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Bad actors are exploiting an obscure technology found in telecommunications networks around the world to track mobile users and engage in fraud, and they could be costing carriers millions of dollars in lost revenues The technology, called "SS7," is a signal protocol developed in the 1970s for setting up phone calls....

Amazon and The New York Times this week engaged in a rehash of their dispute over the publication this summer of a story that describes harsh working conditions at the company NYT reporter Jodi Kantor misled Amazon, alleged spokesperson Jay Carney, as she failed to challenge the credibility of former Amazon employees whose negative comments formed...

Tesla Motors' stock price on Tuesday dropped more than 11 percent followingConsumer Reports' withdrawal of its favorable recommendation for the company's Model S sedan Poor reliability contributed to Consumer Reports' decision to withdraw its recommendation, although it noted that 97 percent of Tesla owners surveyed said they would buy a car from t...

The healthcare industry has become the favorite playground for many cybercriminals, suggests a report Trustwave released earlier this month Of the 398 full-time healthcare professionals surveyed, 91 percent of information technology respondents and 77 percent of nontechnical respondents believed criminals increasingly were targeting healthcare orga...

Beset by customer complaints and struggling to get approval from the United States Federal Communications Commission for a US$79 billion merger with Charter Communications and Bright House Networks, Time Warner Cable on Tuesday announced a virtual assistant The new Ask TWC Virtual Assistant lets customers use a mobile device or computer to type a q...

Liquid Lemur Linux offers a new twist on the usual Linux desktop environment experience.Developer Edward Snyder recently released the second alpha version of Liquid Lemur Linux 2.0. It offers a hybrid desktop experience that combines the Window Maker window manager with elements of the Xfce desktop.

The cybersecurity pact the United States and China agreed to last month hasn't stopped Chinese hackers from continuing their efforts to steal intellectual property from U.S. companies, CrowdStrike said Monday "Over the last three weeks, CrowdStrike Falcon platform has detected and prevented a number of intrusions into our customers' systems from ac...

Researchers at theMassachusetts Institute of Technology last week announced they had developed an algorithmic system to analyze big data that eventually might replace humans The system, called the "Data Science Machine," designs the feature set and searches for patterns in big data....

CEO Tim Cook on Monday revealed that Apple had signed up 6.5 million customers willing to pay for its Apple Music streaming service. Another 8.5 million users currently are giving the service a look-see during a free three-month trial period Cook, speaking at a digital forum sponsored by The Wall Street Journal, unveiled the hard numbers of paid su...

An "unhealthy ecosystem" has developed outside of Amazon and it has been harming the company's website, Amazon said in a complaint filed last week in Washington State Superior Court The suit, which alleges that 1,114 "John Does" placed fake product reviews on the company's website, follows a legal offensive Amazon launched earlier this year against...

Nintendo has started to distribute software development kits that software developers will use to erect digital experiences for the company's next game console, The Wall Street Journal reported last week Nintendo hasn't laid out in detail the ecosystem of third-party software that it plans to build around its upcoming console, code-named "NX." The ...

The reviews are out for Google's Nexus 6P and 5X, unveiled late last month, and they can be summed up in two words: Love them! They're described as "the best Nexus devices ever produced" and "Google's answer to Apple's iPhones," but those tired phrases are rolled out with every new Nexus or flagship Android smartphone, so what else is new?...

The Nintendo Entertainment System turned 30 years old on Sunday, and though it no longer leads the console pack, the entire video game industry owes a lot to its three decades of development. Its predecessor, introduced in Japan two years earlier as the Famicom, or Family Computer, was massively successful there. However, retailers in North Americ...

Some things in business are very clear and binary: A company succeeds or fails. A customer buys from you or from someone else. A customer returns for additional sales or leaves for a competitor Other things are indeed relative: Sales numbers may be double the previous quarter but still fall below expectations. A customer returns for additional sale...

The JPEG Committee last week met in Brussels to discuss a proposal to secure privacy information such as metadata for published pictures that includes geographical information enabling identification of people who have given anonymous interviews to journalists and pictures posted on social media intended only for a limited audience The proposal als...

Siri and other smartphone digital assistants may do your bidding -- but they may do a hijacker's as well That's what two researchers discovered when they began to tinker with the effects of radio waves on smartphones. They could use the waves to issue commands to any Android or iOS phone running Google Now or Siri....

The question that's been bugging me lately is this: Why hasn't Microsoft managed to break through with mobile consumer devices? While Apple has been breaking into the enterprise through consumer demand, Microsoft's enterprise tradition hasn't been helping with consumers. Case in point? Windows Phones Meanwhile, why do I care? After all, I'm an Appl...

Elon Musk must have been channeling ex-Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer last week, when he commented to the German Press (he does get that this Internet thing takes his comments global, right?) that Apple wasn't poaching Tesla's good employees, it was getting folks who couldn't cut it at Tesla. Apple apparently has been paying a lot for ex-Tesla talent...

Welcome, one and all, to another edition of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, the column that somehow musters the energy to scour the latest in gadget announcements for those that deserve our praise or scorn, while still full of turkey from this week's Canadian Thanksgiving In our post-poultry bliss, we look at a smartphone with a focus on encryption, ...

Google won an important legal victory on Friday, when the Second United States Court of Appeals in New York upheld a lower court's judgment in its years-long battle with the Authors Guild over Google Books The case "tests the boundaries of fair use," Judge Pierre Leval wrote in the appeals court's ruling.