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Satya Nadella on Tuesday took Microsoft's helm as its new CEO. Formerly head of the company's cloud and enterprise division, Nadella replaces the retiring Steve Ballmer Cofounder Bill Gates shed his chairmanship of the company, moving into a new role as technology advisor. John Thompson has taken over as chairman.

Tuesday ushered in a series of generic top-level domains (gTLDs) that for the first time in Web history, include Arabic, Chinese and Russian characters The new gTLDs -- which are the suffixes to Web addresses, such as ".com" and ".net" -- were approved by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN.

By now, if you're an IT professional and you're in an organization that has the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard in your scope -- that is, you store, process or transmit credit card data -- you probably already know that an update to the standard, Version 3.0, was released late last year. With this update come a few changes to the te...

Unlike in 1984, when the Macintosh was introduced, there weren't any Apple ads at the Super Bowl this year. Instead, on the day after the Massacre in the Meadowlands, the company raised the curtain on a 127-second video celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Mac -- on YouTube Video for the project was shot entirely with iPhones over a 36-hour peri...

The holiday data breach at Target was opened up with stolen credentials from a vendor in the company's supply chain, according to reports that surfaced last week. That kind of attack is getting more and more common these days "About 80 percent of data breaches originate in the supply chain," Torsten George, vice president of marketing for Agiliance...

Sprint Chairman Masayoshi Son reportedly was scheduled to meet with the United States Federal Communications Commission on Monday to discuss a possible purchase of T-Mobile, although the U.S. Department of Justice already has signaled its opposition Both U.S. government bodies would have to approve of a merger, but they would view it from different...

This week in 2004, Harvard undergrads became the first group to use Facebook -- the social network launched at the college. Fast-forward a decade, and the company is a technology mammoth, with 1.23 billion users and profit of US$1.5 billion for 2013 Facebook is by most accounts a gargantuan success, and it is putting the pieces in place for its nex...

A YouTube video posted by Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott was blocked after what national media described as "mischievous" spam reports. The video, "Delivering on our Promises," was replaced with a boilerplate YouTube message saying that the video had been removed because of "a violation of YouTube's policy against spam, scams and commercial...

The interaction of connected consumer electronics and digital media is creating vast and limitless amounts of user data, now commonly coined "Big Data." Many new business models are forming around these data, but for advertising, data have always been at the core of its business. Data of all varieties and volumes enable stakeholders to invest proportionally to the value of their media assets -- whether TV commercials, video programs, gaming apps, online publications or advertising messages.

If you look back at what Steve Jobs did, he took a hard look at Porsche and Sony, and then he effectively built a better Sony. As Apple's star rose, Sony's star crashed, but Jobs never targeted Sony directly. He just figured out what Sony wasn't doing right, and he did that extremely well while Sony lost its way. He didn't copy Sony's produc...

Microsoft is ready to make its enterprise and cloud head, Satya Nadella, the company's new chief executive officer, and it may replace Bill Gates as chairman, according to press reports Nadella stood out as one of the stronger options to replace retiring CEO Steve Ballmer several weeks ago, according to Bloomberg, but the plans are not yet set in s...

When people talk about the customer experience, the thinking gets lofty quickly. The word "delight" is dropped a lot, people cite things like the American Girl Store or Nordstrom -- and soon over-the-top seems like what the norm should be. The experiences provided by the very best at creating experiences are great because they fit their product, t...

Just when you think you have found the sweet spot with an ideal Linux desktop distro, along comes yet another version to tug at your computing heart strings. In this case, it is LXLE.Lubuntu eXtra Life Extension, aka LXLE, is based on Lubuntu, a version of Ubuntu running LXDE (Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment). Trust me on this, you will not re...

Canadian authorities used information culled from a free Internet service at a major national airport to track the wireless devices of scores of travelers The Communications Security Establishment Canada, or CESC, received information from the unnamed airport's free WiFi system and then used that data to track travelers whose devices later popped u...

Facebook on Thursday announced next week's launch of Paper, a free app for iOS that combines user and curated content into a personalized news medium Users can create stories as well as receive stories based on their interests and organized into sections. Section stories are chosen by both human and machine curators....

Lenovo Group's US$2.3 billion deal to purchase IBM's low-end, commodity x86 Server portfolios, related resources and operations is an all-around win for everyone involved The sale of the IBM x86 servers has been rumored for well over a year, as Big Blue grappled with continuing pressure on its low-margin x86 servers....

Nintendo is planning a new product offering that will take the company beyond traditional gaming and into the world of health, it announced on Thursday Coming hard on the heels of a grim earnings report that prompted a pay cut for President and CEO Satoru Iwata, Nintendo's announcement was described with only the barest of details at a briefing for...

Shortly after Google's US$3.2 billion acquisition of Nest was announced, Nest CEO Tony Fadell felt obliged to clarify something for its users: Any changes to the company's privacy policy would be opt-in. Also, Nest would be transparent about those changes to its users, he said It's questionable whether Fadell can keep such a promise, unless there's...

Apple wants to use natural energy sources to keep MacBooks powered while on the move The company has won a patent for a laptop with a lid that features a second display, touch inputs and solar cells. The latter could help users keep their MacBooks' batteries topped up without having to plug in an external charger....

The Target data breach exposed more than 100 million customers, riled up the United States' intelligence agencies, sparked an investigation by the Justice Department, involved the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, triggered several congressional hearings, and led several banks to re-issue their credit cards The hacker has variously ...