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The U.S.Department of Transportation last week announced a partnership with Alphabet subsidiarySidewalk Labs to help cities ease gridlock using Google's vast array of technology and traffic data Sidewalk Labs will work with the seven finalists in the DoT's Smart City Challenge on a plan to help ease congestion and improve mobility to disadvantaged ...

TheFBI, the U.S.Department of Transportation and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last week issued a warning about the threat of automobile hacking Computers that control functions such as steering, braking, acceleration, lights and windshield wipers, as well as wireless technologies used in keyless entry, ignition control, tire p...

A federal magistrate judge on Monday granted the Department of Justice's request to delay a much-anticipated court hearing that had been scheduled to take place on Tuesday in Riverside, Calif. The court granted an indefinite stay, after the DoJ said it had found a possible method of accessing the encrypted iPhone of the San Bernardino terrorist wi...

Apple on Monday announced a pair of new products in old sizes -- the 4-inch iPhone SE and the 9.7-inch iPad Pro -- banking on user preferences for the familiar form factors to lessen their hesitancy to upgrade Although Apple's hour-long "Loop You In" event was short on surprises, it was slimmer on filler as well. Among the notable extras, Apple an...

Applied machine learning techniques can identify tweeters' behaviors in real time and locate them to within 100 meters, according to a paper Rochester University computer scientists published earlier this month. The research team focused on discovering patterns of alcohol use in urban and suburban settings to better understand where and how peopl...

Sony last week announced it would begin taking preorders for a cost-shaving virtual reality bundle Priced at US$499, the PlayStation VR bundle includes everything needed except the PlayStation 4 console. It contains a VR headset, cables, stereo headphones, a PlayStation camera, two PlayStation Move motion controllers and a pair of discs etched with...

Much of the analysis that I've seen regarding the U.S. presidential election season concludes that it is progressing like the Goldwater vs. Johnson election in the 1960s, when the Republican Party torpedoed its own candidate, ensuring a Democratic Party win. This is happening despite statistics that suggest Hillary Clinton is an extremely weak c...

Security researchers atPalo Alto Networks Unit 42 on Wednesday announced they had discovered in the wild a method of infecting nonjailbroken iPhones with malware by exploiting design flaws in Apple's digital rights management technology The flaw has been exploited since 2013 largely as a means to pirate iOS software, but this is the first time it's...

Apple has shifted a portion of its cloud services business from Amazon Web Services to the Google Cloud Platform, according to reports published this week The company reportedly maintained a smaller presence with AWS, as well as its existing relationship with Microsoft Azure....

Google this week launched a section of its transparency report to track the progress of efforts to encrypt the Web, by both the company and third-party sites estimated to account for about 25 percent of Web traffic The report will be updated weekly with information about progress the company has made toward implementing HTTPS by default across its ...

Consumers' understanding of what encryption does apparently doesn't determine whether they use the technology, with iPhone owners much more likely to use encryption than Android users Most Android phones are not encrypted, either by user choice or manufacturer design. According to a report in The Wall Street Journal, about 95 percent of all iPhones...

ProtonMail, which offers encrypted email, on Thursday launched free iOS and Android mobile apps worldwide, through the iTunes App Store and Google Play, respectively They have been in beta since August, company CEO Andy Yen said....

Instagram on Tuesday announced plans to dump chronological posts in favor of algorithmic recommendations Users miss about 70 percent of the content that flows through their feeds, which the company attributed to its growth and its system for ordering content....

Researchers last week discovered the first ransomware in the wild aimed at Apple's hardware platform. While the threat was subdued quickly, it exposed the weakness of digital certificates in authenticating software to devices The ransomware appeared as a legitimate application because it contained a digital certificate stolen from a bona fide Mac d...

Apple on Tuesday filed a brief arguing that the demands the Department of Justice has made in seeking a backdoor to iPhone encryption would have appalled America's founding fathers The FBI and DoJ want Apple to create new software code that would help government investigators bypass built-in encryption on the iPhone of Syed Farook, who with his wif...

Every few months, fans gather with excitement to see what Apple will introduce next -- so what can we expect to see from Apple on March 21? I think the most important thing will be fixing a mistake the company made two years ago. Apple will reintroduce a 4-inch iPhone. As smartphone sales slow, even Apple needs to cozy up to users. Slapping them i...

Periodically, a blatantly silly idea gains currency, spreading throughout society, and it has one of two effects: Either it scares the heck out of people, or they become enraptured with its seeming plausibility Last week, The New York Timespublished a piece set as a dialog between two economics writers, Eduardo Porter and Farhad Manjoo, titled, "A ...

Prosecutors for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Central District of California on Tuesday announced they had reached a plea agreement with Ryan Collins, a Pennsylvania resident, over charges that he hacked Apple and Google email accounts of more than 100 people back in 2014 The allegations stemmed from the official investigation into the hacking...

Microsoft this week announced that it would support cross-network play between its latest gaming console and other platforms Cross-network support would allow Xbox One players to engage in multiplayer gaming with friends and randoms on platforms such as Steam and the PlayStation Network....

Amazon has applied for a patent for selfie-based authentication for online purchases, according to a patent application published last week Using the technology, a prospective purchaser would take a selfie, and the image would be authenticated against an image database using facial recognition software....