The problem with a lot of touch-sensitive controls is that the communication is one-way: They can feel you, but you can’t feel them. With touch-screen displays it’s easy enough, as the button does what it says on the screen. Not all buttons are designed to be looked at as they are pushed, though. Take video-game…
Declining birth rate, aging population, natural disasters, pollution: Do these sound like issues the IT industry can deal with? Japanese businesses say yes, and a number of them are at the Cebit trade show in Hanover, Germany, to explain why. Industry 4.0 — the building of “smart factories” in which machines monitor one another and…
McDonald’s India operation asked users to update their McDelivery app as a ‘precautionary measure’ after a security firm said it had found that it was leaking personal data of over 2.2 million users. The Indian operation of the food chain, which is owned and managed by franchisees, said in posts on Facebook and Twitter over…
Secusmart, the BlackBerry subsidiary that secures the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s smartphone, will roll out a version of its SecuSuite security software compatible with Samsung Electronics’ Knox platform later this year. That means that organizations looking for smartphones offering government-grade security will be able to buy the Samsung Galaxy S7 or, soon, the S8 rather…
Intel’s first Optane storage modules came out in early January, but were only 32GB. Larger Optane drives with up to 1.5TB of storage capacity are on their way, and we now have a better understanding of how they’re going to perform. The first large-capacity Optane SSD drive is the DC P4800X, which has 375GB of…
Tap-to-pay terminals make it easy for you to pay for things with your smartphone (hey, Apple Pay!), so in theory, you can use them to pay with anything that can support an NFC chip. That’s what Visa was illustrating at South by Southwest through their latest payment-enabled accessory prototype: a pair of sunglasses. The sunglasses…
With so many kid-friendly games, apps, and programs these days, it can be hard for parents to pry their kids away from the screen—but not all screen time has to be passive. SwapBots is a new line of physical toys that spring to life when paired with a smartphone or tablet, thanks to augmented reality.…
Companies that use security products to inspect HTTPS traffic might inadvertently make their users’ encrypted connections less secure and expose them to man-in-the-middle attacks, the U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team warns. US-CERT, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, published an advisory after a recent survey showed that HTTPS inspection products don’t mirror the…
Sony isn’t exactly the coolest name in technology, which is why we were surprised to see the company set up shop directly across the street from the Austin Convention Center at South by Southwest. Stepping inside Sony’s makeshift Wow Factory was like seeing into a future where virtual and augmented reality are full-body experiences not…
San Diego Gas & Electric (SDG&E) has taken the wraps off a new battery energy storage project that will store up to 2 megawatts of electricity — enough to power 1,000 homes for four hours. The new vanadium redox flow (VRF) battery substation was installed by Osaka, Japan-based Sumitomo Electric and will store renewable energy…