One of the inventors of the lithium-ion battery used by laptops, phones, and tablets has announced the next generation of battery technology: a solid-state battery that offers three times the energy density of today’s batteries and is safer to boot. John Goodenough, the Fermi award winner who identified the lithium cobalt oxide material that forms the…
Remember Google Goggles? While it hasn’t seen an update since 2014, the app (which is still able to be downloaded in the Play Store) is a way to search the world by using your camera. But a feature uncovered deep in a beta version of the Google app seems to indicate that Google hasn’t forgotten…
In November, President Donald Trump said on his first day in office he would order an investigation of H-1B abuses. That never happened, though critics held their tongues. After all, Trump had repeatedly campaigned for H-1B reforms, even inviting laid-off Disney IT workers to speak at his campaign rallies. Even so, patience is ending. […
A fresh delivery of Android Nougat is coming to another batch of phones. Motorola’s G4, G4 Plus and the ZenFone 3 Deluxe are on tap to get Google’s latest mobile treats. Meanwhile, the Huawei Honor 6X just launched a beta for those eager to make the leap to Nougat. Each week, we round up all…
Targeted attacks are moving away from traditional malware to stealthier techniques that involve abusing standard system tools and protocols, some of which are not always monitored. The latest example is an attack dubbed DNSMessenger, which was analyzed by researchers from Cisco Systems’ Talos team. The attack starts with a malicious Microsoft Word document distributed through…
Apple’s Safari browser, like rival Internet Explorer (IE), has lost a significant number of users in the last two years, data published Wednesday showed. The most likely destination of Safari defectors: Google’s Chrome. According to California-based analytics vendor Net Applications, in March 2015, an estimated 69% of all Mac owners used Safari to go online.…
Java could be getting a garbage collector that allocates but does not reclaim memory, providing special testing benefits. A draft Java proposal recently floated named Epsilon GC calls for development of a garbage collector that handles only memory allocation. Authored by OpenJDK contributor Aleksey Shipilev, a principal software engineer at Red Hat, the proposal is…
The question of how the electronics industry recycles or disposes of old batteries came up again due to a Greenpeace protest of Samsung at Mobile World Congress this week. Greenpeace protestors appeared at a Samsung press event in Barcelona on Sunday carrying and erecting banners outside the venue; the group urged reuse and recycling of…
Howard Schmidt advised both President Brack Obama and George W. Bush on cybersecurity. He was a CSO at Microsoft and a CISO at eBay. He led several industry groups, and wrote books on cybersecurity. But when security professionals remember him, it is not so much for his technical accomplishments as for the impact he had…
Java Platform SE (Standard Edition) 9, a planned modularized upgrade, remains on target for release in July, an Oracle official said this week. Java Development Kit (JDK) 9 is set for release on July 27. It will include a long list of capabilities, including modularization, a read-eval-print loop, ahead-of-time compilation, and a memory-saving improvement for…