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Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, among his many roles, this week warned about the threat humans face from artificial intelligence AI is probably our biggest existential threat, he told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

Malware writers behind Koler, a bad app that attacks Android devices, have upped their game with a new variant of the pernicious program In its original version, Koler hijacked phones it landed on and wouldn't set them free until a ransom was paid. This latest strain of the malapp also does the ransomware thing, but it takes its malignancy a step f...

U.S. District Judge Alison Nathan last week granted broadcasters' request for a temporary restraining order against Aereo in New York. This is the latest setback for the would-be cable-killer service, which a Supreme Court ruling effectively shut down this summer. Aereo had utilized small dime-sized antennas to capture over-the-air TV signals and stream the content to subscribers over the Internet...

IKEA last week introduced a new desk that can be raised and lowered with the push of a button to accommodate both sitting and standing positions Part of IKEA's Bekant line, the desk serves as a hybrid alternative to traditional desks designed purely for sitting or standing, giving users the flexibility to have both options in one....

Slapping taxes on information and communication technologies (ICT) can cost countries more money than it brings in, says a study released Monday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Most of the countries imposing high taxes are lower- or middle-income nations in Africa, South Asia and America....

Tactile, developer of the free mobile enterprise app Tact for Salesforce CRM, has debuted Tact Premium, a paid version with ramped-up functionality. The company showed off the new version earlier this month during Salesforce.com's annual Dreamforce show....

Consumers who had been using Apple Pay at CVS and Rite Aid received a rude shock over the weekend when the chains turned off the technology at their stores across the U.S. Apple Pay enables mobile payments using the latest iPhone models or Apple Watch....

Fitbit on Monday announced three new fitness and activity-tracking wearables: the Fitbit Charge, Charge HR and Surge The Charge HR and Surge will be available early next year. The Charge is available now on Fitbit's site and is coming soon to retailers nationwide....

Amazon on Monday introduced the Fire TV Stick, a new streaming-media device that can connect to an HDTV's HDMI port and deliver video content from Amazon Prime Instant Video, as well as Netflix, Hulu Plus, ESPN, YouTube, Spotify, Vevo, Pandora and A&E. It also can be used to play games. New and existing Amazon Prime customers can pre-order the Fir...

In watching the illicit attempts of dealers and U.S. auto companies to try to kill Tesla, I have to think they are all wrongheaded. I don't drive a Tesla, but this kind of thing makes me really mad because it is so incredibly stupid. Tesla is as much an idea as it is a company -- and an idea that should be flowing through the car industry anyway...

Microsoft last week announced better-than-expected Q1 2015 earnings, giving pause to its critics Granted, net income registered a year-over-year drop, standing at US$4.54 billion or 54 cents a share, compared with $5.24 billion, or 62 cents a share.

This week in Gadget Dreams and Nightmares, a peek at newly announced gadgets that caught my eye, we're going back to the future Yes, there's an actual hoverboard on the agenda, alongside a larger Nook tablet, a high-end Kindle, smart luggage, and the tipping point for wearable tech....

Perhaps the most important thing you can do before buying business software is to understand what you really want. Software is different from buying a car -- a physical thing you can inspect and whose operation you understand. It's different from buying a commodity, whose characteristics are already clear and there's little variation from purchase to purchase...

Amazon on Thursday posted a net loss of US$437 million for the third quarter, or 95 cents per diluted share. For the same period in 2013, it posted a net loss of $41 million, or 9 cents per diluted share. Amazon had warned shareholders when it reported its bleak second quarter performance in July that the next quarter would be equally grim. Howeve...

The White House and roboticists have set Nov. 7 to get together in a workshop to explore ways of using robots to help in the battle against Ebola The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will cohost the workshop on safety robotics for Ebola workers, with Texas A&M University's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, or CRASAR. ...

Google on Wednesday introduced Inbox, a free mobile app that aims to separate the email wheat from the chaff. It's currently available to Android and iPhone users on an invitation-only basis The software is aimed at managing email on small screens, although once set up and running on a phone, it can be accessed through Google's Chrome browser on a ...

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on stage at Tsinghua University in Beijing Wednesday for a 30-minute Q&A session, the audience expected him to do what foreigners generally do: Utter a few words in Mandarin to acknowledge their culture, then depend heavily on translators Instead, Zuckerberg elicited gasps of approval from the audience when he...

Bluewolf, the consultancy that was founded to assist customers implementing and deploying Salesforce.com, has released its annual State of Salesforce report. The company started this practice a few years ago, using MIT Sloan School of Management personnel to interview Salesforce customers, and the methodology is tight So what's in the report? Jus...

Calculate Linux 14 is a distribution designed with home and SMB users in mind. It is optimized for rapid deployment in corporate environments as well.Calculate gives users something no other Linux distro makes possible. The Xfce desktop session is customized to imitate the look of the KDE desktop environment....

After declaring its intent when it launched roughly a month ago, Ello on Thursday made its ad-free philosophy official by incorporating it into a new company charter Now converted to a public benefit corporation, the social network has stipulated not only that it will never make money from selling ads or user data, but also that any new owners wil...