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The U.S. government is about to hold another wireless spectrum auction. Why is spectrum so important? If you owned a brand new car with brand new tires, you would still need air in those tires in order to drive, right? That's wireless spectrum. It's the air inside the tires that lets you drive. With...

Privacy expert and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ashkan Soltani will be the FTC's new chief technologist, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez announced Tuesday. "Ashkan is well qualified and was an excellent choice for the agency," said Ginger McCall, an associate director with the Electronic Privacy I...

Toll fraud -- the hijacking of a phone system to dial out to premium numbers in distant countries at several dollars a minute -- costs companies more than $4.7 billion a year, up nearly $1 billion from 2011. Major carriers have sophisticated fraud systems in place to catch hackers, and they can affo...

Yet another major retailer -- this time, office supply chain Staples -- reportedly has fallen victim to a data breach. More than half a dozen banks operating on the East Coast have seen fraudulent charges made at non-Staples businesses, such as supermarkets and other big-box retailers, by people usi...

Federal investment in cloud technology is picking up steam and should increase sharply in the next several years -- but that doesn't mean that government agencies suddenly have found that cloud migration will be either quick or simple. Federal cloud spending will jump from slightly more than $3 bill...

IBM's earnings slipped in Q3, sending its share prices sliding 7.11 percent to close Monday at $169.10. The company announced it is unloading its Microelectronics OEM semiconductor business and manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries. IBM will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over the bu...

Whisper, an app that purports to send messages anonymously, reportedly has been tracking the location of its users, including those who have turned off their geolocation feature. Even more incendiary than the location-tracking accusation is the allegation that Whisper has identified smartphones use...

While app developers generally aim to make money off their creations, this goal is often relegated to second-tier status by programmers who but the product first and foremost, as they should. Therefore, in order to minimize the time needed to devote to a monetization strategy, developers generally c...

Netflix stock closed Friday at $357, up slightly from the depths it plummeted to earlier this week. Shares fell almost 25 percent in premarket trading on Thursday -- more than $110 a share -- to $338. The plunge followed news of weak subscriber growth in its third quarter. Netflix reported $1.2 bill...

Apple on Thursday held a new product event on its campus in Cupertino, California, where the stars of the show were a thinner version of its iPad tablet and a 27-inch iMac desktop with a display that has 67 percent more pixels than a 4K TV. The iPad Air 2 will have an entry point of $499 for a 16-GB...

Facebook and Apple, companies already known for their generous employee benefits, are raising the bar even more by paying for egg-freezing services for their female employees. Facebook began covering up to $20,000 in these expenses at the start of the year, and Apple will beginning covering them at ...

Big news: The new wireless world in the United States, which has been led by AT&T Mobility, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile, will stay exactly the same. That's right -- Iliad no longer is interested in T-Mobile. There will be no changes -- for now, anyway. So can we finally forget about al...

Google this week announced that it has expanded its Google Shopping Express service to Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. It has renamed the service "Google Express" and added several new merchants. Members will get same-day or overnight delivery on eligible orders exceeding $15. They'll also get ...

Migration to cloud technologies is a challenging task for federal agencies -- even though they have increasingly high hopes for greater adoption of cloud platforms. Information technology managers at federal agencies are seeking to double the utilization of cloud technology for IT infrastructure, so...

Shine Technologies may well upend the Net neutrality issue with the launch of AdSight, an ad technology product in development. AdSight reportedly will allow wireless carriers to monitor the ads being delivered over their pipes. The data provided will be very granular, including who the ads are from...