Whether you agree with it or not, Samsung gets accused of ripping off Apple just about every time they roll out a new marquee phone or tablet. On Wednesday, the company unveiled Samsung Wallet, a new Android app that looks and works a lot like Apple?s Passbook app for the iPhone. Like Passbook, Wallet is a designed as one central place to store your digital gift certificates, coupons, tickets, travel details and boarding passes.
Waze, the crowd-sourced traffic mapping app, is one of Gadget Lab's favorite apps for successfully navigating around the morass of Bay Area traffic. Today the app one-ups itself with the ability for trusted community members to update maps in real time.
The biggest tech companies in the world are standing up for same-sex marriage, but not just as a matter of fairness. In a brief filed with the U.S. Supreme Court, they say federal same-sex marriage restrictions hurt their businesses.
Internet and computer pioneer Danny Hillis thinks the internet needs a backup, a Plan B.
What kills a social network? A group of internet archeologists have picked over the digital bones of Friendster ? the pioneering social networking site that drowned in Facebook?s wake ? and we now have a clearer picture of its epic collapse.
The innovative digital comics publisher Monkeybrain continues to buck the traditional print publishing model -- this time by bringing its comics back to the world print.
Solar Impulse has arrived in California and started the painstaking process of assembling the solar-powered airplane that will fly across the country at a leisurely 50 mph.
The entire U.S. military is terrified of the impending budget cuts scheduled to hit Friday. But the Army thinks the cuts are demonic.
The Navy is tackling problems that freeze Congress solid. What it learns, what it implements, and how it adapts and innovates will drive market changes that could alter the course of the world.
Google co-foudner Sergey Brin said smartphones are "socially isolating" and "emasculating" during a talk at the TED conference Wednesday.
An ambitious private manned mission to Mars aims to launch a two-person crew to fly around the Red Planet and return to Earth in 501 days, starting in January 2018. The mission is extremely ambitious, well beyond anything previously accomplished by the private sector, and it faces plenty of obstacles. Yet despite these hurdles, of all the bold announcements from private spaceflight companies in recent years, this one seems the most achievable.
Over the past few days, the Peruvian Geologic Survey has noted a sharp increase in seismicity beneath Sabancaya, one of the more active volcanoes in the southern part of the country. More than 500 earthquakes were recorded under the volcano, accompanied by an increase in steam and volcanic gases from the summit.
North Korea?s reward for its recent nuclear test is a visit from the Worm.
Firefox 20, currently in the beta release channel, changes the way Firefox handles so-called "private browsing" sessions. Now it's easy to have private windows right alongside normal windows, very handy for those who, for example, need to log in to two different Gmail accounts simultaneously.
In Winston-Salem, North Carolina, a group of more than 60 doctors have revamped the iPad for use in emergency departments across the region with a little help from a familiar application: the popular Box.net file-sharing services. Using Box, they've built a new system that lets them share procedures, journal articles and -- perhaps most importantly -- conversations.
Amazon so vastly outstrips all other comers, including Walmart's online operation, that it in some ways appears to have the market locked.
The Beatles's iconic
Here?s the most environmentally friendly way to get your Don Johnson on. Mercedes-Benz has created a stupid-fast electric speed boat inspired by its SLS AMG Electric Drive concept, compete with retina-searing yellow paint job.
When you give a group of makers a vague instruction to deconstruct an idea and build something out of it in 48 hours, you get some outlandish results. It's exactly what the team behind The Deconstruction wanted for its two-day global hacker competition that took place this past weekend.
Forget Google Glass -- here are the real personal-computing fashion accessories we need in our future.
Bananas are radioactive and can produce positrons. Could we use this to build a generator? Wired Science blogger Rhett Allain considers the possibility.
If you pre-ordered a Leap Motion, it?ll land in your mailbox this May ? nearly one full year after it was introduced.
When you open the door and walk into the room, it even smells like the 1960s. It reminds you of the old garage where your grandfather kept his twin Chevrolet Corvairs. But those aren't cars you smell. Those are computers.
We sit on our butts 9.3 hours day, more than we sleep. Could "walk and talk" business meetings help us lose weight and improve our health? Author Nilofer Merchant, who spoke at the TED conference Tuesday, says they work wonders.
In this week's
Neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis went on the Daily Show in 2011 and told Jon Stewart that he would develop a robotic body suit that would allow paralyzed people to walk again simply by thinking about it -- and he?d do it in just 3 or 4 years. It was an audacious, some might say reckless, claim. But two years later, Nicolelis insists he?s on track. And he hopes to prove it in brazen fashion in front of billions of people during one of the world?s most-watched events: the World Cup.
Duplitecture isn't just creative laziness or a willful disregard of intellectual property rights. It grows out of old and venerable Chinese aesthetic traditions, in which copying is valued not only as a learning tool but as artistically satisfying in its own right.
All previous Chromebooks have been unapologetically utilitarian -- cheaply priced, cheaply built, and a bit crude. But the Pixel is different than all the rest.
Professor Sugata Mitra is developing an entirely new approach to education, one that could dismantle a centuries-old way of teaching.
Security researchers have identified an ongoing cyber-espionage campaign that compromised 59 computers belonging to government organizations, research institutes, think tanks and private companies from 23 countries in the past 10 days. The attack campaign was by researchers from security firm Kaspersky Lab and the Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security (CrySyS) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. Dubbed MiniDuke, the attack campaign used targeted email messages -- a technique known as spear phishing -- that carried malicious PDF files rigged with a recently patched exploit for Adobe Reader 9, 10 and 11. The exploit was for the vulnerabilities targeted by the exploit on Feb. 20.
Whether you're killing time playing the beta or sitting there twiddling your thumbs waiting for the Heart of the Swarm expansion to release on March 12, now you can distract yourself with the pretty new CGI trailer titled "Vengence." .The trailer got me really pumped to dive straight into the campaign, and maybe even go back through the Wings of Liberty campaign as a refresher. Just when you thought there may be a happy ending for Raynor and Kerrigan, it seems the Queen of Blades is a little restless adjusting to Terran life. The few things I took away from the trailer:
Think of social media—and the Web in general, really—as a game of dominoes: One action creates an entire range of reactions. That's what makes it so powerful...and so time-consuming, especially for those people who are trying to update a constant stream of information on multiple social media accounts. But IFTTT tries to make this easier by allowing you to link Web services, so doing something on one triggers the rest. It is a free service that's a lot like its name: a little bit confusing until you understand just how simple and useful it is.
More than 60 innovators, investors and entrepreneurs called on Congress Wednesday to act on legislation to trample patent trolls. to the chairman and top Democrat of the Judiciary committee of the U.S. House of Representatives, the group urged to legislators to get the ball rolling on bills aimed at curbing litigation by "non-practicing entities, often referred to as patent trolls." "Congress should consider measures that shift incentives away from those who game the system and toward an innovative economy and competitive market," the letter said. The group argues that patent trolls are stifling innovation by targeting startups for lawsuits.
. In my mind, a painting application had to have a wide selection of brushes and effects, multiple paper types, and pressure calibration options. At a mere 1.8MB, SpeedyPainter doesn't have any of these; you just get a blank canvas, and one brush. But you know what? It works, it's fun, and it's easy to learn. SpeedyPainter offers the bare essentials of what makes a painting application possible. It's meant to work with pen tablets, so it plays well with stroke pressure. You can use pressure to control stroke size and opacity, and strokes taper off at the edge in a way that is both pretty and natural. Just like recent versions of Corel Painter, SpeedyPainter features a HUD view that brings the color picker right to your pen, making it easy to change colors while working. Unlike Painter, though, you don't get to limit your possible choices with a palette of color swatches or a fancy natural color mixer: The radial selector has an endless variety of shades, and it's up to you to pick what works. To limit yourself to shades you've already used, you can use the eyedropper tool to sample off the canvas. Rotating the canvas while working is easy, and so is flipping it. The two-faced icon for flipping the canvas made me think of Corel Painter's kaleidoscope feature that lets you paint with multiple planes of symmetry, but SpeedyPainter doesn't have this concept – but even mirroring the canvas is more than you can do with a real canvas. The interface is built mainly for working with pen-and-tablet input, and you can also quickly toggle it off so you're left with just the canvas. To separate background and subject, you can create multiple layers and quickly switch between them, or control their opacity and stacking to get just the look you want.
Many businesses take pains to ensure that company emails stay private and secure, but CIOs and IT managers often overlook another popular form of communication: text messages. A typical SMS is subject not only to hacker interception, but also basic theft: an inbound text remains on a user's smartphone until he or she deletes it. Likewise, it stays on the carrier's servers for who knows how long. If your business trades in sensitive information—documents, photos, private client data, etc.—it might make sense to adopt a more secure system. , but you can also deploy it on Windows and Mac machines.
PC World reader Joel is an Internet Explorer 9 user who encountered a problem: "When I used to [open] a new tab in [Internet Explorer], I used to see a new page with a grid of icons/boxes representing the Web sites I had recently visited, so I could select one and return to that site. No more. I don't know what changed, but now when I select a new tab, what appears is my home page." ) in Internet Explorer opens exactly what Joel described: a page with thumbnails for "Your most popular sites," meaning those you've visited frequently. Somehow, however, this setting got changed, and now Joel's new tabs produce his default home page instead. Thankfully, there's an easy fix:
is for Windows, OSX, and Linux users. It's the fourth critical Flash update since the beginning of the year—and the third Flash security patch from Adobe in February alone. A total of three serious exploits (CVE-2013-0504, CVE-2013-0643 and CVE-2013-0648) are addressed in this update, which Adobe said are already being used in the wild in targeted attacks. These exploits are designed to trick the user into clicking a link that redirects to a website where the computer is exposed to malicious Flash (SWF) files. Two of the exploits specifically target users of the Firefox browser. , or via your browser’s own update service. (Chrome and IE 10 users on Windows 8 are updated automatically.) If you download manually, make sure you deselect the default option to download McAfee Security Scan Plus as well. that are targeted much less frequently than Adobe's software.)
Customers who purchased a Windows 7 PC from June 2012 through January 2013 have just two more days to submit their claims for a discounted copy of Windows 8, Microsoft said yesterday. —a $14.99 copy of Windows 8 Pro to consumers who purchased Windows 7 systems between June 2, 2012, and Jan. 31, 2013—expires at the end of day Thursday, Feb. 28. . Windows 8 Pro's current list price is $199.99. Customers must not only file for the discount before the deadline, but also redeem the offer by paying the $14.99 and downloading the upgrade.
is just one more reason that Microsoft and BlackBerry will need to sharpen their marketing savvy to sell more smartphones in 2013. Microsoft officials at Mobile World Congress here conceded that the company's Windows Phone 8 platform must be differentiated from the technology of market leaders Android and iPhone, as well as newcomers like Firefox in order to grow above a 5% share of the smartphone market. "Firefox's arrival indicates the smartphone industry is so competitive and dynamic," said Greg Sullivan, a senior product manager for Windows Phone, in an interview with Computerworld at the Mobile World Congress (MWC) here this week. "It's far from game over in the mobile space." It seems obvious that Firefox will run on lower-cost smartphones, but the market is still waiting to see what kinds of devices emerge to run it. Meanwhile, Windows Phone can produce a high quality user experience across a variety of low- and high-end devices, Sullivan contended.