BeWifi lets you steal your neighbor’s bandwidth when they’re not using it
What if, when you were up at a ridiculous hour Skyping your relatives in Australia, you could borrow unused bandwidth from your sleeping neighbors to make your own broadband connection faster and stronger? High up in a glass tower in Barcelona, Telefonica’s research and development team has been attempting to tackle exactly this question. The […] more…VMware buys mobile security startup Airwatch to bolster product offering
VMware will buy mobile management and security startup outfit Airwatch for $1.54bn, or about £930m. The firm announced today that the deal has been approved by both companies’ boards and is forecast to close by the end of this quarter. The deal will see VMware, which also announced estimated revenue of $1.48bn for the fourth […] more…Read this before you buy another hard drive
Data storage service provider Backblaze yesterday revealed failure rates among more than 27,000 consumer-class hard drives it uses in its data center. The breadth and depth of Backblaze’s data has given consumers unprecedented access to specific hard drive failure rates across the three largest vendors of the technology: Seagate, Hitachi and Western Digital. It offers […] more…What We Might Not Want to Know About the Current and Future Web
I believe that there have been few times in history when man has seen himself as “the center of the universe.” in Italy in 1300, humans became aware of their gifts and took pride in them: it gave rise to humanism and, later on, to the Renaissance. After 2000, the last time that man saw […] more…Russian Spy Nodes Caught Snooping on Facebook Users
Somewhere in Russia an eavesdropper is operating a network of wiretapped nodes at the edge of the Tor anonymity network. And he’s particularly interested in what you’re doing on Facebook. That’s the conclusion of two researchers who used custom software to test Tor exit nodes for sneaky behavior, in a four-month study published yesterday. Tags: […] more…Google Glass wearer removed from AMC theater under suspicion of recording
Despite the many uses for Google Glass, this new class of wearable devices is inevitably meeting some growing pains (pictured above is 7’3″ Indiana Pacers center Roy Hibbert, a Glass wearer who has experienced some growing pains) as the world gets used to them. One wearer successfully fought a traffic ticket recently and now another […] more…Microsoft takes on the government again, this time focusing on the international community
Microsoft and the government are not strangers — they have met in court, most notably during anti-trust hearings. More recently, the General Council of the company took matters into his own hands when he deemed the US government an “advanced persistent threat”. Now Brad Smith is back for round two. This time the lawyer is […] more…AMD in legal hot water with shareholders
AMD has been sued for allegedly lying to investors about the success of AMD’s Llano APU and “deceptively dismissing” the potential impact of unsold inventory on the company’s gross margins. The allegations are in a new class action lawsuit filed in California. Tags: AMD Law and Order more…Researchers reveal the language of Kickstarter success
If you want your Kickstarter to succeed, it appears there are some definite do’s and don’ts when it comes to phrasing. According to a new study by Tanushree Mitra and Eric Gilbert of Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, the language you use can be pretty indicative of whether or not you’ll get your funding. […] more…Canonical Engages Ubuntu Community for App Development
The team behind Canonical’s Ubuntu Linux wants 2014 to be the year of Ubuntu app development. And it’s reaching out to the Ubuntu community, especially the local LoCo team chapters spread across the world, to spearhead the effort, according to a blog post from Ubuntu Community Manager Jono Bacon. Bacon writes: “2014 is going to […] more…CyanogenMod Installer comes to the Mac in beta form
When it comes to rooting and flashing custom ROMs on your Android device, it sometimes helps if you have a Windows-powered computer. Thanks to the tireless efforts of the CyanogenMod team, their Installer application is now available for Macs. If you are unfamiliar, the CM Installer allows users to painlessly flash the CyanogenMod ROM onto […] more…Remember when SimCity ABSOLUTELY HAD to be online? Not any more – fancy that!
Gamers will soon be able to play Maxis’s SimCity offline – despite the company’s earlier insistence that the game absolutely had to be connected to the internet to work. The turnaround was announced by Maxis studio manager Patrick Buechner in a blogpost on Sunday. He said Update 10 for the latest installment of the long-running […] more…New leaks offer a few more peeks at "Normandy," Nokia’s Android phone
When Microsoft announced its intention to purchase Nokia’s mobile handset division, it came away with two brands: Lumia and Asha. The Lumia line has been home to Nokia’s Windows Phone efforts. The Asha line, on the other hand, is based on Nokia’s Series 40 (S40) platform, which was first introduced in 1999. Nokia’s mysterious Android […] more…NSA’s snooping dragnet has little impact on terrorism
The US government, through its National Security Agency, keeps records of every single phone call made by every single phone in the country – and probably almost anything that travels over the internet. The oft-repeated rationale is that this kind of bulk data collection has the power to prevent terrorist attacks and keep the US […] more…Demonoid is nearly back from the dead
The Demonoid tracker came back online today after a year of being offline. The tracker is linked to nearly 400,000 torrent files and more than a million peers, which makes it one of the largest working BitTorrent trackers on the Internet. Tags: BitTorrent Industry News more…Worried about snooping, India won’t partner with Google for elections
The Commission Election of India (CEI) has decided not to select Google as a partner to create an online voter registration tool that would also provide information about voting locations and card numbers. “Google made a presentation to the Commission for electoral look up services for citizens… However, after due consideration, the Commission has decided […] more…More information
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