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The third in a series of four simulated missions to Mars planned by NASA kicked off last week at a remote site on the Hawaiian island of Mauna Loa A six-person team, comprising the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation 3 mission, is inhabiting a dome for an eight-month study of the human factors that contribute to astronaut crew functio...

Amazon's tactics in its ongoing battles with content publishers, ranging from book publishers to Disney, are fast becoming a bone of contention The company has delayed distributing content from companies it's tussling with over content price points or its cut of the take. It's been steering customers to other publishers, at times overtly. Amazon's ...

The new super thin iPad Air 2 is starting to get tepid reviews, most of which begrudgingly call it the "best tablet" in the market, while admitting it's boring. Instead of talking up all the great things about how it makes their lives better or fun, the focus is starting to turn to the glaringly obvious annoyances about what it doesn't do well at all. These criticisms aren't coming mainly from Apple haters -- they're coming from Apple's friends...

The U.S. government is about to hold another wireless spectrum auction. Why is spectrum so important? If you owned a brand new car with brand new tires, you would still need air in those tires in order to drive, right? That's wireless spectrum. It's the air inside the tires that lets you drive. Without spectrum, you can't use smartphone features like apps...

Digital textbooks with open-licensed content -- and sometimes even complete open-source textbooks -- are two publishing models that are starting to change the way students and teachers interact with subject material The budget-busting prices of traditional printed textbooks and the ubiquity of mobile devices in schools have provided textbook author...

Privacy expert and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ashkan Soltani will be the Federal Trade Commission's new chief technologist, FTC Chairwoman Edith Ramirez announced Tuesday Soltani will succeed Latanya Sweeney in the position beginning in November. Sweeney is returning to Harvard University, where she founded and directs Harvard's Data Privacy...

Shortly after Apple Pay's Monday launch, some eager early users were unsettled to see duplicate charges on their accounts. Apple Pay lets iPhone 6 or iPhone 6 Plus users store credit card information on their devices and then pay for products using tap-to-pay terminals in stores, or via apps when shopping online.

Leeo on Tuesday introduced the Smart Alert Nightlight, a US$99 gadget that can detect when the alarm sounds from a smoke or carbon monoxide detector and send alerts to an iPhone About the size and shape of a coaster, the Smart Alert Nightlight plugs into a wall outlet where it does double duty as illuminator and listener for alarms....

Toll fraud -- the hijacking of a phone system to dial out to premium numbers in distant countries at several dollars a minute -- costs companies more than US$4.7 billion a year, up nearly $1 billion from 2011. It affects mostly SMBs, according to a report in The New York Times The Communications Fraud Control Association verified those figures, bu...

Television manufacturers are moving toward ultra highdefinition -- also known as "4K" -- which offers four times the resolution of HD. It alsooffers greater depth of color and faster frame rate. That means moreinformation must travel through the cable from the video source to theTV The current de facto cable, HDMI (high-definition multimediainterf...

When DiGiorno tweeted, "You had pizza. #WhyIStayed," Twitter lit up with criticism of the brand. The hashtag "WhyIStayed" is associated with domestic violence....

Magic Leap on Tuesday announced that Google was the lead investor in a US$542 million round of Series B funding for its secret endeavors Also participating in the financing round were Qualcomm, Legendary Entertainment, KKR, Vulcan Capital, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Andreessen Horowitz and Obvious Ventures....

Yet another major retailer -- this time, office supply chain Staples -- has fallen victim to a data breach, KrebsonSecurity reported. More than half a dozen banks operating on the East Coast have seen fraudulent charges made at non-Staples businesses, such as supermarkets and other big-box retailers, by people using Staples cards, according to the...

The designers behind the Hendo Hoverboard on Tuesday took to the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to help launch a prototype and bring it to actual production. The funding period for this project will run from Tuesday through Dec. 15. The team has set a Kickstarter goal of US$250,000 and already raised in excess of $100,000 in the opening hours....

Chinese authorities have launched man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on Apple's iCloud.com and Microsoft's Login.live.co, according to Greatfire.org Qihoo 360 browser users' local connections to iCloud.com are being rerouted to a dummy site that's identical to Apple's login page, Greatfire said....

Kickstarter on Friday suspended a crowdfunding campaign for Anonabox, a portable networking device designed specifically to run Tor. The campaign for the privacy-minded router, which launched earlier last week, was wildly successful. In just a few days, it reportedly garnered more than US$600,000 in pledged funds from thousands of backers. The Ki...

Federal investment in cloud technology is picking up steam and should increase sharply in the next several years -- but that doesn't mean that government agencies suddenly have found that cloud migration will be either quick or simple. Federal cloud spending will jump from slightly more than US$3 billion in fiscal 2014 to $9.9 billion in fiscal 20...

Following Edward Snowden's revelations about indiscriminate government snooping on U.S. citizens, many Net surfers would like to find a way to lower their visibility on the Internet. There are a number of tools in cyberspace that can help a soul do that, but they can take time and savvy to set up. That's why Kerry Cox launched the Sierra Project Th...

Aviso, a two-and-a-half-year old startup, has launched its first product, Aviso Insights. It is a sales forecasting analytics tool that uses machine learning and portfolio management frameworks to help sales managers answer a fundamental question: What deals can I expect to close this quarter? The application has a mix of features that allow a man...

IBM's earnings slipped in Q3, sending its share prices sliding 7.11 percent to close Monday at US$169.10 The company announced it is unloading its Microelectronics OEM semiconductor business and manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries. IBM will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over the business. The deal will close in 2015.