The U.S. government today said it received 199,000 H-1B visa petitions for the upcoming 2018 fiscal year — 37,000 less than in 2016. The government will issue 85,000 visas distributed via a computer-generated lottery. The winners will be able to use their visas at the start of the federal fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1.…
Mozilla today announced it would drop one of Firefox’s preview tracks that have let customers test early versions of the browser before wider deployment. Companies running Firefox, and testing the browser using the “Aurora” track, will be automatically migrated to the “Beta” channel today. [ Further reading: See the latest tech reviews on Computerworld ]…
Have you ever had a friend or a family member go on an exotic vacation only to find yourself living vicariously through their social media posts? Well, now you can also live vicariously through a robot. Bay area start-up Let’s Robot allows users to control its robotic fleet through a chat room. Users type commands…
The biggest bummer at a festival like Coachella should be a spilled beer or a long bathroom line, not having your iPhone stolen by a highly ambitious but also bumbling criminal. Awful person Reinaldo De Jesus Henao found himself in handcuffs on Easter Sunday, arrested with more than 100 smartphones in his backpack, nabbed with…
While investments in renewable energy slumped last year, a big drop in unsubsidized costs for new wind and solar power installations indicated that they remain popular energy alternatives. Last year, the average “levelized cost” or total cost of generating power from solar worldwide dropped 17% percent, onshore wind costs dropped 18% and offshore wind turbine…
After 20 years, Intel is scrapping its marquee annual Intel Developer Forum event, where tech enthusiasts gathered to load up on the chipmaker’s news and technologies. IDF started off in 1997 as a small event in Palm Springs, California. The show was later moved to San Francisco and vastly expanded during a boom in the PC…
Microsoft on Friday said it had patched most of the Windows vulnerabilities purportedly exploited by the National Security Agency (NSA) using tools that were leaked last week. The Windows flaws were disclosed by the hacking gang Shadow Brokers in a large data dump earlier Friday. The group has released several collections of documents about the…
Mirai — a notorious malware that’s been enslaving IoT devices — has competition. A rival piece of programming has been infecting some of the same easy-to-hack internet-of-things products, with a resiliency that surpasses Mirai, according to security researchers. “You can almost call it Mirai on steroids,” said Marshal Webb, CTO at BackConnect, a provider of…
We only looked at the first iteration of Google Wifi, the company’s mesh networking set-up, a few months ago and already it looks like version two is in the works. A Google filing recently spotted at the FCC describes a new dual-band router, possibly an update to the company’s Google Wifi. PDFs included with the…
GitHub is opening up its developer program to developers who do not have paid accounts. The popular code-sharing service is looking to attract the open source community with the move. “That means if your free account was holding you back, you can join the program no matter which stage of development you’re in,” said Jared…