A U.S. senator is probing reports of a breach of data from smart toys from Spiral Toys, writing to the company’s CEO a letter with ten questions about the issue, including about the company’s security practices. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat, wrote in a letter Tuesday to CEO Mark Meyers that the breach raises serious…
A resolution introduced in the U.S. Senate on Tuesday aims to roll back privacy rules for broadband service providers that were approved by the Federal Communications Commission in October. The rules include the requirement that internet service providers like Comcast, AT&T, and Verizon should obtain “opt-in” consent from consumers to use and share sensitive personal…
Microsoft’s tools for developers hit another milestone Tuesday, when the company made Visual Studio 2017 generally available. As the name implies, this is the next major release of Microsoft’s integrated development environment. It’s aimed at providing tools for developers to create modern apps for the cloud, mobile platforms and more. The software gained a Xamarin…
Thanks to WikiLeaks, antivirus vendors will soon be able to figure out if you have been hacked by the CIA. On Tuesday, WikiLeaks dumped a trove of 8,700 documents that allegedly detail the CIA’s secret hacking operations, including spying tools designed for mobile phones, PCs and smart TVs. WikiLeaks has redacted the actual source code…
The Raspberry Pi may be the most widely know board computer being sold, but Nvidia’s Jetson TX2 is one of the fastest. The Jetson TX2, unveiled Tuesday, is a full Linux computer on a tiny board the size of a Raspberry Pi. It’s designed to help make robots, drones and other devices that rely on…
Hyperloop One is well on its way to developing the world’s first fully operational Hyperloop transportation system. The company revealed its progress on Tuesday at the Middle East Rail conference in Dubai, sharing pictures and footage of its Nevada development site dubbed “DevLoop.” Taking Elon Musk’s Hyperloop concept of a levitating pod in a low-pressure…
Avaya has found a buyer for its networking business: Extreme Networks will buy the division for about US$100 million as part of Avaya’s bankruptcy process. The venerable enterprise voice, collaboration and networking company filed for bankruptcy in January and said it would shift its focus from hardware to software and services. Extreme, based in San…
Imagine a robot stacking boxes in a warehouse when it suddenly sees that one box is in the wrong stack. It goes back and puts the container in the right place. How did the machine know it had made a mistake? The robot’s human boss didn’t punch any codes into a computer to have the…
Corporations concerned about the release of thousands of CIA documents detailing hacks against Apple iOS and Mac OSX, Google’s Android, Microsoft’s Windows, Linux and Solaris need to conduct a fresh round of risk assessment that takes the new revelations into account. While the trove of leaked data – known as Vault 7 – doesn’t include…
Tesla Motors has hired Gary Clark, formerly IT CTO and engineering CIO of Juniper Networks, as its new CIO. Clark replaces Jay Vijayan, who left the company in January 2016 to launch a startup. Clark, who oversaw Juniper’s broad shift to cloud infrastructure and SaaS (software-as-a-service) applications, revealed the appointment on his LinkedIn profile but…