Items tagged with Misc
Perhaps you’ve heard this before, but Amazon is rumored to be launching its own set top box in a bid to gobble up more TV content and streaming market share. The purported Amazon box would be designed to compete with the likes of Roku and Apple TV by allowing users to stream content with a unit that’s not tied to a cable or satellite...
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Just days before Facebook acquired cross-platform mobile messaging service WhatsApp for a package totaling $19 billion, Google made a lesser bid for the company. According to both CNN Money and The Information, Google offered WhatsApp an acquisition deal worth $10 billion. Of further note, The Information also said that Google had actually...
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Most of the country has been gazing jealously at the Google Fiber rollouts in three lucky locales, but as many as 34 cities in 9 metro areas will be joining the fun relatively soon. “Now that we’ve learned a lot from our Google Fiber projects in Kansas City, Austin and Provo, we want to help build more ultra-fast networks. So we’ve...
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WhatsApp is a popular cross-platform mobile messaging app, and it now belongs to Mark Zuckerberg and Co., although the acquisition is leaving Facebook quite a bit lighter in the wallet; the WhatsApp deal is for $19 billion. That’s $4 billion in cash, $12 billion in Facebook shares, and another $3 billion in...
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The FCC’s effort to impose net neutrality rules suffered a setback when a federal court threw out some important sections of the measures, but as the agency fights back against Verizon, et al, it has a powerful ally in the White House. Well, sort of. In a statement on the We The People blog (in response to a...
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3D Systems announced that it has collaborated with EksoBionics to build a 3D-printed hybrid exoskeleton robotic suit that ostensibly will allow users with paralysis of the lower extremities to walk upright. A woman named Amanda Boxel was the test pilot for the suit (although this isn’t the first time she’s...
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Philips is developing an intelligent lighting system for supermarkets that communicate with your smartphone to guide you through the store, give you deals on products, show you recipes relevant to the items you’re trying to find, and more. In addition to offering efficient LED lighting that the company says will...
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Another day, another hack. This time it was the Forbes website that was compromised, and once again it’s the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) that claimed responsibility for the hack. Forbes posted a message on Facebook announcing the hack and said that anyone who’s registered with the site should change their...
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If you’ve ever wondered how exactly NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden was able to access as much as he did, it’s apparently because he had help. According to an L.A. Times report, at least three other NSA workers helped him--wittingly or not. An NSA memo says that one of the three was an active-duty...
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As we’ve all had some time to digest the potential reality of a Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, there’s some thought out there that the two giants could be making a move specifically designed to target cord-cutters, those brave souls who’ve given the one-finger salute to traditional pay-TV...
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If you’ve ever used Kickstarter, you should change your password immediately, as the site reports that it has been hacked. “On Wednesday night, law enforcement officials contacted Kickstarter and alerted us that hackers had sought and gained unauthorized access to some of our customers' data,” reads...
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Even as the Google Fiber gigabit Internet service pilot programs are rolling along, Google already has its sights set on loftier goals--namely, Internet speeds of 10 gigabits per second. In remarks made at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet conference, Google CFO Patrick Pichette said that Google is already...
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If you live in San Francisco, Washington D.C., New York, L.A., Atlanta, Miami, or Boston, you’ve been looking for love in the top six wrong places. Or put another way, you’re least likely to find that special someone in those cities, according to Facebook. The Wall Street Journal asked Facebook to run some...
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Senate democrats introduced new legislation called the Smartphone Theft Prevention Act (senate bill 2032), which would mandate a killswitch option on all smartphones. The big four wireless carriers as well as the CTIA are all on record as being against such measures, but if the bill passes, they won’t have much...
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Although news about Target’s huge data breach broke almost two months ago, the post-mortem has persisted, and a security firm has posted a detailed breakdown of what went wrong. The story is unnerving, to say the least, as it’s not so much about system-wide failures or anything so big as it is about how...
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Just when you thought Rovio was out of ideas for new Angry Birds titles, another one is coming this fall called “Angry Birds: Stella”, a game apparently targeted toward girls that features the pink bird and a new cast of characters. Although the tag line on the press image for the game--”Best friends forever, most of the...
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Google’s quest to purchase Nest, maker of smart, connected thermostats and smoke detectors, is complete. The search giant’s $3.2 acquisition has been approved, per a Google regulatory filing. The move brings Nest and all of its human resources, most notably former Apple senior VP Tony Fadell, under the...
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You know those blank tiles on your Firefox homepage when you first start using the web browser? Mozilla is rolling out a program to make it so those tiles aren’t blank anymore; instead, they’ll be filled with ads. The company announced the change in a blog post using language that obfuscates at first blush what’s going on....
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The fight over net neutrality is ongoing, and the most recent punch thrown took the form of a letter that several U.S. senators, including Senator Al Franken, wrote to new FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, urging him to act quickly to fight back against a recent court ruling that vacated the anti-discrimination and...
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Making lemonade out of a situation wherein his credit card info was stolen in the UK and the thief went on a shopping spree, PayPal president David Marcus took the opportunity to preach the gospel of PayPal. “My card (with EMV chip) got skimmed while in the UK. Ton of fraudulent txns. Wouldn't have happened if merchant accepted PayPal…”,...
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The wireless charging industry is figuring out what other industries have over the years: If you want to foster growth, standardize. The Alliance for Wireless Power (A4WP) and Power Matters Alliance (PMA) have agreed to work together to develop global interoperability between their respective wireless charging...
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Amazon is expanding its original content programming with a slew of new pilots while also nabbing an impressive smattering of existing popular programs that Amazon Prime users can stream. Thanks to a deal with Twentieth Century Fox, the latter group includes all past episodes of “The Americans”, as well as...
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