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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....

Kaspersky Lab this week reported that criminals have been emptying ATMs and infecting them with malware dubbed "Tyupkin." About 50 machines have been infected in eastern Europe, and the attacks have spread to the United States, India and China, based on statistics culled from VirusTotal, Kaspersky said....

HTC on Thursday debuted two new products for photography enthusiasts. One offering, the RE, is an L-shaped camera that doesn't have a viewfinder. The other is a new smartphone, the Desire Eye, which boasts a 13-megapixel front-facing camera for high-resolution selfies ...

The U.S. National Security Agency's wide-ranging surveillance of people's communications worldwide is hitting America's high-tech industry hard, said panelists on Wednesday at a roundtable held by Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden in Palo Alto, California Wyden set the tone from the start: "This is going to cost America jobs." ...

Cylon is a classic Linux distro preconfigured with lots of tweaks -- kind of a Unity-less Ubuntu with bling.Cylon runs the classic GNOME 3 desktop on almost any hardware configuration made since 2007, but it is more suited to seasoned Linux users. Newcomers to Linux may not make an easy transition....

Verizon Wireless may be bitterly regretting the challenge Verizon made to the Federal Communications Commission's Net neutrality rules a few years ago. There's little doubt competing wireless providers are Verizon in 2010 sued the FCC over the rules it had put in place mandating that ISPs treat all Internet data the same. The D.C. Circuit Court of ...

Ads soon will arrive on Snapchat, company spokesperson Mary Ritti on Thursday confirmed for the E-Commerce Times The ads will not target individual users. Rather, they'll appear in a more generalized fashion within the service's Snapchat Stories feature among shared photos and videos, CEO Evan Spiegel said Wednesday at the Vanity Fair New Establish...

Thync on Wednesday announced it had raised US$13 million in funding from "top-tier" investors, including lead investor Khosla Ventures Thync's product, possibly called the "Vibe," is a wearable device that purportedly uses neurosignaling to modify a user's state of mind in relation to energy, calm and focus....

AT&T Mobility will pay US$80 million for refunds to consumers who were unlawfully billed for unauthorized third-party charges in a practice known as "mobile cramming," the Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday AT&T billed customers for hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription charges -- typically in increments of $9.99 per month --...

AT&T Mobility will pay US$80 million for refunds to consumers who were unlawfully billed for unauthorized third-party charges in a practice known as "mobile cramming," the Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday AT&T billed customers for hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription charges -- typically in increments of $9.99 per month --...

AT&T Mobility will pay US$80 million for refunds to consumers who were unlawfully billed for unauthorized third-party charges in a practice known as "mobile cramming," the Federal Trade Commission announced on Wednesday AT&T billed customers for hundreds of millions of dollars in subscription charges -- typically in increments of $9.99 per month --...

Apple's pretty much annual October new product media event usually is preceded by a cute invitation sent to journalists. The invitation typically includes a phrase or graphic element that provides a vague clue to the secret agenda of the event Presumably, this is to drum up excitement and speculation, in addition to creating an ah-ha moment when t...

BlackBerry is trying to rebuild itself by remaking its brand. A successful brand is one of the most important parts of any success story. However once a brand has sprouted roots, it's very difficult to remake it. It's easier to start from scratch. So what is the plan at BlackBerry -- and will it be successful? The BlackBerry brand has grown and evo...

We're hearing more from vendors about how new features, functionality, rewrites, and releases are being driven by customers -- by their direct experience using the software and competing in their various industries We're also hearing from customers and users, including the enterprise market, that they are increasingly involved and thus empowered in...

If Oracle didn't build another product for a while, it would be OK. In fact, no one might notice. The company already has thousands, and if the recent OpenWorld 2014 is any indication, there are enough to go around. Since I attended OpenWorld and it's my job to critique, I'll make a few observations....

Those wonderful hands-free communications capabilities now available in automobiles may carry the promise of making driving safer, but they're not fulfilling it, according to two studies conducted jointly by the University of Utah and the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety And forget about using your iPhone's Siri in the car, even hands-free -- it m...

Facebook on Tuesday further opened its Audience Network to third-party developers and publishers. It debuted the platform in April, positioning it as a mobile monetization tool that would leverage Facebook's 1.5 million advertisers and the millions of users who sign into apps using their Facebook credentials The platform is now available to develop...

Researchers led by Princeton University physics professor Ali Yazdani have developed an easier way to spot the much-sought-after Majorana fermion. "Theorists have proposed that Majorana can emerge at the edge of some superconductors as quasi-particles, and manipulating them can be used to test their properties as well as building interesting quant...

With summer behind us, brands and retailers are busy finalizing their plans for the upcoming holiday rush. Like last year, this holiday season will be a short one, with just 26 days between Black Friday and Christmas. With this condensed shopping period and digital commerce on an aggressive upswing, the holiday season is no time for retailers to t...

The United States Drug Enforcement Agency co-opted a woman's identity to create a fake Facebook page as a ruse to investigate suspects, BuzzFeed reported The agency posted racy pictures of the woman, then known as "Sondra Prince," as well as a photo of her young son and niece, to the sham page. The photos were taken from her cellphone, which the ag...