Articles by David Jones

Red Hat on Thursday announced major enhancements to the Patent Promise it first published 15 years ago, with the intention of providing new protections to innovation in the open source community In its 2002 Patent Promise, Red Hat vowed not to pursue patent infringement actions against parties that used its covered Free and Open Source Software, or...

Developers at Amazon's secret Lab 126 have been working on audio-only smart glass technology that would allow users to communicate with its virtual assistant Alexa, the Financial Times reported Wednesday. The smart glasses would connect wirelessly to users' smartphones and transfer communications through a bone-conduction audio system that would n...

Amazon Web Services on Monday unveiled a new per-second pricing plan for EC2 instances and EBS volumes, which will take effect Oct. 2. The new pricing for EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) and EBS (Elastic Block Storage) used with EC2 instances will allow greater flexibility and efficiency for customers wanting to expand their use of cloud computing dat...

The Pirate Bay has come under fire for testing a Monero javascript miner as a possible means for generating new revenue to replace its current model of making money through advertising on the site. It used a cryptocurrency miner from Coinhive, essentially hijacking the processing power of its own users to help generate revenue, TorrentFreak report...

In a rare move, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission on Thursday confirmed that it has opened an investigation into the data breach at Equifax that compromised the sensitive personal information of 143 million U.S. consumers The FTC announcement came less than a week after Equifax revealed that an unknown party had gained access to names, addresses, S...

IBM on Tuesday launched LinuxOne Emperor II, the second generation of its open source mainframe computer system, at the annual Open Source Summit in Los Angeles The new model has a layer of security and privacy not seen in a Linux-based platform before, the company said.

Nimble last week announced a deal to partner with CircleBack, which offers an AI-powered contact capture and cleaning tool that updates contacts and scans business cards automatically The CircleBack tool captures email signatures in Gmail and G Suite in real time, automatically adding new contacts to a user's list. The tool photographs or scans bus...

Apple on Tuesday made its long-awaited iPhone splash, accompanied by announcements of major upgrades to Apple Watch and Apple TV. The company launched two new generations of mobile phones -- iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, and iPhone X -- with enhancements in photography and device security in all models....

The Apache Software Foundation this weekend responded to accusations that the massive data breach Equifax disclosed last week resulted from a flaw in Apache's open source code One of the largest financial data breaches in U.S. history, it exposed names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, birth dates, driver's license numbers and other sensitive i...

Apruve last week announced a strategic alliance with Matrix Payment Systems to create a turnkey solution to mitigate the risk of advancing a revolving line of credit to business customers Under the agreement, the companies will help businesses streamline the extension of credit with less financial risk and fewer back office overhead expenses....

Consumer credit reporting agency Equifax on Thursday said it suffered a major criminal data breach that exposed personal information of as many as 143 million consumers in the U.S. between mid-May and July of this year The attack exposed a range of sensitive personal data, including names, addresses, Social Security Numbers, dates of birth, and in ...

Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner, the brains behind both the new Vivaldi browser and the early Opera browser, on Monday accused Google of retaliating against his company after he questioned its customer privacy practices Vivaldi's Google Adwords campaigns mysteriously were suspended just two days after von Tetzchner's criticisms of Google's handling o...

The Document Foundation last week announced that it was rolling out LibreOffice 5.4.1 Fresh, the first minor upgrade to its LibreOffice 5.4 open source suite of productivity apps introduced earlier this summer. It also announced LibreOffice 5.3.6 Still, representing the sixth release of its LibreOffice 5.3 family originally introduced in January. ...

Microsoft and Amazon this week announced a deal that will let their voice-controlled digital assistants, Cortana and Alexa, engage in cross-platform communications, a move that could expand radically both companies' use of artificial intelligence. Microsoft customers will be able to access Alexa voice commands by saying "Cortana, open Alexa" on an...

Mobile app use has become a powerful habit among U.S. consumers, based on new research findings from comScore An increasing number of users have been spending their time consuming video, music and social media on smartphones and other mobile devices, but many are set in their ways and reluctant to try new apps, the data suggests.

Apple and Accenture on Tuesday announced a new partnership to develop iOS tools and services to help enterprises connect with their customers through iPads and iPhones. Accenture will create a dedicated iOS practice within Accenture Digital Studios, staffed by a range of visual and experience designers, programmers, data scientists and architects,...

A relatively new form of cybercrime recently has been plaguing American consumers. Thieves have been hijacking mobile phone account numbers and then transferring services to a different device, The New York Times reported last week Further, hackers have begun using mobile numbers to raid digital wallets and similar accounts, according to the paper...

Microsoft and Red Hat this week expanded their nearly 2-year-old alliance to bridge the gap between Windows and open source computing with the launch of several new initiatives to help enterprise customers more easily adopt container solutions. Through the new collaboration, customers will gain access to native support for Windows Server container...

Walmart and Google, two of Amazon's biggest rivals, on Wednesday announced a partnership that will let customers use Google's Home speaker and a number of voice-assisted mobile devices to shop online at Walmart. Their mutual goal is to eat away at Amazon's dominant share in the e-commerce shopping space and the smart speaker space, in order to cur...

A group of the world's top technology leaders, led by Tesla founder Elon Musk, on Sunday, published an open letter urging the United Nations to ban the use of artificial intelligence in weapons systems amid growing concerns that autonomous killer robots could wind up taking control The group of 116 companies, most of which specialize in robotics or...