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Factory-supplied satellite navigation and entertainment systems can add thousands to the cost of a new vehicle. Plus, the speed at which consumer electronics come to market is significantly faster than a car's development cycle, so your in-vehicle equipment is outdated before the car leaves the new car lot Even an aftermarket OEM kit is in the thou...

Politics, rather than good old-fashioned theft, is increasingly the motivation of malicious hackers who attack websites using DDoS techniques Arbor Networks has found that ideological hacktivism was the motivation behind most distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks in 2011....

Sprint Nextel delivered its Q4 and full year 2011 financial results on Wednesday. The third-largest wireless carrier reported an adjusted OIBDA of US$842 million for the fourth quarter and nearly $5.1 billion for the full year 2011. The company's stock price fell after it posted an overall fourth-quarter loss. In 2011, Sprint added the iPhone to i...

Oracle is clearly not prepared to let go of the TomorrowNow case involving corporate theft it suffered at the hands of the service provider, which was acquired by rival SAP in 2005. In a legal filing this week, Oracle rejected the US$272 million in court-ordered damages from SAP. A jury found in favor of Oracle in 2010 and awarded the software mak...

Yahoo's chairman and three of its board members will step down at the company's next shareholder meeting as part of an extensive overhaul process Yahoo has been undertaking to please investors Yahoo has faced criticism from shareholders for some time. Years ago, its management refused a buyout offer from Microsoft that would have netted US$44.6 bil...

Google has brought its Chrome Web browser to the Android Market A beta edition of the browser is available from the app shop now for free, but since its operation is restricted to the latest version of the mobile operating system, Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich), only about 1 percent of Android's millions of users will be able to take the software...

Privacy continues to be in the headlines. Companies and governments are garnering and analyzing information that they obtain through means some find questionable in unprecedented ways Recently, I wrote a column about Carrier IQ's business of allegedly tracking cell data. Many readers use Google maps and rely on the Google Traffic tool to indicate w...

There's been a lot of activity on the Web and in our industry in the last week, and I thought it might be fun to try and tie at least some of it together. Much of it in one way or another involves Facebook -- or "FB," as the proposed ticker symbol suggests Part of an email from John Borkowski of WebiMax reads:...

If you spend a lot of time at your keyboard, no doubt you dabble a lot in listening to Internet radio. Radio Tray is a relatively new Linux app that can make tuning in to your favorite radio stations a new experience.

When the bright folks at Zeebox, a killer social TV site, decided to build their website, they naturally turned to cloud services because they are a startup and had to use their money wisely. They also turned to the Scala language and open source community because they had very specific scalability and performance needs, like processing 60+ TV channels (knowing it will grow to thousands in the future) in real time, and juggling the social streams of users from sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.

How much does a civil engineer in New Orleans make? What is the average temperature there? What are the differences in the trigonometric functions of sin, cos and tan? What is the exchange rate between the U.S. and the UK right now? Throw one of these questions at Siri, the voice assistant in iPhone 4S, and she will speedily reply. Fueling Siri is...

They're building people out of 3D printers now -- parts, anyway. LayerWise announced Sunday that it has applied a process called "additive manufacturing" to produce a titanium total lower jaw implant for facial reconstruction. The project was developed in collaboration with partners from medical industries and academia This is the first complete pa...

A hacker who was negotiating a ransom for stolen source code to a Symantec product released the data via peer-to-peer networks on Tuesday after negotiations fell through The code is for security vendor Symantec's pcAnywhere remote access software....

Amazon is planning to launch a retail store in Seattle in the coming months, according to reports published by Bloomberg and Good E-Reader. The endeavor is meant to serve as a pilot project for a possible chain of stores that would sell Amazon Exclusive books, as well as its Kindle Fire tablet, line of e-readers, and related accessories. This will...

Google has launched a new program devoted to fostering discussions and ideas among leaders in the science and technology industries. The project, dubbed ""Solve for X," aims to be a seeding ground for solutions to some of the world's most pressing problems The site is meant to inspire "moonshot" thinking, out-of-the-box technologies, and projects t...

Google's apparently taking a cue from movies like "Iron Man" and "The Terminator in designing one of its upcoming products: Eyewear that displays data and information to the wearer The Internet giant's glasses are in the late prototype stage, 9to5Google claims....

As Facebook prepares for an IPO of its stock that may value the company at US$100 billion, it's important to know what sport it's in and if, like the Chicago Bulls with Jordan, dynasties can last Michael Jordan was probably the best basketball player to play the game of hoop. He averaged 30 points per game in his career and did things on the court ...

Identity theft and privacy breaches are reported almost daily. For example, on Jan. 23, two utilities in New York reported that an employee of a software contractor allowed unauthorized access to a database containing social security, date of birth and other information. There was no indication the records were misused, the utilities said. That sa...

The rivalry between Google and Apple in the cut-throat mobile device world took a new turn recently when mobile-app support platform company Crittercism published a study that found iOS apps crash more often than their Android counterparts Crittercism analyzed more than 214 million apps launched in November and December that use its service....

One day, Hemi Weingarten's wife brought home some glow-in-the-dark yogurt for their three young children. He read the ingredient list to find out how the strawberries could be so red, and finding "Red #40," looked it up online. He was surprised to discover that it was a controversial chemical banned in parts of Europe ...