Latest stories · Page 197

The city of San Francisco wants to give its residents the ability to propose, debate, and vote on budget items online — now all it has to do is figure out how to bring this concept into reality. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee and city Supervisor David Chiu announced at a conference this week that [&hell

With the iPhone 4S launch nearly two years ago, Apple introduced the Siri voice control system to its customers. At launch, Siri was a gimmicky feature at best, being released with bugs, a highly-computerized voice, sluggish content loading, and unreliable servers. In addition, Siri of 2011 was shor

In 2001, a pair of Italian programmers wrote a program called Ettercap, a “comprehensive suite for man-in-the-middle attacks” — in other words, a set of tools for eavesdropping, sniffing passwords, and remotely manipulating someone’s computer. Ettercap was free, open source, and quickly

In Zynga’s July 2011 prospectus to future shareholders, company founder and CEO Mark Pincus outlined his firm’s ambitious plan to take over the gaming world. “My kids decided a few months ago that peek-a-boo was their favorite game,” he wrote. “While it’s unlikely

Twitter Co-Founder Evan Williams has an ambitious new plan: to shift our daily reading habits away from consuming incremental news bites and towards engaging with enlightened ideas curated by an intelligent algorithm. Ordinarily, such a goal would seem utopian, were it not for the fact that Williams

As our lovely reader Nerdgazm pointed out to us, pop star Justin Bieber Instagrammedsomething most unsettling today: a script that suggests he may be auditioning for the role of Robin in Zack Snyder’s upcoming Batman vs Superman movie.P …yeah.P While I have no strong feelings about this,

Police in Buenos Aires have taken a 19-year-old man into custody on charges of orchestrating a hacker ring that stole $50,000 a month. The teenager, who has been dubbed a “superhacker” by the press, faces up to 10 years in jail if found guilty. Argentine police raided the home of the man, who has no

This week Netflix rolled out its video streaming service in the Netherlands where it hopes to build a massive user base in the years to come. One of the keys to achieve this goal is getting the rights to the most popular movies and TV-shows, and this is where pirate sites come in. Netflix Vice [&hel

These words are probably unfurling inside one of many open tabs on your computer screen. Perhaps one tab is for work, one is for chatting, and another is for Twitter. You probably even have some others open for no particular reason. This is the way we receive information and the way we communicate n

It wasn’t ever seriously in doubt, but the FBI yesterday acknowledged that it secretly took control of Freedom Hosting last July, days before the servers of the largest provider of ultra-anonymous hosting were found to be serving custom malware designed to identify visitors. Freedom Hosting’s operat

The internet is chuckling over a quirky news item which uncovered, perhaps, the most ominous flight plan ever: Flight 666 to HEL on Friday the 13th. It’s a series of sinister coincidences picked up by the Associated Press. In many countries, the number “666” carries diabolical biblical connotations

NASA’s unmanned LADEE rocket headed to the moon with an unexpected passenger, a small frog which was caught on camera launching into the air from its home in the marshy wetlands surrounding the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. One of three still-cameras setup around the launch site, trigge

Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, reiterated the tech industry’s call for greater transparency from the US government over surveillance on Friday, but declined to “pass judgment” on American spying operations. Speaking in New York, at an event hosted by the New Americ

PayPal’s commerce system wasn’t built for crowdfunding, and that has created problems for some startups — the company recently (if briefly) froze $45,000 of Mailpile’s assets, for example. The PayPal team is determined to set things right, however, and just announced that it&

No, the NSA can’t magically hack all iPhones and smartphones, but just like malware developers, it has more than a few tricks up its sleeve for retrieving data stored on mobile devices. Is your smartphone a sitting duck for government intelligence agencies? Fears about the security afforded by

Twitter, which began as a side project in a small but failing start-up seven years ago and grew into one of the world’s largest platforms for public conversation, is about to take its biggest step yet into maturity: selling stock to the public. The company announced on Thursday — in a tweet, one of

Earlier this week, Miley Cyrus rode a wrecking ball into the record books. Her new Terry Richardson-directed music video—in which she swings around naked on a wrecking ball while crooning about the vicissitudes of love and occasionally licking a sledgehammer—quickly became the most popular music vid

In Zynga’s July 2011 prospectus to future shareholders, company founder and CEO Mark Pincus outlined his firm’s ambitious plan to take over the gaming world. “My kids decided a few months ago that peek-a-boo was their favorite game,” he wrote. “While it’s unlikely

Dell Inc. (DELL) Chief Executive Officer Michael Dell won shareholder approval for a planned $24.9 billion buyout, capping a seven-month standoff with investors and gaining free rein to attempt a turnaround of the struggling personal-computer maker outside the glare of public markets. The founder’s

A nerdy loner snorting obscene amounts of cocaine out of a giant tube. An incredibly detailed Super Mario Bros. mushroom-transformation starring a canine plumber. A grotesque real-life Little Mermaid and a horrifically deranged Jessica Rabbit. These are the creations of Marlo Meekins. You may not kn

Last week (although by the time I post this it’ll be two weeks) BuzzFeed posted a highly successful “listical” 18 Everyday Products You’ve Been Using Wrong], it went viral and you can see why. The list is useful, involving household items some of which you probably use on a daily basis and has that

Think of all the things that tick you off about cable TV. Along with brainless programming and crummy customer service, the very worst aspect of it is forced bundling. You can’t pay just for the couple of dozen channels you actually watch. Instead, you have to pay for a couple of hundred chann

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced today at TechCrunch Disrupt that Yahoo monthly active users are up 20% to 800 million globally, including 350 million monthly active users on mobile. Mayer said those figures are increases since she took over as CEO in July of 2012, and that they do not include Tumb

Mark Zuckerberg joins Mayer in hitting back at critics of tech companies, saying US government did ‘bad job’ of balancing people’s privacy and duty to protect. Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo, and Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook struck back on Wednesday at critics who have charged tech

Inside a darkened conference room in the Miami Beach Holiday Inn, America’s most badass hackers are going to war – working their laptops between swigs of Bawls energy drink as Bassnectar booms in the background. A black guy with a soul patch crashes a power grid in North Korea. A stocky jock beside

The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data withIsrael without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals. Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a mem

The Moto X is a return to form for Motorola, and it represents the first device it has produced from start to finish as a Google company. But while the Moto X is a good smartphone in its own right, half of the story is Motorola’s surprising decision to move its final assembly to the US. This,

IDF13 Intel wants you to know that Moore’s Law is not dead. And to prove it, CEO Brian Krzanich rolled out his company’s next generation of process shrinkage at theIntel Developer Forum in San Francisco. “I’m here to introduce the first 14-nanometer PC,” Krzanich said d

At Apple’s iPhone presentation today, Tim Cook presented the following chart. At best the chart is misleading; at worst it’s disingenuous. The chart has no scale. It could be showing billions of iPhone sales or it could be showing hundreds of iPhone sales. Furthermore, showing sales cumulatively tac

The key to a good prank is to get the right people to pull it off. In this case, if you’re going to try to fool hundreds of onlookers at a UK mall, you need a very particular type of participant. Star Trek teleporters have been a fun part of the science fiction world for […]

The National Security Agency’s searches of a database containing the phone records of nearly all Americans violated privacy protections for three years by failing to meet a court-ordered standard, according to court documents released Tuesday. The documents showed the violations continued unti

Take the year and a half old Galaxy S III, modify it to be ultra secure, and then charge 1700 Eurosfor it. That’s exactly what just happened in Germany. This new Galaxy S III doesn’t have an official name, but the press release says it’s certified for government officials and that it runs a speciali

When a new Samsung product launches, can a patent-related lawsuit be far behind?BBC News reports that British manufacturer Dyson has filed a patent lawsuit against Samsung because its newest vacuum cleaner is allegedly a “cynical ripoff” of a Dyson vacuum cleaner model. At issue is an accusation tha

Documents released today as a result of the House v. Napolitano settlement document the systematic use of laptop searches at the US border to evade the need to get a warrant to read Americans’ email. They way it worked: Homeland Security Investigations has someone they want the goods on, but d

Pax Dickinson has been forced to resign as chief technology officer at Business Insider following an online firestorm over his long history of controversial tweets, according to a source who has been in contact with him. Dickinson got in hot water yesterday over his most recent string of tweets abou

A new “mockumentary” called The Internet Must Go launched today, in conjunction with the latest court hearing in the Verizon case against the FCC over the FCC’s net neutrality rules. I got to see a “preview” showing of the film last week with the filmmaker. You can see

Lawyers for Verizon and the FCC are stepping up Monday to argue over the future of network neutrality before the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday. The case, which is over FCC rules forbidding ISPs from discriminating against packets on their networks, has ramifications for entrepreneurs, cons

A few months ago I passed along the story of Barrett Brown, a young journalist/activist who relentlessly followed up on documents leaked by Anonymous, was targeted for this by the FBI, and who was eventually harassed enough that he cracked—which took the unfortunate form of recording a YouTube rant

Yahoo unveiled a new company logo last week, but it appears one of the designers who helped come up with the concept may have had other ideas. After the new logo was revealed, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer personally thanked design intern Max Ma for his help crafting the new design. But as Business Inside

Budgets for video games are a bit of grey area, but if this report from Scottish newspaper The Scotsman is to be believed, then Grand Theft Auto V is the most expensive video game ever made.P In a report focusing on the upcoming launch of Rockstar’s latest criminal opus, The Scotsman reports that th