Obama Panel Recommends New Limits on N.S.A. Spying
WASHINGTON — A panel of presidential advisers who reviewed the National Security Agency's surveillance practices urged President Obama on Wednesday to end the government's systematic collection of log...
Bitcoin plummets as China's largest exchange blocks new deposits
The digital cryptocurrency has lost almost 50% of its value overnight after BTC China said it could no longer accept deposits in the Chinese currency following a crackdown on third-party payment firms
Apple adds gifting options to the iBookstore
If it's digital books your family and friends love to read, Apple has a gift for them and for you. After long being the company's sole online store without gifting options, the iBookstore now allows ...
Apple's New Mac Pro Goes On Sale Thursday Online And In Retail Starting At $2,999
Apple has just announced that its new Mac Pro computer, featuring that signature ‘Darth Vader’ design, will be available for sale starting tomorrow, Thursday Dec. 19 beginning at $2,999.
Apple forced to adopt new refund policy under Australian consumer law
Apple has been lying to consumers about its obligation to replace or repair faulty computers, iPhones, iPads and iPods, but has now promised to retrain staff and reassess claims stretching back two ye...
Research shows how MacBook Webcams can spy on their users without warning
The woman was shocked when she received two nude photos of herself by e-mail. The photos had been taken over a period of several months — without her knowledge — by the built-in camera on her laptop.
Sources: Target Investigating Data Breach
Nationwide retail giant Target is investigating a data breach potentially involving millions of customer credit and debit card records, multiple reliable sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The sources sai...
Top Products in Two Decades of Tech Reviews
Walt Mossberg on the products that changed the digital industry — Remember the Apple Newton? How about Netscape? Even if these products did not last until the present, they left their mark in the ...
BBM To Come Preinstalled On LG Smartphones
BlackBerry is keeping the hope alive with a partnership with LG. Announced today, the LG G Pro Lite will ship with BBM already installed on the smartphone. — This comes two months after BBM's Andro...
Microsoft pulls Dec 2013 firmware update for Surface Pro 2 as troubles become widespread
On December 10th, Microsoft rolled out a firmware update for the Surface Pro 2. Immediately upon downloading that firmware update, numerous users began experiencing an error code (80070490) when atte...
Opera Max beta compresses most of the data going through your Android device
Opera's mobile browsers are quite popular because of their ability to compress data, but it's unfortunately been limited to just that — the browser itself. This becomes less and less useful as smartp...
No One Buys Music on the Web Anymore. Except When They Buy a Million Beyonce Albums in Five Days.
Sales of music downloads, which were supposed to rescue the music business from the decline of the CD, have been flattening for a few years. Then things got worse: This year, digital sales were down ...
Distimo Stat Show 2013 Was a Huge Year for Android Gaming
For years, Apple has been the presumptive leader in mobile gaming, and it's still in pole position. But if global trends in 2013 were any indication, its nearest rival, Google Play, is putting the he...
Delta CEO makes it clear: No voice calls on our flights
Delta Air Lines CEO Richard Anderson wants to be clear: His airline will not allow in-flight voice calls even if regulators allow it. — Anderson spelled out Delta's opposition to in-flight calls in ...
The Case for a Compulsory Bug Bounty
Security experts have long opined that one way to make software more secure is to hold software makers liable for vulnerabilities in their products. This idea is often dismissed as unrealistic and on...
oDesk and Elance Merge to Create One Big Freelancer Company (But Still With Two Brands)
Elance and oDesk said today that they would merge. The companies have a lot in common — they both connect freelancers and gigs online — and they say they have a combined 10 million workers in 180 cou...
Copyright Strikes Again: No Online Access To UK Internet Archive
Last week we wrote about how Norway had come up with a way to provide online access to all books in Norwegian, including the most recent ones, available to anyone in the country. Here, by contrast, i...
Active Twitter accounts follow a median 117 users, 76% follow more people than follow them
Tweets loud and quiet — Writers who cover Twitter find the grandiose irresistible: nearly every article about the service's IPO this fall mentioned the heroes of the Arab Spring who toppled dictator...
Spotify brings a clean new look to the desktop
Spotify has started pushing out an update for its desktop client with a new aesthetic. We've tested out the refreshed app, and the starkest difference from the current version is a new darker theme; ...
Wearables Pioneer: How Wearing Tech on Our Bodies Actually Helps It Get Out of Our Way
One of the rallying cries for Google Glass is to make technology that's there when you need it, gone when you don't. It is intended to help people get on with their lives, without focusing on the tec...
Yahoo's Mayer Said to Warn of Internet Balkanization Over Spying
Yahoo! Inc. Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer warned President Barack Obama the backlash over U.S. spying threatens to Balkanize the Internet, as countries adopt different standards to thwart surv...
Google Glass Face Recognition App Coming This Month, Whether Google Likes It Or Not
Since Google Glass first appeared, its potential for facial recognition has been seen either as a privacy nightmare or as one of the headset's first truly intriguing uses. Google has declared itself ...
Twitter's Vine gets vanity URLs: sign-up starts Dec. 20 for verified accounts and Dec. 23 for all others
As a holiday treat, Twitter has announced that it will begin allowing Vine users to register for vanity URLs for their profiles. The race begins on Friday, December 20 at 9am PST …
Klarna Acquires Germany's Sofort For $150M To Build A Formidable European Payment Network
Klarna, the Stockholm-based payments company that has raised a whopping $250 million from top-tier investors like Sequoia Capital, is making an acquisition of its own.
Boundless, the free textbook startup, settles lawsuit with publishers
Since before it even launched, textbook startup Boundless has been dealing with controversy. The company, backed by just under $10 million in venture funding, offers free versions of expensive textbo...
Yahoo Introduces New Style Of Flickr Embeds To Seed Content Outside Of The Site
Yahoo has introduced a new cleaner style of photo embeds today. Just about everyone has used content from Flickr in various ways at some point, especially from its great store of Creative Commons lic...
It's official: China is the wild, wild west of cloud computing
Within hours of Amazon's announcement of a new Beijing region for Amazon Web Services, IBM jumped into the mix, announcing a new relationship with 21Vianet to offer high-end SmartCloud Enterprise + cl...
Amazon Raises Its Game Against Alibaba, Will Expand AWS Cloud Services To China In 2014
Another step ahead for Amazon in its bid to become the world's biggest cloud computing platform for businesses, and to specifically take aim at a big regional competitor in Asia, Alibaba.
Washington Post reports servers attacked, suspects Chinese hackers
The Washington Post's servers were recently broken into by a group of unknown origin that gained access to the user names and passwords of its employees, the paper said on Wednesday. — The extent of...
China Mobile chairman says still in talks with Apple on iPhone deal
(Reuters) - China Mobile Ltd said it's still in talks with Apple Inc to sell iPhones amid mounting industry speculation that the pair are about to announce a deal to net the technology giant hundreds ...
Suspend U.S. cloud data deal, European Parliament's civil liberties committee says
Europe should suspend the Safe Harbor agreement with the U.S. that allows American cloud firms to handle the data of EU citizens, the European Parliament's civil liberties committee has said in a set ...
Stealth startup Black Pearl Systems reveals Lyve Minds brand, personal media device
Black Pearl Systems, the startup co-founded by former Apple executive Tim Bucher, came out of stealth mode Wednesday, revealing its new name Lyve Minds, and a device called LyveHome that will help use...