Gmail doesn't offer you much in the way of formatting to make your emails look more attactive. That's fine for most emails, but sometimes you need a bit more pizzazz—like, say, a headline. Then again, maybe you often email code snippets, and could use some automatic syntax coloring. Markdown Here is an unobtrusive extension that can help convert your text into well-formed HTML.
There’s nothing you can do if hackers get into a database with your password in it, but you can still protect yourself for all the other worst-case scenarios involving hacking. In this video, we go over ways to make your passwords harder to crack. First, don’t make it easy on hackers by choosing a common password. Splashdata uses security breaches to gather 'most popular passwords' lists each year. The word 'password', number sequences, and other simplistic phrases or numbers fill the top spots. Also, don’t use your name, a password related to another one you might have on a different site, or a login name. Instead, experts recommend using 15 characters, upper-case letters, better yet nonsensical words with special characters and numbers inside them. Need help? Check out some free websites, like also has some suggestions on strong password creation.
Intel has acquired two software companies as it continues to build its burgeoning portfolio to include more tools to write and manage programs and interfaces. The company on Thursday announced the acquisition of Belfast-based Aepona and San Francisco-based Mashery, which offer software to help manage APIs (application programming interfaces) so partners can monetize services based on customer context. For example, Aepona’s API management tools can track location, device type, and other features tied to a mobile connection, which can act as a basis for communication service providers to enable transactions such as one-time payments for services. Mashery also provides software to help partners manage API tools that have been deployed. Intel was not immediately available for comment regarding terms of the acquisitions.
Change is in the air for Microsoft in response to , and it sounds like PC makers couldn’t be happier. Citing various PC industry executives in Asia, the that Microsoft is being more receptive to their concerns, and could lower its licensing costs to compete with cheap tablets. Microsoft has already hinted at a in the next version of Windows. An update codenamed Blue, which will make its way into developers’ hands in June, will reportedly include a boot to desktop option, and may even bring back the Start button. (The update will also bring more features and Control Panel functions into the modern UI—formerly known as Metro—making it easier for Windows tablets users to avoid the desktop.)
The idea behind Virtual Piggy is solid: This cloud-based service, which is designed to help children shop online safely and securely, allows for communication between parents and children, and protects children from many of the dangers lurking online without zapping their sense of independence. But right now it suffers from a few glitches that may make it hard for some kids—especially those on the younger end—to use without frustration. Virtual Piggy is free to use. Parents sign up for an account, and then create profiles for each child they'd like to use the service. This requires entering the child's name and date of birth, and then creating a username and password for that child. The parent can set certain parameters for the child's online shopping, such as transaction limits (both in dollar amounts for individual transactions and per day or week), and approval settings (which means the service will notify you whenever your child makes a transaction that is either above a certain amount or with a certain merchant). You also link a payment method—a credit card or a PayPal account—to your child's profile and set a monthly allowance, which is the maximum amount the child can spend each month. Virtual Piggy has relationships with a group of online retailers that sell everything from games and books to clothes and more. These retailers, which include big-ish names like Ty.com (maker of Beanie Babies) and lesser-known sites like R&R Games, have agreed to allow children to use their Virtual Piggy accounts for checkout.
AT&T is now following in the footsteps of Sprint and T-Mobile by creating a separate service for customers who are (understandably) wary of signing up for a two-year mobile contract. Like Virgin Mobile and Ultra Mobile, AT&T’s Aio Wireless offers relatively low-cost options without requiring a long-term commitment. This affordable, no-contract option is becoming increasingly appealing for both customers and carriers. Aio prepaid plans range from $40-$70/month, which are common price levels for prepaid mobile plans. Every Aio plan offers unlimited data, talk, and text. The different prices for each plan are justified by the speed of the data that’s delivered, and what percentage of it is “high speed.” None of the Aio plans offer LTE, limiting their service to 4G data speeds topping out at 4 Mbps.
Firefox for Windows 8’s “Modern” user interface (UI) will likely wrap up development in November, Mozilla said on its website, in a best case-worst case schedule. A new addition to a Mozilla Wiki noted that the browser will be completed Oct. 2, 2013, at the earliest, or nearly a year after the launch of Windows 8. But the project could be delayed until March 20, 2014. The most probable finish date—based on programming pace so far—is closer to the former than the latter: Nov. 19, 2013. According to Mozilla, it’s a third of the way through development of Firefox for the Modern UI. Mozilla started work on a Modern edition of Firefox, one that would run in the UI formerly known as “Metro” on Windows 8, last October.
Adobe has warned users of its ColdFusion application server platform of a critical vulnerability that could give unauthorized users access to sensitive files stored on their servers. The vulnerability is identified as CVE-2013-3336 and affects ColdFusion 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1, 9.0 and earlier versions for Windows, Mac, and Unix, Adobe said in published Wednesday. The company credited Marcin Siedlarz of Symantec’s Security Response team with reporting the issue. “There are reports that an exploit for this vulnerability is publicly available,” Adobe said. The company is working on a fix and expects to release it publicly on May 14. Until then, customers are advised to restrict public access to certain sensitive directories like CFIDE/administrator, CFIDE/adminapi and CFIDE/gettingstarted.
Sony's refresh of its Ultrabook convertible notebook line will be slim and run for 10 hours before seeking a socket, if an alleged leaked video is to be believed. from a training session for employees at Dixon's, the UK's largest electronics retailer. released last year.
More than a year ago, Microsoft invested ? Twelve months later, all Microsoft has to show for its Nook investment is a Windows 8 modern UI app—an app that probably would have landed in the Windows Store anyway. But new reports suggest that hasn't soured Steve Ballmer and co.'s taste for the Barnes & Noble spin-off. In fact, Microsoft may have even bigger plans for Nook. recently got its hands on internal documents that show Microsoft is pondering an outright acquisition of Nook Media LLC for a cool $1 billion. But what use would Microsoft have for a struggling e-book business? For $1 billion, this has to be more than just a strategic acquisition to keep Nook out of the hands of competitors like Google or Amazon.
When you turn on a PC, you usually want and expect it to check the hard drive or SSD and, from there, load Windows or another operating system. But occasionally you need to boot into an alternative environment that isn't on your hard drive. You might, for instance, need to install an operating system or scan for malware from inside a clean environment. That's when you need to boot from a CD, DVD, or flash drive. . For what to do when your PC won't boot this way, read on.
The times, they are a-changin'—but a new Google timelapse project shows just how much the world's geography is a-changin' too, based on nearly 30 years of satellite imagery. You can see the expansion of the Dubai coast with in-sea development in the past decades, the Saudi Arabia irrigation process, or the Las Vegas urban growth for a view of how we are changing the planet. More strikingly, see the Brazilian Amazon deforestation process, the Columbia Glacier retreat or the Lake Urmia in Iran drying up. All of them are available from Google’s website. The timelapses are built from millions of images collected by the Landsat satellites since the 1970s, as part of an ongoing joint mission between the U.S. Geological Survey and NASA. Google began processing the images in 2009.
Fans of free and that found open source code typically has fewer defects per thousand lines of code than proprietary software code does. Fast forward to this year, and the news is even more striking. Following the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software code through the Coverity Scan service, Coverity's , which was released Tuesday, concludes that “Linux remains the benchmark for quality.”
Microsoft this week said that it had sold 100 million licenses of Windows 8 in the operating system's first six months. But how many copies are being used? That's a question Patrick Moorhead, principal analyst with Moor Insights & Strategy, had at the top of his list after seeing , which was revealed by Tami Reller, the CFO of the Windows division, in a Tuesday blog post and interviews with several media outlets. "The challenge is figuring out what that actually means," said Moorhead of the 100-million mark. "It doesn't mean that there are that many devices out the door." Microsoft counts a license as sold when it provides a customer an upgrade or one of its OEM partners a copy for a new PC, tablet or "convertible" device. The licenses to OEMS make up the bulk of that 100 million. According to Microsoft, the number it regularly cites for Windows 8 licenses sold—and before that, for Windows 7—exclude those sold to enterprises as part of their volume licensing agreements.
Domain registrar Name.com forced its customers to reset their account passwords on Wednesday following a security breach on the company's servers that might have resulted in customer information being compromised. . The credit card information was encrypted with private keys stored in a separate location that wasn't compromised, Name.com said in the email. The company did not specify the type of encryption used, but referred to it as being "strong." The alert email instructed recipients to click on a link in order to perform a password reset, a method that was criticized by some users and security researchers, because it resembles that used in phishing attacks.
Pioneer will soon launch a new car navigation system in Japan that uses dashboard cameras to scan the road ahead for approaching street signs and other cars, and will share images of road conditions with other vehicles. The company's new "Cyber Navi" system includes image recognition software to identify potential hazards like crosswalks, which it overlays with large warning icons on its LCD screen. The system also tracks the car immediately in front of the driver, marking it with a large triangular symbol and calculating the distance between the two vehicles. When cars travel through preset locations throughout the country, Pioneer's system will automatically snap and upload images using its camera. These can be viewed by other drivers using the same system to check real-time traffic and road conditions. The preset locations will include notoriously crowded intersections, popular driving spots, and highway on-ramps, and more will be added on an ad hoc basis to cover traffic jams and other occurrences. Another component of Cyber Navi is a small projector that attaches to the ceiling of a car and creates a heads-up display for drivers that appears to float over the road. It is used to present driving instructions for navigation, and highlight nearby points of interest like gas stations and convenience stores with large floating icons.
Nokia has expanded its line of phones with the Asha 501, which comes with an improved touch user interface to help keep low-cost Android-based products at bay. The launch of the second new member of the Asha family in about two weeks follows Nokia's announcement last month that sales of its mobile phones in the first quarter had dropped by 21 percent year-on- year, to 55.8 million units. The product family has become important for Nokia because a lot of the future growth is expected to come from low-end smartphones, and its Windows Phone-based products are still not cheap enough to address the whole market. The new phone and the underlying platform is, in part, the result of last year's acquisition of Norwegian company Smarterphone. The Asha 501 will cost $99 before taxes and subsidies when it starts shipping in June. The GSM phone has a 3-inch screen, a 3.2-megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and a choice between one or two SIM cards. Offering the latter has become a must in many developing countries.
Apple retook its spot as China's fifth largest smartphone vendor in the first quarter, as the country's market grew to triple the size of the U.S.'s. Apple had an 8 percent share of the smartphone market, while Samsung continued to lead all vendors with a 20 percent share, according to research firm Canalys. Trailing behind Samsung were Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific, Huawei, and Lenovo. . But iPhone 5 sales, along with price cuts to older iPhone models, propelled the company's smartphone shipments in China's intensely competitive market, said Nicole Peng, an analyst with Canalys. Samsung and Apple were the only two foreign companies to rank among China's top ten smartphone vendors. In the first quarter, about 68 percent of all shipments to the nation's market were from domestic vendors, Peng said. Smartphone popularity in China is soaring to the point that the market now dwarfs the U.S.'s. Vendors shipped 82 million smartphones to the Chinese market during the quarter, but only 27 million to the U.S.
Lenovo’s ThinkCentre Edge 92z is a handsome all-in-one with a 21.5-inch, IPS, 10-point touch-screen display and several business-class features, including Microsoft Lync-qualified VoIP features. Opt for the discrete graphics option, as our eval unit was equipped, and you have a pretty good gaming system, too. Curiously, the graphics option isn’t available direct from Lenovo. We could find such a configuration available only through resellers such as Amazon, Best Buy, and New Egg. Styled in shiny black, the Edge92z is a looker, if not quite in the same league as an iMac. It's thin and quite light for an all-in-one. That’s an important characteristic if you plan to take advantage of the unit's VESA mount point and attach it to an articulated arm. The 92z's two front feet can be removed for a cleaner appearance in that configuration, and Lenovo sells the ThinkCentre Extend Arm, which clamps to your desktop, for a reasonable $90. In its default configuration, the 92z sits on the aforementioned feet, leaning back on a spring-loaded kickstand. This leaves enough room to slide the keyboard between the feet, but the stand blocks much of the rest of the area behind unit. As is typical of business-oriented desktops, the mouse and keyboard are of the wired USB variety. Consumers will likely prefer wireless peripherals, which are a $39 option if you buy the machine direct from Lenovo (but then you can’t get the discrete graphics option).
She's your mom. She's risen to every challenge, not the least of which was raising you to be the fine, upstanding PC enthusiast you are today. Yet despite all of Mom's successes, you're still the go-to techie in the family. With Mother's Day just around the corner, it's your turn to streamline her desktop, protect her precious data, and put a smile on her face. Just install these apps and gadgets on Mom's computer, and surprise her with a much better PC experience on Sunday morning.
Let's not mince words: Cyberattacks suck. Whether criminals are hacking our passwords, or and bogus news was posted about an attack on the White House, the U.S. stock market took a nosedive. The often dire consequences of cyberattacks have the attention of the highest levels of government. Just yesterday, U.S. senators called on the Obama Administration to pursue when he visits Japan this month. All this talk is great, but back in the here and now, the situation is tough. When cyberattacks occur—and they will—there’s little you can do except control the damage. Unless you hack back, that is. Loosely defined, "hacking back" involves turning the tables on a cyberhacking assailant: thwarting or stopping the crime, or perhaps even trying to steal back what was taken. How that digital revenge is wreaked, and whether any of it is legal, are issues being actively debated right now—to the extent that anyone wants to talk about it, let alone admit to trying it. But there's one thing security experts can agree on: Hack-backs are a tempting response to a frustrating situation.
Sony made good on a promise to return to profitability after offloading a number of valuable assets last year, but its core electronics business is still losing money. The Tokyo-based company said Thursday it booked a profit of ¥43 billion ($440 million) for its fiscal year through March, a year after it posted a ¥457 billion loss, the largest since its founding. The company also increased revenue by 5 percent to ¥6.8 trillion. The return to profit, a key promise under new CEO Kazuo Hirai, was expected after the company sold off billions of dollars worth of assets during the fiscal period, including its U.S. headquarters, a large Tokyo office complex and share holdings. A lingering worry is the company's failure to generate profit on its consumer electronics. For the current fiscal year, the company promised a similarly modest profit of ¥50 billion, less than one percent of its projected sales of ¥7.5 trillion.
A standards organization has created a boot environment for tablets and PCs that could potentially run a 64-bit version of Windows RT. The UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) Forum on Wednesday announced that its boot firmware specifications will now support ARMv8, a 64-bit processor architecture announced by ARM in 2011. ARM’s processors are used in most smartphones and tablets, and chip makers such as Nvidia and Samsung are expected to release 64-bit processors for smartphones and tablets in the future. Microsoft on Windows 8 and RT requires PCs and tablets to carry a feature called Secure Boot, which prevents a system from being hijacked. The Secure Boot environment is based on UEFI firmware and ARM has already said it is working with Microsoft to develop a 64-bit version of Windows for ARM-based devices. However, it is not yet clear when the OS will come out. ARM expects 64-bit processors to start shipping later this year or early next year. Most smartphones and tablets today use 32-bit ARM processors.
Microsoft has released a temporary fix for a zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer 8, which was used by hackers in a prominent attack against the U.S. Department of Labor’s website. The problem is particularly dangerous since it can allow an attacker to install malware merely by visiting a tampered webpage. Microsoft is still working on a patch, wrote Dustin Childs, group manager for the company’s Trustworthy Computing division. “Customers should apply the Fix it or follow the workarounds listed in the advisory to help protect against the known attacks,” Childs said in a statement. The vulnerability is described as a problem in the way IE “accesses an object in memory that has been deleted or has not been properly allocated.” IE versions 6, 7, 9 and 10 are not affected.
Fire up the Johnny Cash and watch as the moon very nearly covers the entire sun, leaving just a golden sliver of a ring, during a Slooh Space Camera show of today's annular solar eclipse, starting at 2:30 p.m. Pacific/5:30 p.m. Eastern.
Larry Ellison planned the biggest, fastest and most exciting yacht race in history. Then Team Oracle wrecked one of his massive catamarans in San Francisco Bay, showing just how fragile the big boat, and the event itself, really is.
This is what happens when you give the Wolfsburg brain trust an unlimited budget and tell them to build a concept car for a tuner show: Utter. Madness.
YouTube will let you pay to subscribe to channels with a new pilot program that includes a limited number of channel partners for now. The company listed Jim Henson Family TV and Ultimate Fighting Championship as initial members.
Porsche has introduced two new 911s ¿ its flagship Turbo and track-focused GT3 ¿ with a glaring omission in the options list: a manual gearbox.
The terrorism soap opera and nail-biter series
In the middle of the South Atlantic, there's a patch of sea almost devoid of life. There are no birds, few fish, not even much plankton. But researchers report that they've found buried treasure under the empty waters: ancient DNA hidden in the muck of the sea floor, which lies 5000 meters below the waves.
On Thursday, the White House released a set of tools and policy documents designed to open up the federal government's vast treasure trove of data to software developers, entrepreneurs and policy wonks.
Ouya, the $99, Android-powered game console, has been bumped from its planned June 4 retail launch to June 25, according to a press release issued by its maker today.
BlueStacks announced GamePop, a console and subscription service that brings Android games to a television.
Jason Mars is a rarity. He's an outsider with regular access to Google's data centers.
E-mail newsletters are very good at forming habits and getting readers to take action, like buy a product or click on a news story. That's why they've proven to be the cockroach of internet media: fragile individually but basically indestructible as a species.
In the last 20 years Wired has put a plethora of interesting people, topics, and things on its cover -- and done it all with style. Watch all of them go by in less than 30 seconds in this video montage.
Where the Pebble community has really shined is in creating new watch faces.
Electric vehicles use the same roads, the same bridges and the same infrastructure as the rest of us. But because they don't burn gasoline, they're immune from paying taxes at the pump to fund that infrastructure. That's going to change.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives introduced legislation that would create a new scientific figurehead: the Science Laureate of the United States. Wired Science blogger Jeffrey Marlow reports.
For years Suren Manvelyan has been making extreme macro photos of both human and animal eyes, and he's just released a new batch of purely animal eyes that are equally stunning.
The Army says Afghan poppies -- the source of much of the world's heroin -- can be a "source of stability" for the war-ravaged country.
Google is where you search for information and Amazon is where you buy stuff, right? Two different businesses, right? Hardly.
Not content with award-nominated comics, Boom! Studios is publishing Adventure Time's first original graphic novel this month. Here's an exclusive look.
Tech investors used to prefer startups like Facebook and Twitter -- companies that offered a product to the consumers of the world. These scrappy startups had low overhead, and investors saw them as the easiest way to strike it rich. But that's changing. Early-stage investors are now throwing their weight behind companies that sell stuff to the business world -- companies intent on challenging enterprise giants like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft.
They say there is nothing new under the sun, and nowhere is that more true than Kickstarter, where anything old and cool is being made new again.
The Clek Foonf child car seat is expensive, but it addresses numerous safety issues and legal requirements, and has the design flourishes to please your inner retro sci-fi geek.
Online gambling became legal in Nevada last week, but Mac users are left out of the Texas hold 'em draw at the nation's first state-sanctioned online site. That's because Cupertino's operating system isn't supported. It's a rather strange twist, given that the chief technology officer of the UltimatePoker.com site is Chris Derossi, the former lead architect of Apple's "System 7" operating system in the 1990s.
It's official. Tesla has returned its first profitable quarter after 10 years in the business, following promises that it would be in the black in 2013.
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An Arizona judge has denied a motion to suppress evidence collected through a spoofed cell tower that the FBI used to track the location of an accused identity thief.
The first trailer for Edgar Wright's latest flick with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost is here -- and it looks like the best/worst bar crawl of all time.
In the latest episode of