It’s a short week, which I guess means nothing at all really happe—Wait, Ubisoft is opening a theme park? And there was a new I present your gaming wrap-up for the week of September 7-11. If you’re looking for something new and no-cost to play this weekend, you have two
Windows Phone might be a failure, according to Cyanogen chief Kirt McMaster, but that's okay: He plans to take Microsoft’s Cortana digital assistant and make it his own. In an interview with the McMaster sees Cortana as an app in search of a good home—a home that Cyanogen could provide. “Natural language coupled with intelligence is very important, but as an application it doesn’t rally[sic] work, because you need to be embedded into the framework of the OS because that is where you get all the signal from the services that makes that intelligence smarter,”
Our picks for the top new Android apps and games worth grabbing this week.
Google still hasn’t launched Google Drive for Linux, despite GNOME 3.18, which will be released on September 23, features
The Moto X Pure Edition has a hidden trick: it works with Google’s Project Fi. However, staying on a phone call worked while hopping between Wi-Fi and a cellular signal. Given that the Moto X Pure Edition is sold unlocked for use on any carrier, it’s not a terrible surprise to see it work. Given that Motorola partnered to build the Nexus 6 (the only phone officially supported by Project Fi), perhaps the Moto X will be the next phone to join the MVNO.
Microsoft's privacy policies—you know, the ones that encompass the dodgy Smith was formerly general counsel & executive vice president of legal and corporate affairs, according to his updated Smith will be Microsoft’s first president since 2002, according to Bloomberg. Given that his role is more of an administrative one, it’s not likely that he’ll have any direct impact on Microsoft’s product roadmap. Still, Smith will be the man who crafts Microsoft’s privacy policy.
It's a basic fact of life that once you publish something on the Internet, it's pretty much impossible to get it back. Now illustrating that point with painful clarity, images of the TSA's master luggage keys have been published online, meaning that anyone with a 3D printer can make their own. It all started when The Washington Post published a
If you’re looking to pick up an iPhone 6s for less than its $650 suggested price, Sprint and T-Mobile are eager to help. Both wireless carriers are leasing the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus with monthly installment plans that are cheaper than those of AT&T and Verizon. They’ll also save you money over Here’s how it all breaks down: With T-Mobile’s iPhone 6s deal, you pay $20 per month for the hardware with no money down, or $24 per month for the iPhone 6s Plus. After 18 months, you can either give the phone back to T-Mobile, or pay another $164 to buy the phone outright. (This would bring the total payment to $524, which is still $125 cheaper than full price). Either way, you’re free to leave T-Mobile at that point. You can also sign up for a new hardware plan, though the cost may increase as the $20 per month deal is a limited-time offer.
Hackers who compromise websites are also increasingly verifying themselves as the owners of those properties in Google's Search Console. Under certain circumstances this could allow them to remain undetected longer than they otherwise would be, researchers warn. The Google Search Console, formerly known as the Google Webmaster Tools, is a very useful service for administrators to understand how their websites perform in search results. In addition to providing analytics about search queries and traffic, it also allows webmasters to submit new content for crawling and to receive alerts when Google detects malware or spam issues on their websites.
Microsoft has picked up a new partner as it tries to revitalize Windows on smartphones. Chinese smartphone vendor Alcatel OneTouch says it’s planning to launch a
Yes and maybe. There’s a setting you can change that will give you at least a hint of the problem. But the hard part starts after you get that hint. So let’s get you to a point where your crashes contain some useful information. From now on, your system won’t simply reboot when it can’t keep going. Assuming you’re not yet running Windows 10, you’ll get a blue screen filled with intimidating text. Microsoft calls this a Stop Error, but everyone else prefers a more descriptive term: The Blue Screen of Death (BSoD).
Whether you want Windows 10 or not, Microsoft says it may download the files to your PC regardless. In
Sony Mobile is changing its stance over its The company was not available for comment at this writing. We’ll update this article should the company respond. The
I don’t dive into Windows 10’s Settings app that often, but when I do it’s usually to check two or three things, such as Windows Update or my Wi-Fi settings. An easy way to jump to a particular section of the Settings app is to This tip isn’t just for the Settings app, however—you can also use it in a limited number of other Windows apps such as Mail and OneNote. For our example here, however, we’ll stick with the Settings app.
Researchers at security company ESET have found a type of malware that changes an Android device's PIN, the first of its kind in an ever-evolving landscape of ransomware attacks. For most users, the only option to get rid of the malware is to reset the phone to its factory settings, which unfortunately also deletes all the data on the device. The malware calls itself "Porn Droid" and bills itself as a viewer for adult content. It has only been seen on third-party Android application marketplaces or forums for pirated software, wrote Lukas Stefanko, an ESET malware analyst. But after it's installed, users see a warning supposedly from the FBI that they've allegedly viewed "prohibited pornography." It asks for a US$500 fine to be paid within three days.
You might not think your phone is too big, but you were recently featured in an article about how stupid people look when they take pictures with their tablets.
Quantum dot technology is helping LED LCD TVs deliver richer, broader color spectrums. Almost as rich as OLED TVs.
One of the check-off features of Intel’s big Haswell-E CPU is support for quad-channel DDR4 memory, but my testing shows it may not matter much. Think of memory channels as shotgun barrels. You know from video games that two barrels are better than one. Now think of quad-channel RAM is the four-barrel shotgun of computers: The more memory channels, the more memory bandwidth available to the CPU. For each channel in a modern PC, you need an individual stick of RAM. This also depends, of course, on the CPU. Consumer chips such as the
If free speech for humans is worth fighting for, is free speech for computers worth fighting against? That's the type of question you might expect from someone who holds a doctor of philosophy degree in computer science and psychology and it's exactly what the audience at DARPA's Wait, What? conference in St. Louis heard on Thursday. Posing the question was Paul Cohen, who joined the Department of Defense-run research organization from the University of Arizona in 2013. "Are you attracted or appalled by the idea of machines that have ideas and know how to express them?," he continued. "What if you were lonely? What if they were bigots? What if you could each change the other’s mind?"
In the quest to make a better radiation detector, engineers at DARPA are taking a leaf from crowd-sourcing and have developed one that's small and cheap, integrates with a smartphone and sends its data to the cloud. The gadget, on show at this week's Wait, What? conference in St. Louis, costs about $400 in volume -- significantly cheaper than existing detectors used by public safety agencies -- and provides a more accurate picture of any potential threats, said Vincent Tang, an applied physicist working for DARPA. It works by sending a radiation reading to a companion smartphone over Bluetooth once every second. In St. Louis, attendees could borrow a phone and detector and try it out, searching for radioactive sources hidden around the room.
We don't normally get excited about modem chips, but Intel's new Puma 7 is worth noting because of what it portends: more Internet bandwidth. Puma 7 is Intel's first DOCSIS 3.1 chip, launched Thursday on the eve of a compatibility “plugfest” that represents the next step toward deploying multi-gigabit cable modems based on the standard by early next year. Another interesting tidbit about the Puma 7 chip: It’s fabricated on the same 14-nm process as Intel’s latest