, an associate professor of biological systems engineering at Virginia Tech, ca

The Galaxy Gear 2 will be significantly improved over the first generation, according to ZDNet Korea, as Samsung takes a second try in the wearables market. The publication reports the smartwatch will feature a curved display, similar to the flexible OLED found on the curved Galaxy Round smartphone.