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The case of a journalist charged Thursday with aiding the hacker group Anonymous is sending up red flags in two camps: employers who must worry about security threats from disgruntled ex-workers; and a digital rights group that is finding troublesome parallels with the prosecution of the late Aaron Swartz Matthew Keys, an online social media editor...

In case you missed it, 2012 -- the so-called "year of mobile" -- came and went pretty quickly. Now we simply live in a mobile world. E-commerce is moving to mobile devices more and more, and that trend is not likely to stop anytime soon. U.S. retail mobile commerce sales will grow from US$13.63 billion in 2011 to $86.86 billion by 2016 -- increasing from 7 percent to 24 percent of all retail e-commerce, according to eMarketer...

There is no denying it -- the technology sector is on the rise and jobs are ripe for the taking. Demand has shifted from the mainframes of 30 years ago to virtualization, opening up ample opportunity in the field. Today, it's all about optimization and collaboration, and IT decision makers are investing heavily in these new infrastructures. We fle...

Although it is far from "game over" for the video game industry, February saw a 25 percent drop in sales compared with the same period a year ago, according to an NPD Group report released Thursday. Hardware sales were down 36 percent to US$244.2 million. Surprisingly, it wasn't Nintendo's Wii U, the only new system released this past holiday se...

Redbox Instant, the joint venture between Redbox and Verizon to add streaming video services to the DVD rental company's offerings, launched this week to help the company better compete with rivals Netflix, Amazon Instant Video and Hulu The company announced a beta test period for the service last December, after announcing the Verizon partnership ...

Samsung used all the marketing and showmanship power at its disposal Thursday to take the wraps off its new Galaxy S4 smartphone, which highlights new ways for users to interact with a mobile device while improving the hardware that forms the foundation of its Galaxy product line "We've taken technology and innovation to help us get closer to what ...

The most significant change to U.S. patent law since 1836 -- or perhaps 1790 -- is being implemented on March 16, 2013. Part of the America Invents Act of 2011, it concerns the doctrine of first-to-invent, laws concerning the protection of original inventors, regardless of whether they were the first to apply for a patent. The new law awards inven...

IBM pushed deeper into the customer experience space with the launch on Thursday of its Customer Experience Lab. The lab brings together various elements of IBM's expertise, technology and staff to integrate mobile, social, cloud, Big Data and advanced analytics for its users. The end goal is to provide the tools and strategies to personalize mar...

Slices Pro for Twitter,a mobile app from OneLouder, is available for US$4.99 (no ads) at Google Play.

Nothing is official yet, but it looks like the new particle detected in July in experiments conducted at the CERN Large Hadron Collider may indeed be the Higgs boson or so-called "God particle," scientists announced Thursday at a physics conference in Geneva The scientists have analyzed two-and-a-half times more data on their discovery than what wa...

BlackBerry announced that an unnamed customer has placed an order for 1 million BlackBerry Z10 smartphones, making it the largest-ever single purchase in its history. Shipments are to begin immediately. BlackBerry executives hailed the order as a "tremendous vote of confidence" in BlackBerry 10.

Those who eagerly await the latest tweets from Lady Gaga, Kanye West and Justin Bieber may soon have one more reason to tie their musical interests to Twitter: The social network will reportedly use a recent acquisition to set up a Twitter Music app Technology from the music discovery company We Are Hunted, which Twitter bought last year, will repo...

Since it was announced months before its official release that SimCity would require an online connection to play, fans of the urban planning game have voiced their frustration. Their angst only intensified after this month's launch, which was plagued by crashes and server connection issues that made the game unplayable at times Game developer Ma...

Proposed changes to the popular Mozilla Firefox browser that would block third-party cookies have sparked the ire of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, which claims the move will hurt how small businesses use ads to attract customers Mozilla's proposal will require users to give their permission for the installation of cookies, the software files ...

Andy Rubin, the man who helped maneuver Android into the No. 1 mobile OS position, is stepping down as head of Android at Google. Taking Rubin's place will be browser and applications chief Sundar Pichai. The reshuffling effectively folds Google's mobile OS, applications and Chrome browser into one operation.

Australian prime minister Julia Gillard is taking flak from the nation's tech industry for accusing IT firms of abusing the nation's skilled migration program The "457 visas" program is designed to facilitate the immigration of skilled overseas workers to fill voids in the labor force. Gillard, however, said that the nation's tech industry is abusi...

There is much lamenting in some quarters that the U.S. has lost its road map in tech innovation. Many point to China as a country in a hurry to catch up to and even pass America in technology. They talk about how China is stressing tech-related endeavors and how forward-looking it is. I simply don't buy this argument. Why? ...

Microsoft was once rapidly growing like Google and Apple. Then it changed. It became a very large, but very slow growing company. These days it seems stuck, struggling to break into other businesses. By the way, the same thing is starting at Apple too. The growth wave Microsoft rode crested years ago, but it hasn't been able to catch the next wave...

The Time of a Mobile Ad's Life, Part 1 Does it matter what time of day a mobile ad is displayed? If a generation's worth of lessons learned from email marketing mean anything, the answer is... maybe. Truth is, there are coherent arguments to be made on both sides.

Microsoft's newest version of its Office product, Office 365 Home Premium, has a number of new features: You can install it on more than one computer; save documents online using tight integration with Microsoft SkyDrive; and store files offline as well as retain cross-device settings and themes via a new sign-in function. Plus, there are new feat...