Technology

The NSA reportedly is reading communications between Americans and foreigners abroad, despite its denials. The NSA responded to the allegations by stating its activities are lawful attempts to gather intelligence about foreign powers and their agents, foreign organizations, foreign persons or intern...

It appears YouTube cofounders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen want to mix it up with Vine and Instagram. Their video-editing app, MixBit, which was developed by the pair's new venture, Avos Systems, made its iOS debut on Thursday. An Android version is due in the coming weeks. The MixBit app works much l...

Movie star Jackie Chan, the Chinese kung fu aficionado who has appeared in more than 150 films, is taking loads of flak for posts on Chinese social media. Chan first riled Chinese netizens when he posted a photo of a picturesque Beijing skyline with the caption, "I took the picture myself. Who says ...

Some Xerox copiers/scanners have produced altered copies, researcher David Kriesel reported last week. A Xerox Work Center 7535 actually changed the numbers on scanned documents. After looking into the discrepancies, Kriesel posted his findings on his blog: The photocopier was resizing the room dime...

Consumers with an itch for a hybrid car can now spend less scratch for one. Chevy announced Tuesday that the 2014 models of its Volt plug-in hybrid vehicle will carry a sticker price of $34,995, a $5,000 cut from the current model. A federal tax credit of up to $7,500 for some buyers of green vehicl...

The buzz about Samsung's plans for a smartwatch has intensified with the discovery of trademark and patent filings in the United States and Korea. The U.S. Patent and Trade Office filing lists the name of the patented device as "Samsung Galaxy Gear" and essentially describes a smartwatch. A document...

Scientists unveiled the world's first lab-grown hamburger at a press event in London on Monday, showcasing a patty made from stem cells -- a technique that could help alleviate the growing demand for more sustainable beef products. Mark Post, a scientist at Maastricht University, spent about two yea...

Hot air, maybe. But it's Edward Snowden, so it's news. Pavel Durov, the 28-year-old Russian CEO of social network site VKontakte, has offered Snowden a job as a security software developer. VKontakte is akin to Facebook and has 100 million active users, mostly from Eastern Europe. Last week, Russia ...

Famine... or feast? Soil... or hydroponics, aquaponics, aquaculture or aeroponics? Nine billion hungry human beings will be living on planet Earth by 2050. "We will need to produce more food in the first half of this century than we did in the previous 100 centuries combined," declared Tony Kajews...

Ireland-based Freedom Hosting, which hosted several servers on the Tor Project's hidden network, has been taken down through a vulnerability in the Firefox browser -- and the FBI is widely suspected of being the attacker. The FBI reportedly is seeking to extradite Freedom Hosting's owner, Eric Eoin ...

In what amounts to a serious environmental breach or a continuation of China's anti-Apple PR blitz -- or both -- Chinese regulators are scrutinizing a pair of Apple suppliers in China over pollution allegations. The factories in question, located in Kunshan, an electronics manufacturing hotbed about...

OPINION

The Technology Mysteries of 2013

In the technology market, we have a number of interesting mysteries at the moment. Somehow someone in China was killed -- electrocuted -- by an iPhone, and someone made up a nasty story about Lenovo and the Chinese government and got folks to pick it up during the U.S. NSA scandal. One of the most p...

It's hardly surprising that Samsung is working on a brand-new smartphone -- it is a device manufacturer, after all. What is surprising is the form factor of this new device: It will reportedly be styled as a dual-display flip phone -- similar, in other words, to the many other clamshell devices that...

Barbie's gone digital. She's wearing a new dress outfitted with programmable LED lights that let her change her look on a whim. "Today's girl is tech-savvy, and we created a Barbie doll that utilizes technology to provide a new way to play with Barbie," said Mattel. "Girls will like this doll becaus...

Glorious Mission Online, a first-person shooting game launched in China and codeveloped by the People's Liberation Army, lets gamers defeat Japan in the fake quest to take back real islands. The game includes the real-life plot in which China and Japan fight over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which si...

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