The U.S. Department of Justice is asking a federal court to dismiss its indictment in a case that involves a child porn site known as Playpen after a judge asked the government to disclose the hacking technique it used to gather evidence. “The government must now choose between disclosure of classified information and dismissal of…
Okta has acquired Stormpath, a company that provides authentication services for developers. The deal should help the identity provider improve its developer-facing capabilities. Stormpath offered developers a set of tools for managing user logins for their apps. Rather than building a login system from scratch, developers could call the Stormpath API and have the company…
Fitbit doesn’t quit. The reigning maker of fitness-tracking bands has a new band, the ultra-slim heart rate-monitoring Alta HR, and I got a chance to put it to the test during a spin class at a Midtown Manhattan fitness studio last week. I’ve largely avoided the spin craze until now, but on this particular day…
Characters named Q in film and TV have been portrayed as being exceptional. Q in the James Bond movies served up futuristic gadgets, and Q in Star Trek was omnipotent. A new quantum computing program called Q at IBM will be remarkable in its own right. In a few years, IBM plans to create a quantum…
By 2020, an average internet user will use 1.5GB of traffic a day, and daily video traffic will reach 1PB, Intel predicts. A huge amount of data will be generated by autonomous vehicles, mobile devices, and internet-of-things devices. Every day, more information is being collected and sent to faster servers in mega data centers, which…
Apple last year again lost ground in the U.S. K-12 market, as Google with its Chrome OS continued to make gains, a research firm said Thursday. In 2016, 58% of the 12.6 million mobile computers shipped to educational customers — or approximately 7.3 million — were powered by Chrome OS, up from 50% of 2015’s…
With Snap Inc. riding a successful IPO this week, company executives likely are calculating what to do with the money that’s pouring in. [ Related: Snap soars on IPO, now what? ] The most likely gambit: Looking to make key acquisitions to keep Snap near the top of the social networking world. “Snap will need…
HackerOne, the company behind one of the most popular vulnerability coordination and bug bounty platforms, has decided to make its professional service available to open-source projects for free. “Here at HackerOne, open source runs through our veins,” the company’s representatives said in a blog post. “Our company, product, and approach is built on, inspired by,…
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…