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Police in Australia have arrested a 24-year-old who claims to be a high-level member of the international hacking collective Lulzsec The IT worker was charged with two counts of unauthorized modification of data and one count of unauthorized access to/modification of restricted data. In other words, he attacked and defaced a government website....

If Consumer Financial Protection Bureau Director Richard Cordray ever imagined that House of Representatives Republicans would eventually warm up to the bureau, that hope has surely been dashed by now. Rep. Jeb Hensarling, R-Texas, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, on Monday sent a letter to Cordray, saying that he would be barre...

Salesforce.com expanded its advertising initiatives this week with the launch of Social.com, a platform designed to help brands tie ad campaigns to what's trending on social networks The new platform bundles Salesforce.com features that resulted from the company's acquisitions of Buddy Media, a provider of Facebook ad software, and social media mon...

I can't tell you how many emerging analytics companies have contacted me since January. Every day it seems there is another company -- smelling blood in the proverbial water -- wanting to brief me I know why. Now that Big Data questions have transitioned from "how do we store all this stuff?" and "what's valuable in this pile?" to "how can we slice...

If you are looking for a fast, reliable, trouble-free, lightweight PDF viewer, and you stumble upon xPDF in your distro's app listings, keep stumbling. Chances are it will not run on your Linux configuration....

You can do a whole lot more than watch your favorite sports on television these days if you take advantage of a second screen. The concept is simple: The big TV screen provides the visual action, while your laptop or tablet dishes out in-depth analysis and social media commentary on the side Windows 8 has some superb apps for this purpose....

State-sponsored cyberespionage incidents tripled over last year, according the 2013 Verizon Data Breach Report. Ninety-six percent of those attacks were attributable to East Asia Verizon's study, which analyzed 47,000 security incidents, expanded its contributors this year to 19, including a wider range of worldwide law enforcement agencies....

Voice-based systems offer no real safety advantage over manual texting, according to a study sponsored by the Southwest Region University Transportation Center and conducted by the Texas A&M Transportation Institute The study, reportedly the first of its kind, is based on the performance of 43 research participants driving an actual vehicle on a c...

Twitter will soon significantly expand its advertising reach after the social network agreed to a deal with Publicis' Starcom MediaVest Group, one of the world's largest advertising agencies Starcom's top clients, which include Coca-Cola and Microsoft, will now win some of the premier advertising slots on Twitter, according to published reports. Th...

The market is popping champagne corks over Netflix's latest earnings report. A day after the company delivered boffo results and beat Street expectations for the first quarter, its stock has soared by some 25 percent. Among the goodies in Monday's report: Netflix posted net income of US$3 million, compared to a loss of $5 million a year ago. Pro...

Dramatic rhetoric, tiny fine German data regulators fined Google less than US$190,000 for collecting information from unsecured WiFi networks while it compiled data for Google Street View. The data scoop was, according to Germany's data chief, "one of the biggest known data protection violations in history." ...

A page of computer code being tested by Google may be pointing the way toward future integration of the Google Now mobile virtual assistant into the search company's famously minimalist home page The code was first found by Google Operating System, a blog that labels itself as "unofficial news and tips about Google." The page includes user options ...

From partial unpaid furloughs of personnel to travel cutbacks, U.S. government agencies are scrounging to come up with ways to save money. In that light, the Obama Administration's proposed 2014 federal budget for information technology resources is good news for agency IT shops -- and for vendors serving the market The administration has proposed...

Pegasystems has rolled out the newest iteration of its marketing application. New or enhanced features include improved ability to perform real time event-triggered actions and new B2B recommendation functionality. The key to understanding this app is its name, "Next-Best-Action," said Steve Kraus, senior director of product marketing....

Business intelligence could be one of the most essential but little-known secrets that drives executive decisions in the marketplace. ...

Did you know Julia Child was 37 before she learned to cook? It was a full decade later that she first set foot in front of a television camera. Before becoming the phenomenon we all know, she'd already had quite a career: She'd worked as a typist, an advertising copywriter, and later as a researcher in the intelligence community (for which she was awarded a civilian medal). ...

Samsung is researching a system that would allow consumers to use thought control on a tablet computer, according to published reports Together with Roozbeh Jafari, an assistant professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, the company is testing how sensors and brainwaves could let users turn on a Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, launch applicat...

Activist investor ValueAct Capital has invested US$2 billion in Microsoft, according to a report on CNBC Monday morning. Wall Street immediately reacted, driving the company's share price to $31.18 from its usual perch at $30.27 per share. That is the highest level the stock has since in the last seven months.

Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt defended the company's tax practices in the United Kingdom, where Google and a handful of other U.S. tech companies have been chastised for not paying enough taxes Google paid just over US$9 million in UK taxes in 2011, despite hundreds of millions in turnover. The company was able to pull this off by operatin...

Yahoo last week unfurled two new apps that should help strengthen its mobile bona fides: the Yahoo Weather App for iPhone, iPod and iPod touch; and Yahoo Mail Apps for iPad and Android tablets The new releases are in keeping with CEO Marissa Mayer's intention to pare Yahoo's extensive mobile portfolio to a handful of strong, user-friendly and prod...