Imagine a fellow airplane passenger sitting next to you and yelling into his mobile phone for six hours during a cross-country flight. If simply thinking about that scenario gives you a headache, you’re not alone. On Monday, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission killed a plan to allow mobile phone calls during commercial airline flights. Since 2013,…
Foxconn, the Taiwanese electronics manufacturer best known as the maker of iPhones and iPads for Apple, is said to be preparing a US$27 billion bid to acquire Toshiba’s computer chip assets. Toshiba is most commonly recognized for making NAND flash and memory chips, with all of its factories in Japan. However, chip manufacturing in Japan has…
Microsoft last week restarted deliveries of Windows 10 to beta testers, weeks sooner than it has resumed previews in the past. Windows 10 build 16170 was released Friday to the Insider program’s “Fast” track, one of three that testers can select. It was the first for the operating system’s next feature upgrade, which Microsoft has…
The UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) has launched a new data science campus in Newport to develop world-leading expertise to help policymakers, researchers, and businesses. It will deliver five research programmes under the themes of urban future, society, sustainability, evolving economy and the UK in a global context. It will also offer funding opportunities…
Microsoft is acquiring Deis, a company that makes tools to work with the Kubernetes open-source container orchestration system. The deal, announced Monday, marks Microsoft’s continued interest in container orchestration. Deis creates tools that aim to simplify the development of modern, containerized applications. Containers allow developers to write an application for an isolated, portable runtime that…
The suspected CIA spying tools exposed by WikiLeaks have been linked to hacking attempts on at least 40 targets in 16 countries, according to security firm Symantec. The tools share “close similarities” with the tactics from an espionage team called Longhorn, Symantec said in a Monday post. Longhorn has been active since at least 2011,…
The University of Utah announced last week that it had become the first school in a Power Five athletic conference to field its own varsity esports team. +More on Network World: Most notable tech leaders delivering 2017 college commencement addresses+ Adding League of Legends and several other as yet unconfirmed games to the varsity list,…
Dallas emergency management officials continue to investigate a hack that activated all 156 emergency tornado sirens citywide for about 90 minutes early Saturday. The city declared the sirens were activated Friday night in a hack that officials believe came from the Dallas area. The event was a warning that businesses and organizations, including cities and…
Attackers have been exploiting an unpatched vulnerability in Microsoft Word for the past few months to compromise computers and infect them with malware. The first report about the attacks came Friday from antivirus vendor McAfee after the company’s researchers analyzed some suspicious Word files spotted a day earlier. It turned out that the files were…
Annoyed with the U.S. missile strike last week on an airfield in Syria, among other things, hacker group Shadow Brokers resurfaced on Saturday and released what they said was the password to files containing suspected National Security Agency tools they had earlier tried to sell. “Is appearing you are abandoning ‘your base’, ‘the movement’, and…