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Home Depot on Thursday said it had excised the malware demon from its computerized payment system after its recent discovery of a security breach in which thieves stole records of 56 million credit cards Home Depot stopped short of admitting that an ongoing security upgrade may have contributed to the breach. Efforts to harden the system with enhan...

Hard on the heels of increased security measures in Apple's newly released iOS 8, Google this week confirmed that encryption will be turned on by default in the next release of Android Android has offered encryption for more than three years, and keys are not stored off the device, so they can't be shared with law enforcement, Google said. In the n...

Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle since 1977, has passed the leadership to not one but two successors: copresidents Mark Hurd and Safra Catz. Ellison will remain part of the executive cadre in the position of CTO. He also will serve as chairman of the board. The announcement, which came late Thursday, prompted equal parts reflection and spe...

With data thefts and cybersnooping making headlines daily, security has started to capture the attention of the disciples of the digital lifestyle -- and if the latest version of iOS is any indication, it's catching the attention of Apple, too Along with nifty features like Hand Off and Family Sharing, iOS 8 contains a number of significant securit...

News Corp. and Google have lashed out at each other as the EU reconsiders the terms of its proposed antitrust settlement with the latter News Corp. essentially accused Google of nefarious behavior in a letter to outgoing European Commissioner for Competition Joaqun Almunia over the EU's proposed antitrust settlement with Google....

Opera offers an interesting alternative to the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox Web browsers, but its recent Linux release leaves some room for improvement.Opera previously enjoyed a reputation as the go-to browser of choice for mobile environments. However, Opera Software, the developer, ignored Linux users for quite a long while until now. Oper...

Amazon on Wednesday introduced a slew of new Kindle Fire tablets and Kindle e-readers. It also unveiled a new OS based on Android KitKat. The top-of-the-line product is the company's Fire HDX 8.9, which sports a Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 quad-core processor, with each core running at up to 2.5 GHz, and a GPU that's 75 percent faster than that of the...

Logitech has announced four new products for the smart home in its Harmony family that let users control TVs, set-top boxes, speakers, lighting, thermostats, door locks, window shades and more Users can trigger activities such as dimming the house lights in several ways: by pressing a button on their remote; passing a sensor; using the Harmony mobi...

The Federal Trade Commission has updated a longstanding rule governing mail- and phone-based retailers to explicitly include e-commerce vendors as well, meaning that online retailers now must abide by a 30-day shipping requirement or refund customers' payments if they can't Since 1975, buyers from mail- and phone-based sellers have been entitled to...

The Apple Watch is not a watch. So what exactly is it? Or for that matter, what is any smartwatch from any other maker? No one has done a good job of creating a brand identity for the new segment yet. That leaves the space wide open. Rather than think of the smartwatch as a watch, we should think of it as a smartphone extension. It just happens to...

The wearables market heated up last week with Apple's introduction of its Watch and payment processing service, and the implications for CRM are interesting. First off, the announcement shows how very young the wearables marketplace is and how far it has to go. ...

With every new iPhone release, Apple delivers a handful of new iPhones to a select few industry journalists to review. How are those journalists and publications selected? First, they are known to appreciate the Apple aesthetic -- they have written dozens of positive reviews. No Apple haters allowed, which makes sense. It's important to set the stage for positive vibes when launching a new product -- a professional marketing launch with billions of dollars on the line is never organic...

Sony on Wednesday announced that it will post a loss of US$2.14 billion for the fiscal year, far outpacing the loss it previously forecasted. It will take a quarterly write-down charge on the unit as a result. The reduction is due almost entirely to diminished growth in its mobile unit.

Nintendo's Hyrule Warriors, which was released in Japan last month and will arrive in North America on Sept. 26, is a very different kind of game Nintendo called in help from two outside studios: Team Ninja, developers of the Dead or Alive series and Ninja Gaiden; and Omega Force, the creators of Dynasty Warriors....

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday hosted a roundtable discussion on the possibility of Net neutrality rules being applied to mobile networks. Participants in the talk included representatives from The Center for Media Justice, Consumers Union and CTIA-The Wireless Association, among others. The diverse group voiced a range of nuanced opinions on the subject.

Apple made the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system available for download on Wednesday, and while it looks familiar, it contains lots of new delights not only for fans, but also for its legions of developers "There isn't a significant change to the user interface, so if you already have iOS 7, you're going to immediately know how to u...

Panasonic on Monday introduced the Lumix DMC-LX100, a point-and-shoot camera that supports the latest in high-quality video -- 3840 x 2160 4K video at 30 frames per second -- as well as 1920 x 1080 HD video, which can be stored in AVCHD progressive or MP4 format The LX100 (pictured above) takes advantage of its 4K support to create 8-megapixel phot...

A new open-source project, PredictionIO, is building the MySQL of prediction The young company recently released version 0.7.3 of its open-source machine learning server. Unlike typical prediction algorithms and open-source libraries, PredictionIO is based on the concept of making machine learning available to software developers....

American teens spend a lot more time online than older Web surfers, yet it doesn't seem to increase their vulnerability to malicious activity Teens last year spent a little more than four hours a day on the Net, while adults in the 50-to-64 age bracket burned two hours, 41 minutes online daily, MarketingCharts found....

Security consultant Benjamin Mussler last week warned that the Kindle e-book library had a cross-site scripting vulnerability It appears Amazon previously had fixed the XSS flaw but two months ago reintroduced it in a new version of the "Manage Your Kindle" Web application, according to Mussler....