The U.S. House of Representatives has followed the Senate in voting to repeal privacy rules that can prevent broadband providers from selling customers’ internet-browsing histories and other data without their permission. On Tuesday, the House voted 215-205 to do away with the privacy rules that the U.S. Federal Communications Commission passed last year. The rules…
The landmark Moore’s Law observation, which is now more than 50 years old, keeps shapeshifting as the physical challenges of making smaller chips mounts. Many scientists agree that Moore’s Law is dying, but Intel is clinging on to it for dear life. It has been Intel’s guiding light for making chips smaller, faster and cheaper.…
The FBI warns that attackers are targeting vulnerable FTP servers used by small medical and dental offices as a way to obtain medical records and other sensitive personal information. While the dangers of placing sensitive data on these servers is well known, smaller businesses may not have the expertise or motivation to upgrade. The attackers…
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…