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NSA official Rick Ledgett, who has been with the agency for 25 years, suggested offering whistleblower Edward Snowden amnesty, but agency head Gen. Keith Alexander squashed the idea, CBS reported Ledgett, who runs the NSA task force assessing the damage caused by Snowden's leaks of classified data, said about 31,000 of the possibly 1.7 million docu...

Some people are objecting to North American Aerospace Defense Command online updates on the whereabouts of Santa The Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood is particularly off-put by a video that shows Santa's sleigh being escorted by fighter jets (roughly the :24 mark)....

Innovation often comes slowly to the U.S. government. It has taken several years, for example, for federal agencies to get used to cloud technology -- and it will likely be several more before that technology is fully embraced at the federal level. That pace also seems to be the case for the federal adoption of Big Data and analytics, despite the significant amount of buzz over the past year.

The Federal Communications Commission last week voted to reconsider the ban on mobile phone calls during airplane flights, unleashing a collective cry of angst from travelers not wishing to be forced to listen to the tedious conversations of neighboring passengers Coupled with the Federal Aviation Administration's decision earlier this year that it...

Systems Performance: Enterprise and the CloudBy Brendan Gregg Pearson/Prentice Hall ProfessionalOct 16, 2013, 792 pp.ISBN-10: 0133390098; ISBN-13: 9780133390094Print Book Price: US$45.20eBook Price: $27.49Systems Performance: Enterprise and the Cloud is a must-have reference guide for any IT manager or sysadmin whose job involves working with comp...

Having been asked by a neighbor to help haul her kayak onto her SUV one weekend morning last summer and finding it quite difficult -- that's with two of us doing the lifting -- I saw myLifter as an obvious choice for this week's TechNewsWorld Crowdfunding Spotlight. myLifter is a smartphone-controlled mini-winch now looking for funding on Kickstarter...

SoftBank is considering a bid for T-Mobile USA, according to a new batch of rumors circulating in the press. Softbank shares were down 3.2 percent on Monday by the close of trading in Tokyo SoftBank acquired Sprint, the third-largest U.S. mobile phone carrier, earlier this year, and now may be studying antitrust concerns prior to bidding for T-Mobi...

Google has added to its portfolio of robotics acquisitions by snapping up Boston Dynamics, according to The New York Times The company has conceived research robots for the military and is renowned for its agile robots that have a firm sense of balance. One can run faster than any human.

Norway's government ruled that Bitcoins don't qualify as a real currency, and it will treat them as an asset -- as opposed to a legitimate currency -- that is subject to capital gains tax Many countries have been weighing in on how they will treat Bitcoins. Earlier this month, China said that its banks and financial institutions shouldn't handle th...

Smartphones hacked to run unauthorized programs or unlock features are being targeted by hackers and can pose a threat to enterprise networks, warned Marble Security Modifying a smartphone to enable unauthorized behavior -- called "rooting" in the Android world and "jailbreaking" in the iOS realm -- makes the mobile vulnerable to infected jammer so...

More than eight years ago, the Authors Guild filed a class action against Google on behalf of thousands of authors, claiming that Google infringed the authors' copyrights. The Authors Guild recently lost its case based on the fair use doctrine that's generally reserved for nonprofit use by academic institutions, libraries and the press. The lar...

It is a quirk of the data-information-knowledge continuum that data perceived by one person might be seen as information by another. The same goes for information and knowledge -- the frame of reference is important. You might even say it's all relative, and I don't think you'd be wrong This conundrum is all brought into sharper relief by yet ano...

I just finished reading a very interesting book by Intel Futurist Brian David Johnson, Humanity in the Machine: What Comes After Greed? Stock market trading systems, venture capitalists and NASCAR teams are all optimized toward a defined goal of winning, in most cases, an excessive accumulation of wealth, he argues. ...

Corporate America has been quaking in its boots since Microsoft announced in August that CEO Steve Ballmer would retire within 12 months and launched its search for a replacement Given the enormous task Microsoft's next CEO will face, the compensation is likely to be substantial, and the lure of all that pelf will not be easy to resist....

The era of Big Data has scary implications for both personal privacy and national security and puts our society at significant risk. The impact of a cyberattack on a large financial institution or a security breach at a government's secure data house, for example, would have dire consequences. As a result, cybersecurity is one of the greatest challenges facing the world today...

Ford on Thursday unveiled its Fusion Hybrid Research Vehicle, part of an ongoing research project on autonomous cars and other assisted driving technologies that can help lead to safer roads and less traffic congestion ...

NASA on Wednesday shut off one of the two external cooling loops on the International Space Station and has been struggling to fix it since The problem appears to be in the flow valve within a pump module....

China has "substantial evidence" on Qualcomm in an antitrust probe, according to a report in the state-run China Daily that quotes Xu Kunlin, the head of the National Development and Reform Commission's anti-price-fixing bureau. The Daily didn't divulge any specific details -- just Xu's confident assertion that Qualcomm is squarely in the crosshairs...

Finding itself at the center of a social media firestorm, Twitter on Friday acted quickly to placate users who were concerned about changes it made to its blocking functionality Thursday afternoon The way blocking worked prior to the change, was that Twitter would send a notification to a person blocked from another's profile. The blocked individua...

Amazon on Wednesday announced the expansion of its experimental grocery delivery service to San Francisco. It launched AmazonFresh in 2007 as a test in one Seattle neighborhood, gradually expanding into more ZIP codes in that area. This summer, it made its debut in parts of Los Angeles. With the addition of San Francisco, it appears AmazonFresh is...