- Welcome Guest
- Sign In
I was pleased last year when Apple finally took a proactive stance and reached out to 28 million App Store customers who might have been bamboozled by shady in-app purchases in games designed to take advantage of children. However, even that action had dubious beginnings stemming from a class action...
Facebook will start peddling user data to Yandex, Russia's top search engine, as part of a deal between the two tech giants. Yandex will get full access to public data from users in Russia, Turkey, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. Yandex will use the data in question -- which includes posts and comm...
French taxi drivers reportedly attacked vehicles linked to the smartphone app Uber, which helps people find shared rides and drivers-for-hire -- or, from cabbies' perspective, helps erode a time-honored business model. Protestors blocked traffic and went after the service's vehicles, reported one Ub...
Google has had its share of headaches in Germany, but this one is new. Google apologized after Google Maps briefly changed the name of a Berlin intersection, "Theodor-Heuss-Platz," to its Nazi-era moniker, "Adolf-Hitler-Platz." Google released a statement explaining that user-submitted edits for Goo...
After my Belize retirement update appeared last week, a number of things happened. Most initially were rather painful, but eventually I was placed on the phone with Rod Kazazi, the project CFO who is based in the United States. Since we both had a financial background, he was able to address most of...
Privacy regulators in France have slapped Google with the maximum fine allowed by law, confirming both the nation's dissatisfaction with Google and Europe's need to overhaul its data-privacy penalties. France followed through on threats made in June and again in September to fine Google over its pri...
The Guardian has become the latest Western media outlet to get blocked in China. For more than a year, China's Web-censoring authorities, unaffectionately known as the "Great Firewall of China," have blocked sites for The New York Times and Bloomberg, each of which published unsavory articles abou...
China reportedly will temporarily lift a sales ban on foreign videogame consoles, reversing a 14-year prohibition. Companies like Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo -- which long have salivated over the heretofore obstructed gold mine of Chinese videogamedom -- will be allowed to make game consoles in Sha...
Certain advertisements on Yahoo's European website may have helped infect thousands of computers with malware, according to Yahoo. A Dutch computer security firm, Fox-IT, outed Yahoo last Friday, penning a blog post claiming that attackers had used ads.yahoo.com to insert malicious ads. Fox-IT was a...
I've been executing on a long-term dream of retiring in Belize. I've been putting some rigor into the effort to make sure the perception of the dream doesn't outpace reality. I've often been brought in on projects that should have been shut down early, largely because executive staff had lost track ...
As New Year's Day approaches, I'm reminded of the Chinese curse, "May you be born in interesting times," because 2014 is likely to be a very interesting year. I expect the Democrats will be trying to distance themselves from their failed Affordable Care Act, while Republicans will be doing their bes...
Alan Turing, a British man whose code-breaking prowess helped thwart Nazi Germany in World War II, was pardoned this week by Queen Elizabeth for his decades-old "crime." Turing was prosecuted in 1952 for "gross indecency" for having a sexual relationship with another man, a ruling that resulted in t...
It is time to look back on 2013 and consider what we've learned about technology and human nature. Both Apple and Dell were massively changed, and Google went from a company that wanted our private information to one that wanted our jobs. The U.S. government decided, through the NSA, that laws don't...
A humanoid robot named "Kirobo" has had a chat with a Japanese astronaut on the ISS. The robot, also from Japan, is designed to process questions and construct answers from its vocabulary bank, as opposed to regurgitating preprogrammed responses. Asked if he could handle zero-gravity conditions, the...
A Chinese citizen was sentenced to three years in U.S. prison for trying to smuggle American-made microchips to China. The man, Philip Chaohui He, was targeted in a 2011 sting at a Los Angeles-area port. He was nabbed while approaching a Chinese freighter, toting with him 200 radiation-hardened micr...