Because many medical devices use commercial operating systems, they are as open to attacks as many computers.
Fully 95% of 600 businesses surveyed by Cisco permit the use of employee-owned smartphones and tablets at the office and found productivity gains for workers.
True privacy can be hard to come by in the socially enabled online world, but Twitter on Thursday announced that it has joined Firefox maker Mozilla in taking a big step forward for users.
How do AMD's next-generation A-Series processors match up against Intel's latest Ivy Bridge chips?
If you think your juggling tricks are impressive, think again. This robotic arm nails it using just one hand.
Sheer iOS traffic is making Apple the lowest hanging fruit, Zscaler's State of the Web Report finds
Everyone's either a critic or a comedian when it comes to Friday's Facebook stock offering. Here's a round-up of some of the best comments and quips.
A free e-book explains how the hot new social network works, why you should be using it to drive leads and traffic, and how to get started.
The PCWorld editors discusses the impact of Facebook's IPO, news from the Nvidia GTC, the launch of Diablo 3, and Lenovo's slick new ultrabook.
MaKey MaKey is a Arduino-based contraption that lets you play the piano with bananas, a game with a piece of paper, type with noodles, and more.
Adoption of Android tablets and smartphones in business is "severely limited" because of the complexities of managing the various Android models, a Gartner report asserts.
These tips will help you address device security while keeping your employees happier.
Microsoft is reprising last year's promo, offering a free Xbox 360 game console to U.S. back-to-school buyers of Windows systems.
Company won't comment on reports as CEO Whitman visits customers and HP prepares to announce its quarterly financials this month.
If Twitter is your chosen platform for airing opinions on political matters, this robot will help you get your message out literally in front of the White House.
Apple has apparently wrested control of the iphone5.com domain from its fans.
A surcharge beats losing access, but have the carriers lost their taste for throttling?
Lawyers have filed a "groundbreaking digital-privacy rights case" against Facebook that seeks damages for privacy violations considered to have "significant legal and business implications."
Simon & Schuster becomes the latest publisher to settle an antitrust claim by a team of states, while Macmillan, Penguin, and Apple fight on.
After all the buildup, the day of Facebook's public stock offering arrives, finding the team camped out to celebrate and investors watching expectantly.
The unsupported conviction or hope that Apple will refresh the iPhone with a 4-inch screen has burned brightly for more than a year.
You can keep your $30 per month unlimited data plan when you switch to LTE, but it'll cost you in another way. Verizon explains its pricing plan.
Despite the rumors of the next Android OS 'Jelly Bean', developers are focused on making apps -- and money -- from today's Android OS.
PCWorld's "20 Best Airports for Tech Travelers" ebook compiles data on electrical outlets, USB ports, charging stations, Wi-Fi, and more at the nation's 40 busiest airports.
Twitter announced that it will support "Do Not Track." It's welcome news, but there are pros and cons to the "Do Not Track" solution.
Here are five iTunes alternatives for converting and managing music and videos on iOS devices.
Windows 8 is a major OS overhaul, but some of the most important additions might be the ones you can't see. Here's a look at Windows 8's new security tools and features.
Investors will pressure Facebook, the public company, to find new ways of making money from users' personal data. If times get hard, can Facebook do that without endangering user privacy?
Not a wheeler-dealer? You still can own some Facebook stock if you really want to. Here's how.
There's a chance that there may be less of it than in previous version of Windows, but as with earlier Windows versions, if you want it cleaned of junk, you can pay $99 for a bloatware-cleaning service from Microsoft.
The ARM/Apple tsunami is gaining strength, but anyone who thinks it will swamp Wintel anytime soon is badly mistaken.
Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston advises new doctor to not 'friend' patients on Facebook.
Apple historically has fought iPhone jailbreaking by warning customers that their device warranties will be voided if they muck around with the innards of their Apple products. Now Apple appears to be taking its disapproval of jailbreaking one step further by censoring at least some references to "jailbreak" in its U.S. iTunes store.
Such activity is often paid for, or sanctioned by, government agencies.
More than half of US businesses still rely on conventional firewalls or intrusion prevention systems to shield themselves from the scourge of DDoS attacks, a survey by services firm Neustar has found.
Car insurance firm insurethebox is using a business analytics appliance to analyse drivers' habits and set insurance premiums based on how safe they drive using telematics.
Sophos says they're starting in Russia, but will expand with success.
Price cuts for Apple's iPhone have spread to Best Buy, where the retailer has slashed the iPhone 4's price to $50.
This tiny add-on card could let you connect every piece electronic equipment you own to the Internet.
This remote presence robot shows how technology can help people in the most difficult of positions lead a more normal life.
Apple claims that the case should be dismissed because the plaintiffs have not specified that the claims about Siri led them to purchase the device.
Google's Knowledge Graph seems like just another search feature, but connect the dots and it could become the brains behind a Siri-like virtual assistant.
The results were surprising even to the researchers who conducted the study.
Bloatware may still creep onto your new Dell, HP, or Lenovo PC, even though Microsoft is reportedly getting ready to take on Windows 8 bloat.
This impressive collection covers everything from mastering social media and marketing to landing venture capital and international sales.
All search engines thrive on advertising, and the longer your eyes stay on the search engine itself, the more likely it is that you will click on an ad.
One in two mobile subscribers now has a smartphone, according to a Nielsen study, and the average number of apps on each device is 41.
Sleek silver Ultrabooks arriving from major PC manufacturers aren't just Apple Macbook Air clones. Some of them even have options that Apple's laptop doesn't offer. Here's a guide.
The meteoric rise in the smartphone market is creating a dangerous vulnerability in smartphone security - one that may not be patched until the problem expands.
Netflix's video player finally looks like it was designed for the 21st century.
sciencehabit writes "A project to drill deep into the heart of a 'supervolcano' in southern Italy has finally received the green light, despite claims that the drilling would put the population of Naples at risk of small earthquakes or an explosion. Yesterday, Italian news agency ANSA quoted project coordinator Giuseppe De Natale of Italy's National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology as saying that the office of Naples mayor Luigi de Magistris has approved the drilling of a pilot hole 500 meters deep. The project’s organizers originally intended to bore a 4-kilometer-deep well in the area of the caldera late in 2009, but the plan was put on hold by then-mayor Rosa Russo Iervolino after scientists expressed concerns about the risks."
New submitter The God of Code writes "EA has announced that they will be waiving all Origin distribution fees for crowd-funded games — like those from Kickstarter — for the first 90 days. 'The public support for crowd-funding creative game ideas coming from small developers today is nothing short of phenomenal,' Origin VP David DeMartini commented. 'It's also incredibly healthy for the gaming industry. Gamers around the world deserve a chance to play every great new game, and by waiving distribution fees on Origin we can help make that a reality for successfully crowd-funded developers.' The recently funded Wasteland 2 developer Brian Fargo applauds EA's move, saying, 'Having Origin waive their distribution fees for 90 days for fan funded games is a major economic bonus for small developers. We look forward to bringing Wasteland 2 to the Origin audience.'"
CowboyRobot writes "Opening with the line, 'To me, a personal computer should be small, reliable, convenient to use and inexpensive,' Steve Wozniak gave his system description of the Apple-II in the May, 1977 issue of BYTE. It's instructive to read what was worth bragging about back then (PDF), such as integral graphics: 'A key part of the Apple-II design is an integral video display generator which directly accesses the system's programmable memory. Screen formatting and cursor controls are realized in my design in the form of about 200 bytes of read only memory.' And it shows what the limitations were in those days, 'While writing Apple BASIC, I ran into the problem of manipulating the 16 bit pointer data and its arithmetic in an 8 bit machine. My solution to this problem of handling 16 bit data, notably pointers, with an 8 bit microprocessor was to implement a nonexistent 16 bit processor in software, interpreter fashion.'"
benrothke writes "Elementary Information Security, based on its title, weight and page length, I assumed was filled with mindless screen shots of elementary information security topics, written with a large font, in order to jack up the page count. Such an approach is typical of far too many security books. With that, if there ever was a misnomer of title, Elementary Information Security is it." Read below for the rest of Ben's review
The Bad Astronomer writes "What's the nearest star to Earth that can explode as a supernova? Spica, at 260 light years away, is the nearest massive star that can explode, but IK Pegasi — a Sirius-like binary composed of a normal star and a white dwarf — will also one day blow. At a distance of 150 light years, it's truly the closest supernova candidate. Happily, that's too far away to damage the Earth when it goes off — and it won't explode for millions of years at least, by which time it'll be even farther away. Either way, we're safe... for now."
medv4380 writes "38 Studios, run by Curt Schilling, is having a hard time paying its bills and employees. The gaming community hasn't been happy with the company since the issue with an Online Pass for Single Player Content, which we discussed previously. Now, 38 Studios has bounced a check intended as a payment on its $75 million loan from the state of Rhode Island. If the company defaults, Rhode Island taxpayers will have to cover the loan and interest, which could total nearly $100 million."
Facebook's much-hyped IPO kicked off today, but an anonymous reader points out that things didn't go quite as smoothly as investors hoped. "Public trading didn't get underway until about 11:30 a.m. ET, half an hour after it was supposed to. The delay was likely caused by the huge amount of interest in the stock – especially by retail investors. In the first few minutes of trading, Facebook shares were only up between 5 and 10 per cent and by noon were essentially back down to the IPO price of $38. Many observers had expected the stock to double in price by the end of the day, if not sooner." The NY Times has a data visualization showing how Facebook's IPO compares to other tech IPOs throughout the years, and how the first day of trading treated all of those companies. Meanwhile, the debate is lively over whether the social networking giant will be a good investment. "The banks helping take Facebook public want us to value this 8-year-old upstart at as much as $104 billion, more than Disney or Kraft Foods, though those companies earn three and four times more. That top valuation is also more than 100 times Facebook's earnings last year, versus 13 times for the average company. At such a high price, it will take years for this so-called earnings multiple to fall to a more reasonable level, and that's assuming the company can maintain its torrid earnings growth."
Sparrowvsrevolution writes "On Thursday, the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing to discuss a proposed bill to limit location tracking of electronic devices without a warrant — what it's calling the Geolocational Privacy and Surveillance Act, or the GPS Act. Ahead of that hearing, University of Pennsylvania computer science professor Matt Blaze submitted written testimony (PDF) telling Congress that phone carriers, as well as the law enforcement agencies with which they share data, can now use phones' proximity to cell towers and other sources of cellular data to track their location as precisely or even more precisely than they can with global positioning satellites. Thanks to the growing density of cell towers and the proliferation of devices like picocells and femtocells that transmit cell signals indoors, even GPS-less phones can be tracked with a high degree of precision and can offer data that GPS can't, like the location of someone inside a building or what floor they're on. With the GPS Act, Congress is considering expanding the ban on warrantless tracking of cars with GPS devices that the Supreme Court decided on in January. Blaze's testimony suggests they need to include non-GPS tracking of cell phones in that ban, a measure law enforcement agencies are strongly resisting."
bonch writes "Autoparts manufacturer Delphi has developed a diesel-like ignition engine running on gasoline, providing a potential 50 percent efficiency improvement over existing gas-powered engines. Engineers have long sought to run diesel-like engines on gasoline for its higher efficiency and low emissions. Delphi's engine, using a technique called gasoline-direct-injection compression ignition, could rival the performance of hybrid automobiles at a cheaper cost."
ananyo writes "A newly-discovered microbial community living tens of meters beneath the Pacific Ocean floor uses so little oxygen that researchers believe they may be living at the absolute minimum energy requirement needed to subsist. For years, scientists thought that the ascetic conditions of the deep sub-seabed — high pressure, minimal oxygen and a low supply of nutrients and energy — made such environments uninhabitable to any form of life. The discovery extends the lower bound for life (abstract). The surface of Mars, for instance, may be inhospitable, but there may be conditions below the surface that are reminiscent of the deep subsurface on Earth. As microbiologist Bo Jørgensen comments in the Nature piece, while the discovery does not mean there is life on Mars, 'it's now really challenging to show where there is no life.'"
Barence writes "Computer scientists have unveiled a computer chip that turns traditional thinking about mathematical accuracy on its head by fudging calculations. The concept works by allowing processing components — such as hardware for adding and multiplying numbers — to make a few mistakes, which means they are not working as hard, and so use less power and get through tasks more quickly. The Rice University researchers say prototypes are 15 times more efficient and could be used in some applications without having a negative effect."