Canonical, the company behind the best-known Linux distribution in the world and one of the biggest players in commercial open source software, has announced several large-scale changes of direction that have created big ripples in the open source world. The biggest news is that the company will no longer focus development resources on its Unity…
Two powerful U.S. lawmakers are pushing President Donald Trump administration’s to tell them how many of the country’s residents are under surveillance by the National Security Agency. In a letter sent Friday, Representatives Bob Goodlatte and John Conyers Jr. asked the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to provide an estimate of the number…
While many people who bought an original Huawei Watch are still counting the days until delivery of the Android Wear 2.0 upgrade, the long wait isn’t the only thing that’s bumming them out. One of the new OS’s best features, Android Pay, remains just out of reach since the watch doesn’t have built-in support for…
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) said Friday that the H-1B cap for FY 2018 has been reached. The agency will now hold a computer-generated lottery to distribute the visas. The USCIS didn’t say how many visa petitions it received, and an agency spokeswoman said counting up the final number will take a week…
Samsung and Microsoft recently struck an unusual partnership: Buyers of new Samsung Galaxy S8 phones will soon be able to load Office and other productivity apps onto those Android 7 phones via Wi-Fi when inside Microsoft Stores. [ Related: Samsung targets the enterprise with Galaxy S8 and S8+ ] With the Windows apps on a…
The costly Galaxy Note7 debacle, which led to the recall of about 3 million smartphones because of overheating batteries, seems to be behind Samsung Electronics, with the company forecasting a 48 percent growth in operating profit in the first quarter. Samsung has not had a new flagship smartphone on the shelves ever since it stopped…
Twitter is suing the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and alleging the government is misusing an investigative tool as part of an internal witch-hunt to uncover who is behind a Twitter account critical of the immigration service. The lawsuit, filed on Thursday in California, comes on the heels of a report that visitors to the…
If you haven’t read the story of the original mechanical Turk, you really should. This was a 1770s machine that appeared to use complicated mechanisms to play competent chess against even very good human players, and it has fired the imaginations of everyone from computing pioneer Charles Babbage to today’s steampunk nerds. Here’s a great…
AMD’s new Ryzen Balanced power plan is offering an answer for early performance woes with its new CPU. The power profile tweaks how Windows 10 handles power states of the individual CPU cores and can bump performance from 3 percent all the way to 21 percent in many popular games, AMD said in a blog post…
Attackers are exploiting a vulnerability patched last month in the Apache Struts web development framework to install ransomware on servers. The SANS Internet Storm Center issued an alert Thursday, saying an attack campaign is compromising Windows servers through a vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-5638. The flaw is located in the Jakarta Multipart parser in Apache Struts…