Articles by Richard Adhikari

Apple's plan to release its App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy enhancement feature in early spring has set the ad industry on its ear and triggered a war with Facebook ATT requires apps to get a consumer's authorization before tracking them or the devices they are using....

An international group of scientists is demanding scientific journals demand more transparency from researchers in computer-related areas when accepting their reports for publication They also want computational researchers to include information about their code, models, and computational environments in published reports....

More than 80 percent of 650 cybersecurity and IT professionals surveyed by Check Point Software Technologies in July said their traditional security solutions either do not work at all, or only provide limited functions in the cloud This indicates that organizations' cloud migrations and deployments are racing ahead of their security teams' abiliti...

Illinois consumer Matthew Hufnus says that on September 26, he received a number of text messages on his cellphone from a company named DoNotPay, Inc., attempting to solicit his business Taken together, the messages read: "Hey there, it's Jen from DoNotPay -- we know it's a lot to ask for your payment details upfront, we really do. But here's a sta...

Cybersecurity firm FireEye, which has been prominent in the fight against nation-state cyberthreats, has been itself attacked by "a highly sophisticated threat actor, one whose discipline, operational security, and techniques," company CEO Kevin Mandia announced Tuesday This indicates the attack is likely state-sponsored by a nation "with top-tier ...

Service outage detection website Downdetector on Nov. 19 reported that the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Internet infrastructure service, which many websites and apps use as a backbone, was having problems Downdetector's historical data shows that AWS had also experienced problems on Nov. 2 and Nov. 16....

CRM giant Salesforce on Tuesday signed a definitive agreement to purchase enterprise communications platform Slack, as widely expected Under the terms of the agreement, Salesforce will pay $26.79 in cash and 0.0776 shares of its common stock for each share of Slack, for a total of about $27.7 billion....

The demand for smart home devices is projected to grow steadily over the next few years. Nonetheless, consumers should think carefully before making a purchase due to a trend of manufacturers phasing out "smart" products Last week, Google discontinued its Google Nest Secure home security alarm system without warning, though it says the device will ...

Hackers hit German enterprise integration and IoT platform Software AG with ransomware twice this month. On Oct. 5 data was downloaded from the company's servers and employees' notebooks, and its internal systems were disrupted. The hackers reportedly demanded more than US$20 million to de-encrypt the data....

Healthcare records were digitized to help prevent medical errors such as misdiagnoses and mistakes with medication, but electronic health records (EHR) have made it easier for bad actors to steal patients' highly personal information Cyberattacks on hospitals are "increasing exponentially year after year," Ellen Neveux wrote in secure remote access...

CEOs of three of the five "Big Tech" firms -- Facebook, Twitter, and Google's parent company, Alphabet -- are expected to testify on Oct. 28 at a Senate hearing on their control over hate speech and misinformation The Big Tech companies, which also include Amazon and Apple, have largely done what they want over the years, arousing consumer anger an...

When Amazon first proposed using drones to deliver packages back in 2013, it kicked off a firestorm. Google in 2014 disclosed it had been working on a secret drone delivery project, and NASA in 2015 announced it was working on a cloud-based unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) traffic management system Meanwhile, entrepreneurs began offering drones as a...

The United States Defense Innovation Board (DIB) has recommended that the Pentagon hire civilians to work from home who can handle classified information as a way of attracting people with technical expertise DIB, in its September 15 report, proposes a "highly limited, temporary and specific use of waivers for a small percentage of the workforce t...

Although software patches can be inconvenient and cumbersome for both enterprises and individual users, these fixes serve an important role in protecting computer systems, which are now vital to everyday life Earlier this month, a woman with a life-threatening condition passed away after hackers crashed the IT systems of a major hospital in the cit...

It's hard to beat being able to tell your sound system to select and play a particular song, order something online using just your voice, have your refrigerator tell you when you're running short of food, or have your office printer diagnose itself and demand service automatically from the vendor Features like this are driving the demand for smart...

Computer systems design and related services added 13,000 jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor's August jobs report Technology-related jobs figures for August are not yet available, but net IT employment in July was up by more than 203,000 positions since the COVID-19 outbreak, and there were more than 235,000 job postings by U.S. employ...

Corporate cybersecurity has been increasingly compromised since businesses and organizations began implementing work-from-home (WFH) policies in March as the pandemic continued its spread. Malwarebytes in June set out to measure the how corporate IT leaders reacted to the pandemic; and what strategies are planned as they look forward. The antimalw...

Data breaches were rampant in 2019, occurring at an unprecedented pace. However, the first half of this year has seen a reduction in the number of reported events. Reported being the operative word In the first six months of 2019, more than four billion records were exposed in 3,800 publicly disclosed breaches, according to cybersecurity firm Norto...

Municipalities throughout the United States have been switching from diesel- and natural gas-powered vehicles to electric vehicles (EVs), to cut costs and reduce damage to the environment, but the COVID-19 pandemic might slow that trend EV sales for passenger and commercial light duty vehicles "will remain broadly at 2019 levels," the International...

Who can forget Princess Leia's hologram asking for Obi-Wan Kenobi's help in the movie Star Wars? That was perhaps the best-known hologram of the many used in the Star Wars franchise movies, but the power and promise of holographic technology have been depicted in science fiction stories for years The starship Voyager's chief medical officer in Star...