Apple yesterday patched a bug in the iOS version of Safari that had been used by criminals to spook users into paying $125 or more because they assumed the browser was broken. The flaw, fixed in Monday’s iOS 10.3 update, had been reported to Apple a month ago by researchers at San Francisco-based mobile security…
Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk today indicated he may be helping a new company that would develop technology that lets humans communicate their thoughts to computers. While Musk hasn’t made many details about the new venture public, he included the name “Neuralink” in a tweet. Twitter In that post, Musk alluded to information about…
China is pouring more money into chasing its semiconductor ambitions. The state-backed Tsinghua Unigroup, which has been building up the country’s chip-industry infrastructure, received a 150 billion yuan (US$22 billion) in financing on Tuesday. The funds come from the China Development Bank and a national integrated circuit investment fund, two groups tied to the country’s…
A financial report cited by South Korea’s Yonhap News says that Samsung’s higher-end smartphones are accounting for a rapidly decreasing share of the company’s sales. Premium smartphones account for just 29% of Samsung’s smartphone sales, down from 75% in mid-2013, Yonhap quotes a Hana Financial Investment report as saying. The disastrous battery problems experienced by…
Just two days before Samsung’s launch of the Galaxy S8 on Wednesday, the company announced it will consider using some recalled Galaxy Note7 smartphones for re-sale as refurbished or as rental phones. One analyst bashed the plan as “disastrous,” while another said Samsung is performing a “balancing act” following the Note7 fallout when some units…
Amazon today released Connect, a contact center as a service offering hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud. The move represents AWS attempting to jump into a burgeoning market for cloud-based contact center software, while continuing to push AWS into the enterprise communications market. Just last month AWS announced Chime, a cloud-based Unified Communication as…
Eli Singer, CEO of Jethro, provider of an acceleration solution for interactive business intelligence (BI) on big data, says that despite its promise, BI on big data is fundamentally broken because SQL-on-Hadoop remains too slow. “Today’s approach to BI on big data is not working,” Singer said in a statement Tuesday. “Under the SQL-on-Hadoop hype…
Microsoft has brought live, collaborative editing to its Excel app for Windows through a beta update it launched on Tuesday. The new feature lets testers collaborate with one another on the same file from inside the app. Live collaboration has been a major focus of Office 2016, which Microsoft released roughly a year and a half ago.…
New clues signaled that work has wrapped up on Microsoft Windows 10’s next feature upgrade, dubbed the Creators Update, with a release to customers expected in one week, perhaps two. Build 15063, first issued to participants in Microsoft’s Windows Insider preview program on March 20, has been identified by Windows experts as the likely RTM…
For the second time in two weeks developers of the popular LastPass password manager are working to fix a serious vulnerability that could allow malicious websites to steal user passwords or infect computers with malware. Like the LastPass flaws patched last week, the new issue was discovered and reported to LastPass by Tavis Ormandy, a…