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The Linux Foundation on Wednesday announced that it has taken the OpenSwitch Project under its wing OpenSwitch last year began as a joint project of Hewlett Packard Enterprises, Broadcom, VMware, Accton, Intel and Arista....

Uber has nailed down a record US$3.5 billion investment from the Saudi Arabian Public Investment Fund -- the largest-ever investment in a closely held technology firm. The investment is part of a deal that will allow Uber to expand its Middle East operations. Yasir Al Rumayyan, managing director of the fund, will take a seat on Uber's board of dir...

HP last week introduced several new additions to its Omen by HP gaming hardware line: 15.6-inch and 17.3-inch laptops, a desktop PC and a 32-inch Quad HD4 display The laptops will be available next month at HP's website and at Best Buy stores, with a starting price of US$900; the desktop and display will be available in August at HP online and at s...

Digital rights and free speech advocates are up in arms over Tuesday's announcement of an agreement between the European Commission and four leading U.S. social media firms -- Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Microsoft -- on a Code of Conduct designed to crack down on hate speech. The companies have agreed to adopt a system that allows users to flag...

Persistence. It's what permeates the fabric of upcoming sci-fi odyssey No Man's Sky, and it's what will see the game well past its launch this summer While eager to set out into a digital space that's populated with 18,446,744,073,709,551,616 unique planets, gamers have, for the most part, expressed patience as the handful of developers atHello Gam...

Voyager Live 16.04 is a Linux distro that could be an ideal choice for everyday computing tasks -- but first it has to step away from its branding with Xubuntu....

Microsoft on Tuesday announced plans to sell 1,500 mobile technology patents to China-based Xiaomi, in a deal that will expand both companies' access to new markets Microsoft's office apps will gain a stronger foothold in China, while Xiaomi's smartphones will gain a stronger global presence....

After two years of declining customer satisfaction, thetelecommunications sector has halted the slide, according to the ACSI Telecommunications Report 2016, released Wednesday. There was a 1.9 percent gain -- to 70.1on a 100-point scale -- in satisfaction with pay TV services, Internetservice providers, fixed-line telephone services, wireless phon...

At least 419 million people around the world are blocking advertising on their smartphones, according to a report PageFair released Tuesday Most of those people -- 408 million of them -- are using ad-blocking browsers, notes the report. The use of ad blockers doubled in 2015, and the use of mobile ad-blocking browsers increased 90 percent during th...

Myspace and Tumblr this week emerged as the latest in a string of mega breaches that resulted in the theft of millions of user IDs -- not just recently but years ago "Over the period of this month, we've seen an interesting trend of data breaches," wrote security researcher Troy Hunt, operator of the Have I Been Pwned website. "Any one of these fou...

Salesforce last week announced its selection of Amazon Web Services as its preferred public cloud infrastructure provider. The deal is worth US$400 million "For the first time, we'll be able to deliver our core services -- including Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more -- for our international infrastruct...

The digital media world was abuzz last week when news surfaced that billionaire Peter Thiel, one of PayPal's cofounders, had provided financial backing for a defamation lawsuit against Gawker Media. The suit stemmed from Gawker's publication of a sex tape involving ex-WWE superstar Terry Bollea, better known as "Hulk Hogan." A Florida jury awarded...

The Rise of Drone Racing, Part 1 With lucrative broadcast deals and cup competitions now crowding calendars, the sport of drone racing has become one of the primary factors driving the surge in demand for consumer drones....

Antiquated IT systems are soaking up federal technology dollars and creating risks for both bureaucrats and citizens, the Government Accountability Office reported last week More than 75 percent of the federal IT budget in 2015 went toward the operation and maintenance of nearly obsolete legacy systems that use outdated software languages and unsup...

I joined a bunch of analysts in discussing Hewlett Packard Enterprise's next move at a secret conclave last week. The company had just announced the sale of its IT services, which basically undid much of Mark Hurd's work as CEO. (It already had sold off PCs and printers, more than undoing Carly Fiorina's earlier efforts.) Granted, HPE spun it like it was an acquisition (I'll get to that later) but this move leaves the firm even more crippled, suggesting there's more to come. ...

Black Duck Software this week released Security Checker, a free tool based on the company's Hub open source security solution Security Checker is a drag-and-drop, Web-based tool that allows users to determine if known open source vulnerabilities exist in the components used to build applications. It scans the code in an uploaded archive file or Doc...

Welcome to Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, where we gather up the latest gadget announcements, roll them in a burlap sack, and mosey on down to the beach for an afternoon. Yes, we're excited summer is finally here In this week's sunny ray of riches are Google's voice-activated at-home assistant, a gesture-controlled lamp, and headphones that analyze ...

Microsoft seems to have gone off the deep end with its tricks to get unwilling customers to upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8 to Windows 10. Doesn't the company realize this will hurt it? Does Microsoft think it can be abusive and win? Users are complaining loudly. Why doesn't Microsoft care about the disruption it is causing? A slice of the Mic...

A coalition of technology companies and advocacy groups earlier this week wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging it to open a public investigation into zero-rating practices, in which mobile providers allow some video or music providers to be excluded from data caps The group, which includes Common Cause, Etsy, Foursquare, Mozilla a...

Facebook this week said it would make several procedural changes to its Trending Topics feature to quell concerns that the results could be steered in a particular political direction, even though it has found no evidence of bias. The company will retrain workers in the Trending Topics department and institute additional oversight and control to m...