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Change is good. Industry consolidation seems to come in waves, and the next wave seems to be starting. Together, AT&T and DirecTV will be a strong new competitor in the pay-television space. That's great. Unless traditional cable-TV companies get their act together, this merger could be another nail in their coffin This is a busy time in the indust...

It had to happen sooner or later. It turned out to be sooner. It is here. The Blue Pup Linux distro brings the Metro view to the Linux desktop.This arrangement is not a true Metro interface the likes of the much criticized Windows 8. Instead, it is a Puppy Linux derivative distro, or Pupplet, built around the Chromium Web browser with a Chrome ext...

If there's a list of retailers that have not exposed their customers' data to a security breach, it just got shorter. The most recent company to confess to being hacked is eBay, which on Wednesday began sending emails urging customers to change their passwords. eBay announced that a cyberattack had compromised a database containing encrypted passw...

Only the truly dedicated shopper realizes this -- and of course, anyone who follows the retail industry (I happen to fall in both categories) -- but most shopping centers in the United States are owned by just a handful of companies, called "real estate investment trusts," or REITs, if they are publicly held On the surface, this is irrelevant to av...

Many shutterbugs are familiar with this bugaboo: They shoot scads of photos of a vacation or event, but they never quite get the time to put the pics in a form where they can be shared with friends and family Google now has an app for that. It's called "Stories." Google on Tuesday added Stories to its Google+ social network. ...

Yeah, about that breakthrough between Google and European antitrust regulators The European Union's antitrust chief might pursue a tougher stance on Google than the one outlined in a February agreement, which was believed to have end -- finally -- the legal circus between the two sides....

If you're a daily Internet user, there's a good chance that you're also a daily Internet browser user. If your choice is Firefox, you may be tired of its look -- it hasn't changed much recently. However, Firefox allows you to customize its background look with more than 300,000 themes. Plus, with complete themes, a more in-depth form of theme, you...

The U.S. government could save billions of dollars in the management of information technology resources by significantly improving outdated and overworked networks. Federal agencies are making progress on a series of five key IT initiatives designed to improve the management of IT resources: data consolidation, virtualization, cloud computing, re...

Tailoring language translations for software documentation and graphical user interfaces can make or break an open source project. Localizing language is a unique undertaking, with a number of moving parts Developers often have to choose between tight development cycles or less harried ones that might let competitors advance first. The process of t...

As if it weren't easy and tempting enough already, Facebook recently made it even simpler to pry into your friends' private affairs on the social network Specifically, the Ask button -- which already has been available to those seeking more information about many other aspects of a given user's life -- now is an option when it comes to a user's rel...

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled its latest iteration of the Surface tablet at a New York City event. The Surface Pro 3 is slightly larger, with a screen size of 12 inches diagonally, instead of the 10.6 inches of previous models. It is also thinner, at 0.36 inches, and weighs a mere two pounds. ...

AT&T on Sunday announced it had agreed to acquire DirecTV in order to expand its consumer offerings across additional platforms and better compete in the ever-evolving telecom industry. The merger of the U.S.' second-largest wireless provider and second-largest pay-TV company would be worth about US$48.5 billion. With the inclusion of DirecTV's n...

AT&T on Sunday announced it had agreed to acquire DirecTV in order to expand its consumer offerings across additional platforms and better compete in the ever-evolving telecom industry. The merger of the U.S.' second-largest wireless provider and second-largest pay-TV company would be worth about US$48.5 billion. With the inclusion of DirecTV's n...

Anonymous Philippines, the Philippines branch of the hacktivist collective Anonymous, defaced more than 200 Chinese websites over a territorial dispute between the two countries The group announced the move on its Facebook page, offering a detailed list of all websites it had infiltrated....

After years of legal wrangling over their mobile technology intellectual patent rights in courtrooms around the world, Apple and Samsung apparently are ready to call it a day Representatives of the companies are in negotiations to settle their legal differences out of court, the Korea Times reported, citing unnamed sources.

The U.S. Justice Department on Monday kicked up a notch the Obama administration's efforts to curb China's economic espionage activity against American businesses A grand jury indicted five members of the Chinese army on DoJ allegations they conspired to hack into the networks of U.S. companies to steal information that would be useful to their com...

Another digital currency was brought to its knees last week when the administrators of Doge Vault had to suspend operations after they discovered their online wallet service had been attacked by hackers Following an investigation of the incident and the reconstruction of some of their damaged information from a backup, the administrators contacted ...

Gone in half the blink of an eye. Online customers, that is. Visitors are less likely to return to a site that is even 250 milliseconds slower than a competing site, according to Harry Shum, a Microsoft executive who led research and development efforts for the Bing search engine. That's an increment of time equal to about half the amount of time ...

A space-bound satellite designed to provide Internet access to remote regions in Russia and neighboring states was destroyed when its ride blew apart mid-flight The Proton-M rocket, affixed with a European-built Express AM4R satellite, seemed to be doing just fine until nine minutes into the flight, when it exploded some 93 miles above Earth. The f...

Pinterest last week announced that it had raised US$200 million in a new round of fundraising from existing investors SV Angel, Bessemer Venture Partners, Fidelity and Andreessen Horowitz. The latest funding puts its valuation at $5 billion, which is quite a tidy sum for a company that has little to offer in terms of revenue.