Articles by

Airbnb recently filed suit against San Francisco over a new rule governing short-term rentals, which the city's Board of Supervisors approved last month An Airbnb-supported law adopted earlier this year requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city, but it's estimated that only about 20 percent of them -- about 1,400 out of 7,000 -- ha...

The number of mobile ransomware victims across the globe has increased fourfold compared to a year ago, suggests a Kaspersky Lab report released last week Kaspersky software protected 136,532 users targeted by ransomware from April 2015 to March 2016 -- up from 35,413 in the year-ago period, the company said....

While most businesses are focusing their efforts to capitalize on the Internet of Things in areas that will generate immediate cost-savings and operating efficiencies, a number of IoT pioneers already are leveraging a new generation of connected products to fundamentally change their business models There is no question that the safest bet in today...

Americans have expressed outrage at Wednesday's police shooting of Philando Castile, an African-American man, which happened in St. Paul, Minnesota, during a traffic stop for a broken tail light Castile was shot in front of his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and their 4-year-old daughter, who were in the car....

Bulgaria's Parliament recently passed legislation mandating open source software to bolster security, as well as to increase competition with commercially coded software Amendments to the Electronic Governance Act require that all software written for the government be Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)-compliant. The new provisions reportedly to...

CEO Elon Musk on Wednesday accused Fortune magazine of incorrectly reporting Tesla Motors' handling of a fatal accident that involved a Tesla Model S. The incident took place in May. Musk's online post is the latest salvo in a war of wars between Fortune and Tesla Musk accused Fortune, in essence, of jumping the gun in its reporting of Tesla's resp...

Alphabet's Sidewalk Labs, a sister company of Google, recently began negotiating a plan to help restructure the public transportation system in Columbus, Ohio, after the city won the Obama administration's national competition to ease traffic gridlock issues. Sidewalk Labs will leverage its cloud-based transportation data to help Columbus implemen...

The United States Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into philanderers' dating site Ashley Madison, Reuters reported Tuesday The company, which suffered a massive data breach last year that resulted in extortion attempts and ruined lives, as well as class-action lawsuits, earlier this week announced that it hired a new CEO and a...

Although an FBI investigation concluded that Hillary Clinton's use of a separate email system during her tenure as Secretary of State may have violated federal law, Director James B. Comey on Tuesday recommended against pursuing any criminal prosecution "Although there is evidence of potential violations of the statutes regarding the handling of cl...

More than 85 million Android devices worldwide have been taken over by the Yingmob, a group of China-based cybercriminals who created the HummingBad malware, according to a Check Point report released last week HummingBad establishes a persistent rootkit on Android devices, generates fraudulent ad revenue, and installs additional fraudulent apps....

This summer has started out to be anything but a somnolent day at the beach. The Brexit vote for the UK to leave the EU is enough to disturb your slumber, and that's not the only thing on the plate. To be frank, it appears we are at one of those major historical transition points that might happen a few times in any of our lives. Without being ove...

Apple and Donate Life America on Tuesday announced a partnership to offer an organ donation app when the new iOS 10 update becomes available this fall. iPhone users will be able to register for the program with a couple taps of a button. They'll be able to sign up to make organ, eye or tissue donations, automatically entering their information in ...

BlackBerry on Tuesday announced it will cease manufacturing the BlackBerry Classic "The Classic has long surpassed the average lifespan for a smartphone in today's market," noted COO Ralph Pini. "To keep innovating and advancing our portfolio, we are updating our smartphone lineup with state-of-the-art devices."

Symantec last week confirmed that it had developed fixes for a series of eight vulnerabilities found in its portfolio of security products for enterprise and consumer customers, after an outside researcher identified the problem. A researcher from Google's Project Zero alerted the company, but there was no evidence of the vulnerability being explo...

With breaches of consumer data occurring all too frequently, who could be against proposals to improve privacy on the Internet? Well, a broad swath of the e-commerce sector, ranging from CTIA-The Wireless Association to USTelecom and the National Retail Federation, is strongly opposed to a recent proposal from the Federal Communications Commission ...

Every once in a while I run into a little company that comes at an existing market as if the folks already in it are idiots -- and sometimes they are right. Here's the thing: What often happens is a company breaks out in a segment, and everyone groups around that company's ideas and emulates them Few initially stand up and say, "Wait a minute -- wh...

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that occasionally takes a break from gulping water every 4 seconds now summer's here to run down the latest gadget announcements ...

Google on Wednesday unveiled its latest investment in long-haul undersea fiber optic cabling. Dubbed the "Faster Cable System," it is the highest-capacity undersea cable built to date, providing 60-Tbps (terabits per second) bandwidth between the United States and Japan. It is about 10 million times faster than an average cable modem, Google noted...

It's summer, and Walmart and Amazon are celebrating by escalating their e-commerce competition Amazon on Thursday announced it would hold its second annual Prime Day on July 12. A shopping day for Amazon Prime members worldwide, it is billed as the biggest global Amazon event ever. The company will offer more than 100,000 bargains, with new deals p...

Devialet, the French company that has built a reputation in the audio market for high-end wireless speakers, on Tuesday announced its newest addition: the US$3,000 Phantom Gold The Phantom Gold looks something like a futuristic Faberge egg, and it's priced like one, too....