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Netgear on Monday announced the Orbi WiFi System, designed to eliminate dead spots in smart homes Orbi's system "is similar to using a network extender, but Netgear has improved on this approach with a dedicated band for communication with the satellite devices," explained Bill Ablondi, a research director at Strategy Analytics....

Slackware is one of those Linux distros often described as being difficult to use. The Slackware Project version 14.2 released on July 1 does little to change that view -- at least, as far as installing it is concerned....

There were three stories that caught my eye last week that I think deserve some additional discussion. One is the alleged robbery of U.S. Olympians followed by questions of whether it really happened because their phones weren't stolen. There may be a legitimate reason for that, and it's one that suggests a lot of folks will be getting huge cellphone bills next month...

Responsibility for securing enterprise applications has been moving down the development lifecycle, and for good reason. It not only makes the enterprise more secure, but also saves companies time and money For example, the average time to fix a vulnerability in IBM's application security solution has dropped from 20 hours to 30 minutes, according ...

Oracle has been investigating a point-of-sale system breach that may be the work of Russian cyberthieves. Hackers compromised at least 700 computers on the MICROS POS system, used by hundreds of thousands of hotels, restaurants and retail outlets worldwide to process credit card transactions, Krebs on Security reported earlier this month.

Gawker Media owner Nick Denton on Thursday revealed that Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Kotaku, Jalopnik, Jezebel and Deadspin will continue with their current writers and other staff members following the company's sale to Univision, but that neither he nor Gawker.com will be included in the transition The Gawker sites will be joining The Onion, ClickHole a...

What's the direction of the software industry? As an analyst, I might ask this several times a week, but it's not idle curiosity. Things are changing, and today's events are signaling a significant shift. The rollout of Software as a Service and the emergence of relatively good platforms -- which will only get better -- suggest to me that the soft...

Cisco Systems will cut up to 5,500 employees from its 73,000-strong global workforce, the company announced Wednesday as part of its Q4 earnings report The restructuring will allow further investment in key priority areas such as security, the Internet of Things, collaboration, next-generation data center and cloud, the company said, along with opt...

Uber on Thursday announced plans to begin testing semi-autonomous vehicles in Pittsburgh later this month. Its first partially self-driving Volvo XC90 vehicles will be assigned at random to customers who use the company's app, according to a Bloomberg report. Each of the prototype cars will have an actual human on board to act as copilot and monit...

NSA whistle-blower Edward Snowden on Tuesday injected himself into an escalating cyberstruggle that could affect the U.S. presidential election. The reported hack of The Equation Group might have been a warning shot from Russia, Snowden claimed.

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday addedPNDA -- the Platform for Network Data Analytics -- to its project menagerie PNDA provides an open source, scalable platform for next-generation network analytics. It integrates data from multiple sources on a network and works with Apache Spark to crunch the numbers in order to find useful patterns in the data m...

Intel on Tuesday presented its virtual reality vision -- a vision that mixes virtual and real worlds into a kind of merged reality -- to developers attending a conference in San Francisco Mixing reality and unreality sometimes can be a recipe for disaster, but Intel thinks it will be a formula for success. At the center of Intel's vision is its Pro...

Salesforce has inked an agreement to acquire BeyondCore, a data analytics firm that already has integrated its latest release with Salesforce, the companies said Monday. BeyondCore will become part of the Salesforce Analytics Cloud, extending smart data discovery and advanced analytics capabilities across the entire Salesforce Customer Success Pla...

Internet of Things cloud platforms offer device makers and companies the opportunity to greatly expand the value of products and services. These devices are reshaping the value chain by altering product design and development, manufacturing, marketing, supply chain management and service after the sale. They also generate new support activities, such as product data analytics and security...

The Growing Scourge of Cyberbullying, Part 1 The digitization of everything has decreased the degrees of separation between everyone. While that interconnectedness has solved many problems, old and new, digitization has worsened one age-old problem: bullying. An online bullying epidemic is now pushing parents, teens, teachers and technology compani...

Symantec and Kaspersky Lab last week separately announced the discovery of a highly sophisticated advanced persistent threat that had eluded security researchers for at least five years A previously unknown group called "Strider" has been using Remsec, an advanced tool that seems to be designed primarily for spying. Its code contains a reference to...

Intel last week announced the acquisition of startup Nervana, in a bid to enhance the company's capabilities in artificial intelligence and deep learning. Nervana jumped out of the gate at its 2014 launch with a robust platform for deep learning, a framework called "Nervana Neon," and the Nervana Engine -- a groundbreaking ASIC chip scheduled for ...

Google on Monday launched Google Duo, a one-on-one video calling app that runs on iOS and Android. The app will be available worldwide in the next few days, said Justin Uberti, principal software engineer at Google....

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that is ready to take a breather, after finally upgrading to Windows 10, to peruse the latest announcements in the world of gadgets On our Start menu this time around are levitating smartwatch and smartphone chargers, a connected wine and cider maker, and a wearable with a safety focus....

Tim Cook gave a wide-ranging interview to The Washington Post on Saturday, discussing his five years at the helm of Apple. However, Apple fans looking for juicy morsels about new products won't find them in the Q&A Among other things, Cook discounted the bleak claims of analysts who maintain the smartphone market is in decline -- and Apple's fortun...