Items tagged with U.S.
It was always assumed (outside of Cupertino, anyway) that if Apple released a bigger size iPhone model to compete with large screen Android devices, it would be a huge hit. Well, that notion was proven right when Apple launched its 4.7-inch iPhone 6 (1334x750; 326 ppi) and 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus (1920x1080; 401 ppi) models, which combined to break sales records. Those flurry of initial sales weren't just a knee jerk reaction, either -- Kantar Worldpanel ComTech notes that the latest smartphone sales data for the three months ending November 2014 shows that the impact of the iPhone 6 launch continued in the run up to Christmas. According to KWC's number nerds, iOS grew is market share in all surveyed...
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The controversy surrounding news of the NSA’s wide-ranging spying tactics is causing ripples in other aspects of U.S. – European Union relations. Based on information released by Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor, the EU voted to support its own commission in the event the commission decides end data sharing agreements between the EU and the U.S. The commission is investigating both the reach of the NSA’s spying tactics as well as reports that the U.K. has been involved in a similar spying program. European Parliament The vote could prove to be an important one because of the data that is being shared between the EU and U.S. at the moment. In particular, flight passenger...
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The high-speed Internet advocacy Web site, Speed Matters, has just released a report on the average Internet connection speeds by U.S. state. If you live in Rhode Island (6,769 Kbps), Delaware (6,685 Kbps), New Jersey (5,825 Kbps), Virginia (5,033 Kbps), or Massachusetts (4,564 Kbps), you can take pride that your state has one of the fastest average Internet downstream connection speeds in the U.S. But before you get too smug, compare your speed against the average 63 Mbps downstream speed that the Communications Workers of America (CWA) claims Japan has... Or South Korea (49 Mbps), Finland (21 Mbps), France (17 Mbps), or even Canada (7.6 Mbps) for that matter. Credit: Speed MattersThe report...
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A study just released by the Leichtman Research Group, indicates that the "twenty largest cable and telephone providers in the US" now total approximately 65.1 million, high-speed Internet subscribers. Those 20 providers make up roughly 94 percent of the U.S. broadband market. Assuming that Leichtman's results are correct (and assuming that Neilson's latest numbers are as well, which show 164 million U.S. users went online in May 2007), this would mean that about only 42 percent of U.S. Internet users connect via a broadband connection. This is significantly lower than the 55 percent of adult Americans that the July 2008, Pew Internet & American Life Project reports have a home broadband...
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What do providing secret service protection for former vice presidents and going after cyber criminals have in common? (And no, Al Gore did not have his identity stolen--at least not as far as we know). They are both part of the same bill that was just passed by the Senate. Current legislation lacks the necessary breadth to go after and punish how cyber criminals do their dirty work these days. A cyber-crime bill, the Identity Theft Enforcement and Restitution Act, was introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) last October and it was unanimously passed by the Senate in November. However, it "has been stalled in the House [of Representatives ]" ever since. So as politicians...
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A study on laptop loss at airports was just released, and we don't know what is more depressing: how many laptops are "lost" at the airport, how few of the "lost" laptops have their data protected, or how few of the "lost" laptops are ever recovered. The Airport Insecurity: The Case of Lost Laptops report was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and was sponsored by Dell. The report finds that "business travelers lose more than 12,000 laptops per week in U.S. airports." That works out to over 62,400 laptops per year. If the average business laptop costs $1,200, then roughly $749 million worth of laptops are lost each year at U.S. airports. To make matters worse, the report claims that for those...
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As hard as it may be to believe, according to a study by research firm Parks Associates, nearly 20% of the population of the United States is disconnected from the Internet and has never used email. In their annual phone survey of U.S. households, Parks Associates found 20 million households are without Internet access, approximately 18% of the U.S."Nearly one out of three household heads has never used a computer to create a document. These data underscore the significant digital divide between the connected majority and the homes in the unconnected minority that rarely, if ever, use a computer.""Internet connections have slowly increased in U.S. households, but getting the disconnected minority...
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S3 Graphics Launches Chrome 430 GT in the U.S. MarketChrome 430 GT desktop graphics cards now available through GStore, delivering DirectX 10.1 3D performance and stunning HD multimedia for under $60 Fremont, California, March 20, 2008 - S3 Graphics, a leading provider of graphics and visualization technologies, today announced the S3 Graphics Chrome 430 GT desktop cards, now available at online retail affiliate GStore. The first of the S3 Graphics Chrome 400 Series to market, the Chrome 430 GT combines advanced 3D graphics and incredible HD multimedia performance with extreme power-efficiency and rigidly low thermal specifications, breaking new ground in the highly competitive...
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Wikileaks was started with the intention of allowing whistleblowers to anonymously release government and corporate documents, "an uncensorable version of Wikipedia for untraceable mass document leaking and analysis. " Of course, that only works if the site is reachable.A federal judge in San Francisco has shut down a Web site that posted more than a million government and corporate documents from whistleblowers and others alleging criminal acts worldwide.A permanent injunction was issued Friday by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White. It was sought by the Swiss banking group Julius Baer after internal documents were posted to Wikileaks.org claiming to show the bank was connected to money laundering...
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With several countries offering cheap broadband internet to the masses, the U.S. is starting to look like we're in the slow lane, at least according to a bill introduced by Massachusetts Representative, Ed Markey.What is clear is that broadband providers are charging an arm and a leg compared to other countries, and possibly even mislabeling products such as Comcast declaring their service to be 'unlimited' but then disconnected users who 'use too much'.“What's less clear is how badly the country that gave birth to the Internet is doing, and whether the government needs to step in and do something about it. The Bush administration has tried to foster broadband adoption with a hands-off approach....
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If you are a user in the United States, you can no longer use TorrentSpy. However, that's not necessarily a bad thing as the site had been ordered to start tracking users. Citing privacy, TorrentSpy now gives an error message if a user with a U.S. IP address tries to search. US users of the popular Torrent search site TorrentSpy can use the site no more—at least not for now. TorrentSpy has begun to block all searches by US visitors, instead redirecting search requests to a page with the headline "TorrentSpy Acts to Protect Privacy." The page says that TorrentSpy has chosen to block US visitors because of an "uncertain legal climate in the US regarding user privacy and an apparently...
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Home Media Research, a division of Home Media Magazine, released sales results for the different high-definition movie disc camps today - and the results were not good for HD-DVD. Blu-ray high-definition movie discs outsold films on the rival HD-DVD format by 2-to-1 in the United States in the first half of 2007, Home Media Research said on Tuesday. The division of Home Media Magazine said total sales of Blu-ray discs, using a Sony Corp-backed technology, totaled 1.6 million units from January 1 through July 1, compared with 795,000 HD-DVD discs sold in that period. It's not really surprising to us - the recent decision by Blockbuster to focus on Blu-ray seemed to indicate that...
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A study conducted by Hope Cummings of the University of Michigan and Elizabeth Vandewater of the University of Texas at Austin sampled a group of adolescents, both gamers and non-gamers, from around the U.S. to find out where they find the time to play games and what parts of their lives suffer as a result. They found that boys spent an average of 58 minutes playing games on weekdays and one hour and 37 minutes playing on weekend days. They also found that girls spent 44 minutes playing on a weekday and an hour and four minutes playing on weekend days. To make time for all this gaming, the study found that male gamers spent less time reading while female gamers spent less time doing...
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These numbers speak for themselves: "Over a period of two years, the hackers, still unknown, were able to download 45.7 million credit card numbers, with estimates in the Wall Street Journal article suggesting it might reach 200 million, spanning a period of more than four years. Clearly this is a big deal. Whether we shopped at these stores or not, we are all paying for this credit theft. Banks are having to reissue credit cards (this costs the banks), and investigators in eight countries are pursuing the use of these numbers (this diminishes the law enforcement available to fight other cybercrimes)." 45.7 MILLION. That's simply mind-boggling. What's even more boggling is the fact that...
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Study Commissioned by AMD Reveals Scope of Annual U.S. Data Center Energy Consumption: 45 Billion kWh, at Cost of Nearly 3 Billion Dollars - AMD Calls for Increased Collaboration between Technology Industry and Government Officials to Track and Reduce Energy Consumption - NEW YORK - Feb. 15, 2007 - In a keynote address at the LinuxWorld OpenSolutions Summit in New York today, Randy Allen, corporate vice president, Server and Workstation Division, AMD (NYSE: AMD), revealed findings from a study that comprehensively calculated, for the first time, the energy consumed by national and global data centers annually. Addressing the need for thorough, credible estimates on data center power use, the...
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Finally, a government program regarding technology that I can support. HotHardware has reported in prior articles Seagate Announces Encrypted Hard Drives for Notebooks and How To Turn Your Stolen Laptop Into A Snitching Doorstop both concerning the issues that are being served by this memorandum. After story after story of government laptops being stolen and compromised, the U.S. government is making progress in encrypting all information stored on its data devices. On June 23, 2006, a memorandum (PDF) from the Executive Office of the President mandated that all government mobile computers and devices must fully encrypt all data. The document...
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Magma(R) Design Automation Inc. announced today that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) will reexamine U.S. Patent No. 6,725,438 (the'438 patent), one of three patents at issue in a lawsuit between Magma and Synopsys Inc. pending in the U.S. District Court in the Northern District of California. With this decision, the PTO is now in the process of reexamining two of the three patents in the lawsuit, and the PTO will soon decide whether it will reexamine the third. The PTO is reexamining U.S. Patent Number 6,378,114 (the '114 patent), and in August rejected all 15 claims in that patent. The PTO was asked to reexamine the third patent, U.S. Patent Number 6,453,446 (the '446...
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SEATTLE, Dec 1 (Reuters) - The U.S. Department of Justice has issued subpoenas to Nvidia Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. as part of a probe into potential antitrust violations involving graphics chips, helping to send shares in the companies lower. Nvidia, the largest independent maker of graphics chips for computers and other devices, said on Friday that no specific allegations had been made against the company and that it plans to cooperate with the investigation. AMD, the No. 2 maker of computer processors, said late on Thursday that it had been subpoenaed. AMD entered the graphics business in October after acquiring Canadian firm ATI Technologies for $5.4 billion. Read more here......
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And the hits just keep coming for Sony. On top of the whole battery fiasco, now the US Justice Department has subpoenaed information from Sony with regards to their SRAM business. After several charges and fines in recent years regarding allegations of price fixing in the DRAM industry, the DOJ does not appear to be taking any chances with the SRAM industry. TOKYO (AP) -- Sony said Tuesday the U.S. Department of Justice is probing its electronics unit as part of an industrywide investigation into sales of a particular type of memory chip. The news could spell more trouble for a company already stung by sinking profits, a global battery...
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Intel, DIRECTV Poised to Connect PCs and TVs in U.S. INTEL DEVELOPER FORUM, San Francisco, Sept. 26, 2006 - Intel Corporation and DIRECTV, Inc., the nation's leading satellite television service provider, today unveiled details around the world's first digital set-top box with integrated digital media adapter (DMA) functionality verified to work with Intel(R) ViivTM technology. Through the integrated DMA, the DIRECTV digital set-top box will allow customers to access and enjoy their pictures and music on their TVs directly from Intel Viiv technology-based PCs. READ MORE... ...
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KANGURU MICRO DRIVE AES RECEIVES U.S. GOVERNMENT APPROVAL ACHIEVES FIPS 140-2 CERTIFICATION FOR SECURING SENSITIVE DATA Millis, Mass. - June 2006 - Kanguru Solutions today announced their KanguruMicro Drive AES has completed Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS 140-2) Certification testing. FIPS 140-2, a rigorous federal security accreditation program completed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology, sets the standard for encryption algorithms intended for use in protecting sensitive information. "FIPS 140-2 Certification is essentially the U.S. and Canadian Governments' seal of approval for a security product," said Nate Cote, Vice President of Product Management at Kanguru...
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Not wanting to fall behind, the U.S. is looking to fully embrace WiMAX technology. While opening up different frequencies for WiMAX use, including, the 700-MHz band currently used for analog cable, the Bush administration hopes to bring "universal, affordable access for broadband [in the United States] by 2007". "Washington is looking to expand the spectrum to satisfy what could be enormous demand for the technology. This year and next, the U.S. government is expected to auction off the separate 1,710- and 2,110-MHz frequency bands for WiMAX applications."...
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