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In examining airplane crashes, investigators often discover that it's not one thing that causes the disaster. It's a chain of interrelated things that go wrong: A mechanical failure or weather event can elicit the wrong reaction from the pilot, which worsens the initial problem and starts a sequence of events that can end very badly The same is tr...

The WiFi network you have in your home distributes Internet bandwidth using radio signals It's the same technology that FM radio, smartphones and television rabbit-ears use -- and it's susceptible to the same kind of problems, like interference, penetration and range....

It sounds like something out of science fiction: One person thinks about pressing the spacebar on a keyboard to fire a cannon in a video game, and another person across campus is compelled to press the spacebar for real, even though he doesn't see the game on-screen It's essentially that very scenario, however, that scientists at the University of ...

Twitter has hired Nathan Hubbard as its first head of commerce, with the goal of adding an online shopping component to its offerings. Twitter plans to provide partners with tools to more effectively offer their goods and services, perhaps then taking a commission on any transactions completed through the site.

The Syrian Electronic Army -- widely suspected of being comprised of pro-Syrian government hacktivists -- on Tuesday hijacked The New York Times' website and briefly took over Twitter's domain name system servers The SEA's main motive is to gain visibility for its cause, said Jaeson Schultz, a Cisco threat research engineer....

Nissan will be ready to begin selling multiple models of driverless cars by 2020, it announced on Tuesday. The company has been researching the technology for years, it said, in partnership with teams from universities including MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Carnegie Mellon and the University of Tokyo....

Facebook on Monday released transparency reports of government requests for its users' data Privacy groups hailed the move as a positive step forward -- rare praise for the company, which has had a checkered relationship with those groups over the years.

BlackBerry is looking to spin off its BlackBerry Messenger service into a separate business to compete with other instant messaging apps The company announced in May that it would make BBM, once available only on BlackBerry devices, available to devices running on iOS and Android....

Apple must hire an external monitor to ensure it does not engage in fixing the prices of e-books, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote said Tuesday, according to Reuters. Cote had found Apple guilty of price-fixing in a trial that concluded last month. Cote's latest decision followed discussions over penalties between Apple and the Department of...

One of the more interesting aspects of CRM Evolution, which was held in New York last week, is how many emerging companies attended and appear to be doing well. The big guys were there too -- either with booths or through attendance by senior people. You can get a false sense of the marketplace if you only attend Salesforce.com's Dreamforce, Microsoft Convergence, SAP Sapphire, or Oracle OpenWorld...

With countless high school and college students heading back to school at roughly this time of year, now is a good time to get acquainted with Zotero, a great cross-platform tool for collecting, organizing, citing and sharing research sources....

It's almost like we're going backwards. What with the escalating price-gouging by mobile networks for wireless data on the move, it still behooves us to use WiFi hotspots whenever possible. Who'd have thought we'd still be using public WiFi in this now 4G-enabled world? The answer, however, is that we are, like it or not, and most likely will be fo...

Amazon on Tuesday released the Mobile Associates API, new software that allows app developers to create ads for Amazon products with one-click purchasing The new release is an extension of Amazon Associates, an affiliate program created by the online retailer in 1996. Under the mobile guidelines, developers can set up ads with specific Amazon produ...

Facebook on Monday began rolling out a new feature that allows multiple users to upload images to the same online photo album, according to a Mashable report Whereas previously users could upload photos only to albums they had created themselves -- with a maximum of 1,000 photos per album -- the new feature allows up to 50 people to contribute to t...

The number of U.S. households connected to the Internet has risen, but 20 percent of households nationwide still don't have broadband access, according to a study released Monday by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Seventy percent of U.S. homes have an Internet connection, the study found, while 10 percent rely solely on connectivity via ...

Nokia sent a letter to India's commerce ministry threatening to leave the country because of Indian taxes The letter said that the "political risk" in India was increasing due to tax claims from the government. India's passage in March of a retroactive income tax violates a bilateral treaty between India and Nokia's native Finland, Nokia says....

Federal spending for information technology has peaked. It will decline at a gradual annual pace for at least the next several years, but cumulatively it will amount to a significant amount of money. However, vendors that can provide the IT services that are moving to the top of the government's requisition list will find solid marketing opportuni...

Real-time bidding, or "programmatic buying" as it is sometimes called, is remaking the online ad industry with its approach of matching supply and demand of ad inventory in real time against the attributes of any given viewer Now this trend is starting to creep into how mobile ads are delivered....

In the cloud storage competition for customers, a battle is raging over innovative software-only storage systems and wannabe innovators still hawking yesteryear's legacy hardware solutions. Dollars and performance are the battlefield stakes Nexenta, an open-source provider of software-defined storage solutions, is waging the fight with its flagship...

Chinese websites with the ".cn" domain name extension fell on Sunday to a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack, the state-run China Internet Network Information Center reported Two attacks reportedly were launched -- the first at midnight on Sunday and the second at 4 p.m., according to this translation of CINIC's post....