Articles by

Google on Wednesday announced the no-CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA, a kinder, gentler way of distinguishing human Web surfers from bots. The new system requires that users confirm their humanity by checking a box to the left of the statement "I'm not a robot." A privacy statement is displayed on the right....

How is broadband doing as a market? The two largest providers in the United States are Comcast and AT&T. Broadband started as a service for people to surf the Web. Generally, it was a separate service offered by the telephone and cable television companies. However, things are changing and growing. The changes that are occurring in the industry ar...

I have sympathy for customer service representatives -- really, I do. I know that customers can be ignorant, demanding and ill-mannered. On the other hand, CSRs should be trained to deal with bad-tempered customers. Also, CSRs should be trained to avoid provoking pleasant and agreeable customers to the edge of meltdown -- or beyond If your ears are...

Iran, which for decades has locked horns with the United States, is emerging as a cyberwarfare power that's threatening the world, Cylance warned in its Operation Cleaver report, released Tuesday Cylance has been tracking one team of roughly 20 hackers called "Tarh Andishan," which means "thinkers" or "innovators" in Farsi. The group is suspected t...

Several news stories have provided interesting insights into the Black Friday phenomenon and into customer behavior. The first story, from The New York Times, reports that sales slipped by 0.5 percent from the same period last year, despite sharp discounting and stores opening on Thanksgiving. Another story, also from the Times, shows how the Blac...

HP on Tuesday unveiled the EliteBook Folio 1020, a new family of business-oriented notebook PCs it claims are the thinnest and lightest in the industry so far The HP EliteBook 1020 and the ultra-lightweight HP EliteBook 1020 Special Edition both offer an ultrathin form factor measuring just 15.7mm, and they are designed with enterprise mobility in ...

Apple this week clomped into court to continue fighting a nearly 10-year-old class-action suit stemming from its use of digital rights management technology in iPods The suit originally was brought in 2005....

Cyberspies will flourish and hackers will target Apple devices more often in 2015 Until now, Russia, China and the United States have dominated the cyberespionage scene, but their success will start to attract new players to the practice....

With considerable media fanfare, Amazon on Monday announced its deployment of 15,000 robots as part of the highly automated systems in place at all 10 of its eighth-generation fulfillfment centers across the United States The systems reportedly have cut cycle times from an hour or more to less than 15 minutes and eliminated the need for aisles. Thi...

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday heard arguments in Elonis v. United States, also known as "the Facebook threat case." At the center of the case are a number of threats posted in the form of rap lyrics to a Facebook page created by Anthony Elonis. The targets of the threats were his estranged wife and an FBI agent....

The Monday after the Thanksgiving Day holiday weekend, aka "Cyber Monday," lived up to its name and more this year. Despite a ho-hum level of sales volume over the past four days, online sales on Monday were up 8.7 percent over the same period in 2013 by late afternoon, according to the IBM Digital Analytics Benchmark....

Upwards of 1.2 million people have used pirate sites to download Brad Pitt's World War II drama Fury, scheduled for release Dec. 25, according to Variety That was one of five films hackers leaked onto the Web following an attack on Sony Pictures' network last week....

Uber has disciplined the company executive accused of using an internal tool to track a journalist's whereabouts, it confirmed on Monday. The company offered no details about the nature of that reprimand, however, or about the possibility of taking similar action against another executive who publicly suggested the possibility of targeting journalists with a smear campaign...

The Madness of the ITC, Part 1: The Invisalign Case The U.S. Trade International Trade Commission has broad investigative powers on matters of trade, gathering and analyzing trade data, and providing it to the White House and Congress to help formulate U.S. international trade policies....

Google has teamed up with Intel to target the corporate market with its Glass eyewear, and it will use an Intel processor in the next iteration of the device instead of the Texas Instruments dual-core 4430 OMAP it now uses, according to The Wall Street Journal The partnership makes sense, given that Glass has failed to make much headway in the cons...

A batch of great online deals on Cyber Monday, on the heels of strong Black Friday sales at traditional brick-and-mortar stores, could make Microsoft's Xbox One video game system the big winner in the run-up to the holidays. The video game console headed into its second holiday season in second place to Sony's PlayStation 4, but Microsoft has intr...

It was the best of times and the worst of times for retailers over the 4-day long Thanksgiving Day-Black Friday weekend. If you were an online retailer, it was the best of times. If you were strictly a brick-and-mortar store, it was perhaps not quite the worst, but certainly worse than expected.

The United States International Trade Commission in May issued its final ruling in what has come to be known colloquially as "the Invisalign case." Here's what happened: ClearCorrect, a company based in Pakistan, in essence had imported digital models, digital data and treatment plans to make clear plastic teeth-repositioning appliances that are si...

OK, I know you are just back from Thanksgiving vacation, if you are in the U.S., and you likely are still stewing about what your drunk uncle said during dinner. So, since you probably are in the mood, I thought I'd toss out an idea that has been percolating in my brain that I plan to annoy folks with at my Thanksgiving dinner: What if Jaguar and Tesla merged? ...

Welcome, friends, to another installment of Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, a trip through the land of delightful and deplorable gizmos Among the items to grab my eye this week are portable chargers and espresso makers, a robot hack, a limited-function radio, and a bizarre-looking camera....