The U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Federal Trade Commission have opened parallel inquiries into the way smartphone security updates are issued and handled by major mobile carriers and device makers. The two agencies say they are responding to the growing amount of personal information held in smartphones and a recent rise in the attacks on the security of that information. The FCC has sent letters to AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, and U.S. Cellular asking for information on their processes for reviewing and releasing security updates for mobile devices. The FTC has asked for similar information from Apple, Blackberry, Google, HTC, LG, Microsoft, Motorola, and Samsung.
The onslaught of tech information is relentless. Stay on top of the latest with PCWorld’s Digital Edition. Available as single copies or as a yearlong subscription, it highlights the best content from PCWorld.com—the most important news, the key product reviews, and the most useful features and how-to stories—in a curated Enhanced Edition for Android and iOS, as well as in a Replica Edition. The Enhanced Edition includes videos and other interactive features—all designed for consuming on your tablet. The Replica Edition is a PDF-like version that’s enabled for your mobile device’s touchscreen. We feature Microsoft Build’s biggest reveals: HoloLens gets some apps, Windows 10's next big update, Windows Phone's slumber, and supersmart bots. Plus, our candid hands-on with the HoloLens Development edition and our review of the long awaited Oculus Rift headset.
Siri made the iPhone more responsive with artificial intelligence, but now its founders want to put AI in every device you own. Dag Kittlaus, who cofounded Siri, left Apple five years ago, but now he’s back with a new voice assistant named Viv that he predicts will change the way we interact with not just our phones, but our home appliances, cars, and more. Viv has
The founder of now defunct virtual currency Liberty Reserve has been sentenced to 20 years in prison for using his company to run a huge money laundering scheme catering to cybercriminals. Arthur Budovsky, 42, was sentenced Friday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, with Judge Denise Cote also ordering him to pay a US $500,000 fine. In January, Budovsky pleaded guilty to one count of conspiring to commit money laundering. During sentencing, Cote noted Budovsky ran an "extraordinarily successful" and "large-scale international money laundering operation." The long sentence shows that "money laundering through the use of virtual currencies is still money laundering, and that online crime is still crime," Leslie Caldwell, assistant attorney general for the U.S. Department of Justice's Criminal Division, said in a press release.
If you’re having problems with Windows 10’s forced updates, you’re not alone. Thankfully, with 11 cumulative updates behind us, we’ve accumulated some coping experience. Each cumulative update is different, but there’s a handful of tricks that can help jolt your system back into consciousness when a troubling cumulative update strikes. If you’re having problems, the following solutions are worth a try. If you can’t get back on course, follow the instructions at the end to find more personalized help -- and the hope to live to fight another day. I’ve avoided recommendations that seem old-in-the-tooth nowadays. As best I can tell, few recent cumulative update problems are solved by creating a new user account (although there are
I’ve been ignoring an update from Oracle’s Virtual Box for a while now. The program doesn’t do automatic updating, and the only time I remember to update it is when I open the program. Also known as: exactly the time when I least want to do a manual update. It’s not just Virtual Box. I’ve got nearly a dozen programs on my PC I need to update that I just didn’t know about or was too lazy to check. That’s why I recently decided to get a program to monitor my other programs for updates: All you have to do is download and install the App Manager from File Hippo. Once that’s done, the program will automatically start and tell you how many updates you need. Then you just click
You don't have to be stuck shooting with the camera app that came with your phone.
Considering we spend a third of our lives in bed, comfortable sleep often comes down to choosing the right mattress. Our homes and apartments are climate controlled, so why shouldn’t the place where we sleep? That’s the question posed by an enterprising group of inventors at a startup who raised nearly $1.4 million on Kickstarter last year to launch the second generation of a unique device intended to “hack” your body’s natural biorhythms for a better night’s sleep. Designed by engineers formerly responsible for climate control systems in NASA spacesuits,
This summer, a spate of new features are headed to Windows 10 by way of the The full Ink experience is still months away—longer, if you wait on the fruits of Microsoft’s
The fans have spoken. It wasn’t enough Normally, comparing the 4.5-pound, 15-inch, quad-core MacBook Pro 15 to the 3.3-pound, 13-inch, dual-core Surface Book would be just the sort of Apple-to-orange mismatch I’d never consider. But the fans argued the price was the thing—comparing a loaded-up, $2,699 Surface Book to a top-of-the-line, $2,700 MacBook Pro 15 was “truly fair.”
Twitter has blocked Dataminr from offering analytics around real-time tweets from the social networking site to U.S. intelligence agencies, according to a newspaper report. The social networking company, which provides Dataminr with real-time access to public tweets, seems to be trying to distance itself from appearing to aid government surveillance, a controversial issue after former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that the government was collecting information on users through Internet and telecommunications companies. Executives of Dataminr told intelligence agencies recently that Twitter, which holds around 5 percent of the equity in the startup and provides the data feed, did not want the company
