Microsoft will likely wait until February 14 to fix a publicly disclosed vulnerability in the SMB network file sharing protocol that can be exploited to crash Windows computers. The vulnerability was disclosed Thursday when the security researcher who found it posted a proof-of-concept exploit for it on GitHub. There was concern initially that the flaw…
Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this week, and as the story goes this means six more weeks of winter. If only the critter was carrying a smartphone, perhaps that would give us a better idea of when Nougat would be coming to your favorite device. Fortunately we didn’t need a groundhog to find out about…
The robotic arm manning Cafe X at the Metreon shopping center in San Francisco looks very caffeinated as it frantically swings from one side of its enclosed bar to the other. Along with the help of two fully automatic coffee machines, the arm can whip up anywhere from one to four drinks a minute, depending…
Micron is rushing to release the latest GDDR6 graphics memory by the end of the year, and eSports is a major driver behind the plans. The memory company is speeding up the release of GDDR6 to cope with faster PC and console upgrades. GDDR6 will be significantly faster than its predecessor, GDDR5X, which is still…
The implementation of the SMB network file sharing protocol in Windows has a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to, at the very least, remotely crash systems. The unpatched vulnerability was publicly disclosed Thursday by an independent security researcher named Laurent Gaffié, who claims that Microsoft has delayed releasing a patch for the flaw for…
Chrome users have been able to add homescreen shortcuts for their favorite websites for years, letting you quickly jump to a site without having to navigate the bookmarks folder, but they’ve always been just that: fancy links. With the latest Chrome beta, Google wants them to be something far greater. Called Progressive Web Apps, they…
Apple plans to start assembling the iPhone in Bangalore by end April under a contract manufacturing arrangement with Taiwan’s Wistron. The move by the company comes even as it awaits approval from the federal government for some of its proposals for lowering the import duties on components and for creating an ecosystem of local manufacturers…
Over the next five years, the company behind Snapchat will pay Google at least US$2 billion in cloud bills. On Thursday, Snap revealed in a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission that it signed a five-year contract to pay Google at least $400 million a year for cloud services. That’s a steep figure,…
The internet is what made IoT happen, providing a common protocol to take the place of separate, specialized networks. But the public internet itself may not always be the best path between a connected device and the cloud. Enterprises can now connect cellular IoT devices to back-end systems via NetBond, a private network service from…
RSA Conference 2017 will take on the threat posed by the internet of things, something that was demonstrated last fall by the DDoS attacks that took down Dyn data centers and many of the high-profile Web sites it supports. Those attacks, generating peak traffic of 1TByte or more, raise the question of how best to…