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China is in the middle of yet another crackdown on what it terms “online rumors”, as the government tries to rein in social media, increasingly used by Chinese people to discuss politics, despite stringent censorship. According to a judicial interpretation issued by China’s top cou

Google runs its web empire on computers the size of warehouses. Inside the massive data centers that drive things like Google Search and Gmail and Google Maps, you’ll find tens of thousands of machines — each small enough to hold in your arms — but thanks to anew breed of software that spans this se

Thanks to mobile technology, keeping track of your finances and the economy at large is easier than ever, even when you’re on the go. In fact, the...

Up is down and down is up if you’re watching closely enough to what has been happening at the NSA and with the Obama administration the last few years. The President that was supposed to make things more transparent, less paranoid, and better for the common American has been caught repeatedly doing

Oyster has already established a compelling elevator pitch: “Netflix for books.” Pay a monthly fee, get access to an unlimited number of 100,000 titles available in Oyster’s app. The app is beautifully designed and certainly rivals that of Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iBooks version. But whether its

It’s too bad for Samsung this time because Sony has revealed its latest version of the SmartWatch. Samsung was just a few hours late when it announced its new Samsung Galaxy Gear. All of these announcements were done during the IFA launch in Berlin this second week of September 2013. The Sony SmartW

Everybody’s been waiting for the smartwatch revolution to begin, and for major companies (other than Sony) to unveil their long-awaited offerings in this new era of mobility. Samsung announced this week their Galaxy Gear smartwatch. Qualcomm also announced a smartwatch called the Toq. Press an

December 2011, a month before the criminal proceeding against Megaupload became public, Kim Dotcom first revealed his plans to launch a new service to transform the music business. At the time the project was called Megabox and the similarly named .com domain was seized by the U.S. Government. Howev

The phone would be free, no wireless contract necessary, and sold on Amazon.com or through wireless carriers, according to unnamed sources. Amazon is going to give away its long-rumored smartphone for free, according to a report from former Wall Street Journal reporters Amir Efrati and Jessica E. Le

Yahoo said Friday that it has received 12,444 requests for data from the U.S. government so far this year that covers the accounts of 40,322 users overall. In its first government transparency report, the Web giant said it rejected just 2 percent of those federal government requests. Yahoo released

A university graduate says he was left humiliated after being asked to dance to a Daft Punk song during a job interview at an electronics superstore. Alan Bacon, 21, thought working at Currys in Cardiff would be ideal given his love of cameras, and he spent a week preparing for the interview. But in

Elon Musk, the world’s busiest rich dude/mad scientist, has just posted a video showing off the Iron Man-inspired 3D modeling setup he tweeted about last week. Because people don’t compare him to Tony Stark* enough, right? By combining the gesture-sensing Leap Motion controller with an array of diff

Automattic was replacing the web server software that underpins its popular WordPress blogging platform, and things weren’t going well. This was 2008, and the company was intent on moving WordPress to software in line with its open source philosophy. The world’s best-known web server, Apache, was th

Intel hopes to make computing far more efficient by introducing a technology that replaces conventional copper data cables with faster optical data links. The breakthrough required Intel to fit lasers and other optical components onto silicon chips, which usually deal only with electronic signals. T

US and British intelligence agencies have successfully cracked much of the online encryption relied upon by hundreds of millions of people to protect the privacy of their personal data, online transactions and emails, according to top-secret documents revealed by former contractor Edward Snowden. Th

The reporting on these documents was done jointly by The Guardian, the NY Times and Pro Publica. However, the NY Times coverage has one interesting tidbit: Intelligence officials asked The Times and ProPublica not to publish this article, saying that it might prompt foreign targets to switch to new

Bad news, America. All that effort you and your favorite companies have put into encrypting data was for nothing. After spending billions on research and supercomputers, the NSA can now crack almost any type of encryption according to documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Nothing is safe. Against the

After a series of digital attacks on news organizations by the Syrian Electronic Army hacker group, members of hacktivist collective Anonymous may have struck back by swiping SEA data and publishing personal information of purported SEA members. But the SEA, which supports Syrian President Bashar As

Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines” may have been unofficially declared one of the songs of the summer, but we’re happy to end the season with this amazing parody of the decidedly sexist hit. In response to the criticism surrounding “Blurred Lines,” an Auckland Univers

What makes a video go “viral?” After an elevator prank video from LG UK garnered over 19 million views on YouTube, LG Chile has used the same format for a new video. “Ultra Reality: What would you do in this situation?” presents itself as a hidden camera, much like a Candid C

It’s been a while since we heard supposedly smart health professionals, who are clearly addicted to making claims about addiction, discuss internet addictions. You may recall that a couple of years back, China declared that spending six hours in a day on the internet meant you were addicted. E

EBay is redefining convenience with today’s launch of the revamped PayPal mobile application. Don’t have any cash? Left your wallet at home? Credit card expired? No problem—just open the PayPal app to make in-store payments, transfer money to family, and keep track of your spending habit

Disgruntled businessman Hasan Syed made headlines this week after buying several promoted Tweets to blast British Airways for allegedly losing his father’s luggage on a flight to Paris over the weekend. Since posting several Tweets on Sept. 2, Syed’s rants have been seen by more than 50,

After 30 days of continuously changing its logo, the tech giant unveiled its final new design at midnight Thursday. “We wanted there to be a mathematical consistency to the logo, really pulling it together into one coherent mark,” CEO Marissa Mayer said. Mayer said she spent the majority of a Saturd

Twitter is great for real-time news and updates, but searching through your history for tweets on a specific topic — that’s much less efficient, even with hashtags. With more than 450 million tweets created every day, finding one from, say, 2007 may be harder (and more painful) than finding a

At the exact same time that Samsung was unveiling its new Galaxy Gear smartwatch (more on that from Reviews Editor Ron Amadeo later today), Qualcomm was making a smartwatch announcement of its own. While the company is primarily known for its Snapdragon chips, it will also be producing its own smart

Samsung today announced its Galaxy Gear Smartwatch, a wearable device that features a 1.63-inch 320 x 320 resolution AMOLED touchscreen, built-in speakers, and a 1.9-megapixel camera in the strap. It has an 800MHz processor, 4GB of storage, and 512MB of RAM. Samsung’s watch will support voice contro

Dan Shapiro has made his mark as a Seattle software entrepreneur, creating startups such as Ontela and Sparkbuy. Now, Shapiro, who is on leave from Google, is turning his attention to board games. That’s right. Shapiro, the father of 4-year-old twins, is creating a new board game called Robot Turtle

Tonight, at midnight Eastern Standard Time, Yahoo! will unveil its new logo. If you’re confused—yes, Yahoo! has been “unveiling a new logo” (read: comic sans rendering of Yahoo!) at midnight for the past 29 days. It’s all part of an unusual plan to evade the virulent public b

On September 1, Kim Dotcom published a tweet suggesting he has plans to enter the political arena. TorrentFreak caught up with the Internet entrepreneur who told us that a political program has already been drafted and potential candidates are being met. If all goes to plan a brand new party will ba

Forget eyes and fingerprints. The Nymi bracelet wants the future of biometric password protection to be your own unique cardiac rhythm. Future authentication methods need to be a lot harder to hack. That’s the idea behind the Nymi from startup Bionym. Instead of passwords, Nymi relies on your

Syria’s civil war and political strife inEgypt have thrown up new battlegrounds on the Web and driven a surge in cyber attacks in the Middle East, according to a leading Internet security company. More than half of incidents in the Gulf this year were so-called “hacktivist” attacks

BT, Virgin Media, BSkyB and Talk Talk are being asked to sign up to a voluntary code for policing illegal downloading Broadband providers are being asked to create a database of customers illegally downloading music, films and books, which could be used to disconnect or prosecute persistent offender

All those people staring at their tablets on airplanes, the buttons to their Economist app conspicuously displayed—are they more likely to spend the flight actually reading theEconomist, or slingshotting irate avians into green pig heads? Or maybe they’re reading about the latest coup in Africa, or

Digital bad guys are as concerned about return on investment (ROI) as any big business. That’s why they attack credit-card processing centers rather than gathering account information one credit card at a time. It’s also why they’re more interested in cracking online password managers instead of ste

The Yahoo portal in China contains a farewell message citing adjustments to its operations strategy as the reason for the change. Yahoo’s news and community services have shut down in China, following the closure of its email service last month. The Yahoo China home page now redirects users to

Verizon and Vodafone have finally announced a deal that’s at least three years in the making: Verizon is to pay Vodafone $130 billion for the British operator group’s 45 percent stake in Verizon Wireless. The companies’ boards have given their approval and the transaction should close in the first q

The good ship Galaxy Gear smartwatch is springing multiple leaks ahead of its official reveal this Wednesday, Sept. 4, and there are even leaks about previous leaks vying for attention. That said, there’s a lot about the device we can reliably say we know at this point, although what the device look

After helping Lenovo thrive in the wretched PC industry — while also making it the number oneChinese smartphone maker — CEO Yang Yuanqing earned a sizeable bonus. And like last year, he’s sharing the wealth with front-line employees, giving $3.25 million of his $14.6 million salary

Images of tech entrepreneurs such as Mark Zuckerberg and Steve Jobs are continually thrown at us by politicians, economists, and the media. The message is that innovation is best left in the hands of these individuals and the wider private sector, and that the state—bureaucratic and sluggish—should