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News that a Russian gang has stockpiled more than a billion purloined user name and password combinations has revved up the Internet's reputation as a post industrial Wild, Wild West Just how much havoc will be raised by the gang remains to be seen. The data thieves so far appear content to use their ill-gotten trove for spamming, according to Hold...

Acer America on Monday rolled out a new Chromebook contender featuring a 13.3-inch display and an Nvidia Tegra K1 mobile processor With a battery life of up to 13 hours, along with a light, fanless design, the Acer Chromebook 13 is available with two display options: a full HD display with 1920 x 1080 resolution, 2 GB of memory and a 16-GB solid st...

There's a New Sprint in town. Last week the earth shook twice in Kansas City -- once when Sprint decided to end its pursuit of T-Mobile, and then again when it replaced CEO Dan Hesse with Marcelo Claure. What can we expect next? The first thing is this: Sprint is going to be a very different kind of company going forward. New CEO Marcelo Claure and...

Amazon, which has for some time been locked in a battle with publishing giant Hachette over the pricing of e-books, has broadened the battlefield to take on Disney. It has stopped taking preorders of Disney DVD and Blu-ray discs Amazon earlier this year stopped taking preorders for Hachette books. It also lengthened delivery times and reduced disco...

Atmospheric pollution may not exactly be among mankind's proudest achievements, but it's certainly an incontrovertible sign that we are here. Could something similar help us find civilizations on other planets? That's the premise behind one of several recently announced new approaches to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence....

Salesforce.com has debuted a new feature for its Salesforce Desk.com Support Center: video support for knowledge-based self-service offerings. Desk.com Video Support Center allows users to embed video content from any of the major video platforms in their online customer service offerings. There is also analytics support that allows companies to a...

Intel on Monday introduced its Broadwell processor platform to the world, and it is an impressive piece of technology. Stepping outside of its normal two-step process of first releasing the processor and then updating the platform, Intel is doing both this cycle, and the end result is a massive step forward in terms of size and power efficiency. Intel is stepping solidly into turf once owned by the ARM technology most commonly found in tablets and smartphones. ...

U.S. government agencies are struggling to manage the huge amount of data they generate or process, despite the goals of a program designed to operate thousands of data centers more efficiently. The idea behind the Federal Data Center Consolidation Initiative, or FDCCI, was to save space, energy and IT costs by consolidating woefully underutilized electronic data storage centers into fewer sites and servers.

Current approaches to Java application protection place security at the application or the network layer, both of which are problematic. The first approach has proven to be too complex, too time consuming and too risky -- in other words, "too hot." Meanwhile, network level security that consists of perimeter devices lacks the intelligence to know w...

IBM has announced the latest version of its neurosynaptic processor -- that is, a processor whose workings are inspired by the human brain Built on Samsung's 28nm process technology, it has 5.4 billion transistors and an on-chip network of 4,096 neurosynaptic cores....

The Peppermint OS is built around a concept that may be unique among desktop environments. It is a hybrid of traditional Linux desktop applications and cloud-based apps.This innovative approach puts the latest release of Peppermint OS 5, which appeared in late June, well ahead of the computing curve. It brings cloud apps to the Linux desktop with ...

Wireless carriers pose a threat to mobile phone security, researchers have disclosed Mathew Solnik and Marc Blanchou of Accuvant this week told an audience at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas that Android, BlackBerry and some iOS devices are vulnerable....

A rising tide of interest has sparked a series of competitive moves among the widening array of software and technology providers vying for a share of the rapidly expanding IoT market As with previous major IT industry trends, the enormous promise has driven a growing number of large and small players to rebrand and reposition their product and ser...

USIS, the contractor that did the background checks on Washington Navy Yard shooter Aaron Alexis and NSA leaker Edward Snowden, on Thursday reported that its computer systems have been breached "Our internal IT security team recently identified an apparent external cyberattack on USIS' corporate network," said US Investigation Services, which perfo...

Some Barnes & Noble customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day delivery of their purchases through Google Shopping Express, according to media reports that surfaced Thursday Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby described the teamup as a test and a way to increase book sales both online and fro...

Some Barnes & Noble customers in Manhattan, West Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area will be able to get same-day delivery of their purchases through Google Shopping Express, according to media reports that surfaced Thursday Barnes & Noble CEO Michael Huseby described the teamup as a test and a way to increase book sales both online and fro...

It was just six months ago that we saw what beacon technology could do on a wide scale. For Super Bowl XLVIII, the National Football League installed wireless transmitters in Times Square and at MetLife Stadium to send simple yet specific messages to smartphones: "bathrooms to the right," "snacks to the left," and so on. The deployment was "the boldest test yet" for the nascent technology, according to The New York Times...

Google on Wednesday announced that it has begun factoring websites' use of HTTPS into its search rankings, resulting in more favorable results for those that use the security-minded protocol "Over the past few months we've been running tests taking into account whether sites use secure, encrypted connections as a signal in our search ranking algori...

A Russian cybercriminal gang so far has stolen 4.5 billion credentials, of which 1.2 billion appear to be unique, Hold Security announced Tuesday The credentials belong to more than 500 million email addresses....

Google is hosting a conference in Sicily this week simply called the "Camp." This is a different kind of conference. It's not just about business. Attendees are from business, politics and entertainment -- they bring their families. I was interviewed by Fox News about what will take place and what Google can expect from this event. You may find this interesting...