Archive

BlackBerry on Friday announced that it would introduce an Android smartphone later this year. The announcement came during the company's Q2 earnings call. The device will be known as the "Priv" and will be built around user privacy, said CEO John Chen. "Priv combines the best of BlackBerry security ...

The Office of Personnel Management on Wednesday revealed that the hackers who penetrated its records system stole 5.6 million fingerprints of federal employees -- five times the 1.1 million originally reported. The cyberattack, which came to light this spring, compromised the Social Security numbers...

Google on Tuesday announced new block and unsubscribe features for Gmail that will make it easier for users to manage their in-boxes and harder for marketers to creep out of the spam folder. "Sometimes you get mail from someone who's really disruptive," said Sri Harsha Somanchi, product manager at G...

The idea of intelligent personal assistants or voice assistants like Apple's Siri, Microsoft's Cortana and Google Now seems very cool -- talking to a computer and having it talk back. It should be like talking to the computer on Star Trek's starship Enterprise. If the technology worked well, these d...

Groupon on Tuesday announced plans to cut 1,100 jobs and close operations in seven countries and said it has filed a statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission to that effect. The biggest cuts will hit its customer service and international deals centers, as the company regroups to levera...

The U.S. government spends millions of dollars on information technology systems designed to prevent cybersecurity attacks, but the attacks still occur. Government agencies are hopeful that the learning curve will improve dramatically, and breaches will be reduced. In the meantime, what happens to p...

The Internet of Things is poised to soar in the enterprise, a new survey from IDC indicates, with the planning stage rapidly shifting to deployment. Nearly 73 percent of about 2,500 respondents to the firm's IoT Decision Maker Survey said they already had deployed IoT solutions or would do so within...

GameStop has signaled resistance to the trend of bundling game consoles with digital downloads rather than physical copies of games. The company ships more than half of all PlayStation 4 and Xbox One software. GameStop worked with its partners to sell the physical version of Madden 16 in its PlaySta...

Microsoft on Monday confirmed that network issues crippled the consumer version of Skype. Some users reported no success in logging in. Others managed to log in, but weren't recognized as being online. The network issues affected only the consumer version of the service, according to Microsoft. So S...

German automaker Volkswagen on Sunday admitted that it installed software that doctored the pollution tests for diesel vehicles sold in the United States. Volkswagen stock, which is listed in Europe, fell more than 20 percent Monday morning on the announcement. The company apparently was concerned t...

Amazon has confirmed and detailed the bare-bones Fire tablet, which will sell for just $49 -- and it announced five other Fire family additions while it was at it. Flanking the Fire tablet are the refreshed Fire HD, the Fire TV with 4K, the Fire TV Stick with Voice Remote and the updated Fire Kids...

Someone perhaps even more flamboyant than Donald Trump may be getting involved in the U.S. presidential race -- and not on the Republican side. Notorious Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is not running for office, but as his extradition case heats up in New Zealand, a possible Democratic candidate f...

New York Mayor Bill de Blasio on Wednesday announced his computer learning initiative, requiring that every student in the city's public schools be exposed to computer literacy training at every grade level within 10 years. The program will cost some $81 million over the next decade. The mayor expec...

The connected car and smart home markets are both at an early stage of development, but in many ways they have been growing in parallel. Both markets are enabled by the falling costs of sensors, networking technologies and data, as well as by expanded cloud services, the mass penetration of smartpho...

Shame on you Microsoft! Last week you admitted to downloading gigabits of Windows 10 data to users' hard drives without permission. The problem is, that move both took up our hard drive space and triggered Internet Service Provider fees. You didn't even ask our permission. Hey, Microsoft, who the he...