1 Day Ago - You could call it Santa 6.0. In what's becoming a regular product cycle, Google announced today the new features that Santa-tracking kids of all ages could expect starting on Christmas Eve at 2 am EST: primarily, support for the Google Earth plug-in, meaning that users will be able to watch... (Read More)

3 Days Ago - Hewlett-Packard is scrambling to respond to an issue brought up by a Dec. 10 YouTube video demonstrating that the facial tracking software used in some of its laptops doesn't recognize black people. HP responded to the issue yesterday in its blog, and it's starting to go viral today. In the... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - The federal government today made the first awards aimed toward improving broadband access in the U.S. In the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, also known as the stimulus package, Congress appropriated $7.2 billion for broadband grants, loans, and loan guarantees to be administered... (Read More)

1 Day Ago - Yesterday, the Federal Appeals Court ruled in what appears at first blush to be a shocking decision, that Microsoft must stop selling Word 2007 by January 11, 2010. But a closer look at the decision suggests that this isn't as big a deal as it first seems. Sure, Microsoft has to pay Canadian... (Read More)

4 Days Ago - I write a lot of about the battle among large technology corporations in this space and the importance of competitive checks and balances. Yet Comcast seems to be growing into a super power with control over the very pipes that provide many of us with internet access, but without any real... (Read More)

6 Days Ago - TechCrunch reports that Google is in advanced stage negotiations to purchase Yelp, the online local business review service. This is a deal that makes so much sense for Google, it makes me wonder why they haven't done it already. As I wrote yesterday, mobile is a big part of the Google strategy and... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - When Google announced Android and Chrome, it was easy to think that they were going after Apple's core business, and when news of Google's own phone leaked last weekend, that seemed to only reinforce the idea, but I see the two companies with very different goals. Yes, they are both going mobile in... (Read More)

10 Days Ago - News "leaked" this weekend of an unlocked Google-branded phone. On the upside, an unlocked phone means you aren't tied to any particular carrier, nor are you required to sign a contract, but on the downside, you don't get the large provider subsidy on the phone cost in exchange for the contract... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - I came across an interesting post today by the Kansas City Star's Eric Adler suggesting that technology is robbing us of serendipity, those playful moments of spontaneous discovery. For example, he wonders when the last time a young person went into a library or book store and just found a book... (Read More)

13 Days Ago - My son needs a new phone, so yesterday at my suggestion, we took a trip to the local AT&T retail store to get a look at the options up close and personal. Instead of eager sales people trying hard to sell us phones, we found they preferred to send us over to the Mall to retail partners Best Buy and... (Read More)

14 Days Ago - We've been hearing about an Apple Tablet for such a long time now, it feels like it should exist, yet it doesn't. With each Apple event, the rumors are so vivid, we actually believe them. Then the announcement comes, the shiny new ipods and Mac Books and other equipment are marched out, and we are... (Read More)

16 Days Ago - Google announced Google Googles yesterday, an application that uses the camera in your Android-powered phone to take a picture, conduct a visual search, then return results. Google admits that it's very early, but this is extremely intriguing technology and it has the potential to take visual... (Read More)

1 Day Ago - Absolutely no surprise there then: Modern Warfare 2 is the all-format games Christmas Number One according to the ELSPA software charts just published here in the UK. A position, incidentally, it has held for the six weeks, ever since it was released. The Top Ten, in case you are interested, is... (Read More)

4 Days Ago - The media seems to have been a-buzz this week following the release of the top search terms from 14.6 million searches picked up by parental control service OnlineFamily.Norton - mainly because it 'revealed' that kids are searching for sex online. I am a parent myself, of young kids, and while... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - Thought that 2009 was the year that botnets died, well think again Batman, it was actually the year they bounced back. Compromised computers were responsible for distributing 83.4% of the 107 billion spam messages sent around the world, every single day, during 2009 according to a new Symantec... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - Oh dear, now I do not believe that was meant to happen. It appears that users of Office 2003 who also protect their documents with the Microsoft Rights Management Service (RMS) have found them so well protected that nobody can open them - not even the person who created the documents in the first... (Read More)

14 Days Ago - IBM today announced that it has opened a Cloud Computing Laboratory in Hong Kong to support its LotusLive cloud services and the numbers are pretty impressive whichever way you look at them. From the 18 million seats in year one that LotusLive has amassed, to the $126 billion IBM expects the global... (Read More)

1 Day Ago - If you are expecting a nice shiny iPhone or BlackBerry as a gift this Xmas, your joy may be short lived if network crashes this week are anything to go by. Earlier this week Twitter users in the UK were reporting data network access as being down for close on two days, with attempts to access... (Read More)

5 Days Ago - File under FAIL: social network widget maker RockYou has fallen victim to a SQL injection flaw and as a result some 32.6 million users are being urged to change their passwords as a matter of urgency. Security specialists Imperva discovered the problem at social networking development site... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - Still using Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader? Maybe it is time to switch to something that's not glowing red on the bad guy radar, or which is more securely coded depending upon how you look at these things. Yes, Adobe has admitted that there is yet another possible zero-day vulnerability in Adobe... (Read More)

11 Days Ago - I've been a freelance journalist for 20 years now, and can honestly say that the iPhone has changed the way I work more than anything since wireless Internet access came along all those years ago. But what are the essential iPhone apps that a jobbing journalist, or blogger for that matter, cannot... (Read More)

15 Days Ago - The Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE) has started work on WiFi the next generation. While that news in itself might not exactly rock your socks off, the small matter of a big speed increase might. Word is that WiFi TNG could be fast, very fast indeed. Anyone fancy some 1... (Read More)

2 Days Ago - You might by now have heard that Hewlett-Packard has come in for criticism for its webcams' inability to follow black faces through its face recognition software. My thanks to the NBCBayarea website for drawing my attention to this YouTube link, which pretty much proves it. Let me make it clear... (Read More)

3 Days Ago - British Telecom has announced that it is ahead of schedule for superfast broadband* and will deliver it in time for the Olympic Games in London. It's less good that only 40 per cent of customers will be able to get at the service but then the Internet was ever thus. What's really interesting to... (Read More)

4 Days Ago - In case you didn't know - and I'm betting you did - some activists from Iran apparently hacked Twitter during last week so instead of seeing Twitter's home page people saw a poem in Persian (people under 44 might not be aware that Persia was the old name for Iran before major regime change). The... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - The news that Google is going to start making its own mobile phones to run the Android operating system might seem odd at first but it's actually quite logical. I should stress it's unsubstantiated as yet but it's appeared on a number of websites. The doubters have pointed out that promoting... (Read More)

16 Days Ago - The British Government's decision to throw £30 million on getting everybody online is of course laudable in its way. The idea is to save a lot of money - and as the last European country still in recession goodness knows we could do with it - by taking Government services online, and to do that you... (Read More)

3 Days Ago - Everyone has posted their predictions for 2010 but here's the real scoop on what's going to happen in 2010 with Linux and Linux-oriented hardware and software products. Get ready to see the biggest increase in Linux adoption in history. You can say you saw it here first. These are in no particular... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - Everyone has their predictions for the new year but do they often prognosticate using an animated video? The folks over at rPath created a clever video animation depicting their reasonable and humorous predictions for 2010. rPath might be best known for its online virtual appliance builder. You can... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - The Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) took aim at 14 consumer electronics companies for violating GPL licensed products. This is the largest lawsuit of its kind ever filed. This lawsuit uses what Richard Stallman calls "tivoization" as its defense. Tivoization, if you recall from my post, "Does... (Read More)

12 Days Ago - The Obama Administration vows to cut costs in part by using open source software (Software whose source code is made available to the user), cloud computing, virtualization, Linux and other low cost technologies. But, does the use of open source software put the government, its records and our... (Read More)

16 Days Ago - Do you need a reality check? Freedom isn't free. You have to work hard, and possibly even die, for it. Fortunately, free software doesn't require you to sacrifice anything but restrictions. Unfortunately, the powerful marketing machines constantly bombard and tempt you with semi-clever TV... (Read More)

6 Days Ago - The Android has landed. 17 percent of people in the U.S. currently planning to buy a smartphone within the next three months are considering one that runs Google's mobile OS, while 20 percent indicated that iPhone would be their choice. That's according to a report released yesterday by analyst... (Read More)

7 Days Ago - If you've ever remotely operated one computer from another, you've used desktop virtualization. It's been built into Linux, Mac OS X and Windows for years, but recent moves by Red Hat could signal that it's about to go mainstream. The Linux company late last week announced that it was opening the... (Read More)

9 Days Ago - Thanks to new firmware (v.1.3) released last Thursday, Dell's Lifecycle Controller now works with system management tools from BMC and Microsoft. Most reports that followed Dell's Thursday announcement focused on the speed and capacity of its EqualLogic storage arrays, not on the software used to... (Read More)

12 Days Ago - Even Microsoft is sometimes faced with the decision of whether to "buy or build." This time it chose to buy. With the acquisition of Opalis Software announced yesterday, Redmond in one stroke takes a major leap in data center process automation. And it couldn't have come at a better time. Major... (Read More)

12 Days Ago - Tired of parsing all the source code involved in building mobile apps? Or perhaps the approval process for Apple's App Store is getting you down. Or maybe you're an aspiring commercial developer in search of the next must-have platform to tap. If you think Android might be the one, then a new tool... (Read More)

13 Days Ago - According to a Search Software Quality survey of 492 IT professionals, 22 percent struggle most with requirements gathering. Yet the same group said they spend less than 12 percent of their time doing it. Not so at LSI Corp., which probably made some of the storage silicon in the computer you're... (Read More)

13 Days Ago - What if you had access to the millions of tweets that flow to and from Twitter users every day? Perhaps you'd build something like PostRank, which amasses them along with other data from social media sites to trackcyber-reaction to posted articles. Or maybe you would filter them by demographic and... (Read More)

13 Days Ago - Earlier this week I read a very interesting article written by my colleague Davey Winder about the new search engine Ecosia. After reading Davies article, I decided to do some research comparing Ecosia vs. the monster search engine Google. Ecosia claims that one search via Google uses around the... (Read More)