Kim Dotcom, the founder of the now defunct file-sharing site Megaupload, has won an undisclosed settlement from the New Zealand police over their dawn raid on his house in 2012 which saw him arrested as part of an FBI investigation into his websites.
Microsoft has announced the closure of the last available path to upgrade to Windows 10 operating system without having to pay full price. The loophole offered to customers using accessibility systems will close in December of this year.
A team of scientists at Carnegie Mellon University has created an algorithm that can detect suicidal thoughts or tendencies in people by analyzing their brain scans.
Mark Zuckerberg and Apple CEO Tim Cook, met with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a meeting of the advisers to the Tsinghua University Business School in Beijing on Monday.
Researchers from the Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab have discovered that using simple exploits, they could uncover sensitive data, like location and message history, for users of 9 dating apps for iOS and Android, including Tinder, Bumble and OK Cupid.
China’s recent advances in quantum technologies, including the launch of a quantum satellite and the announcement of a $10 billion quantum computing center, have Western scientists concerned as to whether the United States and its allies will be able to match them in developments.
Recent wildfires in Northern California have once again sparked multiple posts on Facebook by people desperately trying to find family members in the affected areas who they haven’t been able to contact.
Speaking at the inaugural meeting of the National Space Council, Vice President Mike Pence confirmed a shift in goals for NASA towards putting humans back on the Moon.
Democrats in both the House and the Senate want to put a ban on political advertisements on social media that are paid for by foreign companies, sending a letter to the FEC asking them to consider new rules about online advertising. The letter came two weeks after Facebook revealed to Congress that a Russian account had paid for 3,000 ads between June 2015 and May 2017.
Google announced in a blog post that it will issue refunds to companies whose advertisements were viewed by bots instead of humans; some of its advertising partners will do the same.
In her speech at the UN in New York Thursday, the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, warned social media companies that if they do not clamp down on terrorist on their sites, she will introduce new legislation that would make them liable for any extremist content posted; failure to remove it would result in fines.
Hackers installed a backdoor system into the popular security application CCleaner, according to reports. Version 5.33 was issued back on August 15, and was undetected until September 13. According to Avast, the parent company of Piriform, around 2.27 million users ran the affected software.
Apple’s new Face ID system, which was announced as a feature for the new iPhone X, may prove unpopular with consumers, as fears of biometric protection for electronic devices are relatively prevalent, according to a recent report.
Virginia’s State Board of Elections has decided to scrap the current generation of electronic voting machines, judging them to be too vulnerable to hacking, ordering them to be replaced before the state’s gubernatorial election on November 7 of this year.
The Spanish Data Protection Agency (AEPD) has fined Facebook 1.2 million euros, or just over $1.4 million dollars, for breaching the country’s data protection and privacy regulations. The fine follows an investigation into how the social media giant collects, stores and uses data which found it did not obtain the proper user consent necessary beforehand.
Uber has confirmed that it is cooperating with the FBI who has launched an investigation into its “Hell” software, over concerns it illegally tracked the positions of Lyft drivers, its major competitor in the ride-sharing business.
In a post on Facebook’s Newsroom, Monika Bickert, director of global policy management, explained the process employed by the social media company for the treatment of profiles for users who have passed away, something that most social networking sites do not take into account.
The CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, responded in Fortune to the recent viewpoint diversity memo by James Damore. She claimed that she had faced massive discrimination for being a woman working in the technology industry, and that implicit biases still exist within it, despite exact claims to the contrary in Damore’s memo.
Breitbart Tech’s gaming expert Nate Church joined Curt Schilling, himself a long-time gamer and former development studio founder, on Schilling’s show Whatever It Takes to discuss the growing phenomenon of eSports, with its huge presence in Asia and rapid growth in the United States.
Chinese users of the messaging app WeChat are now subject to levels of censorship never seen before — images sent in a one-to-one conversation can be blocked mid-transit, presumably by an algorithm, ensuring the receiver never sees what was sent to them.
The commencement order of the Digital Economy Act of 2017, which gained Royal Assent in April, has started a nine-month countdown to the introduction of compulsory age verification checks that British citizens will have to complete before they are allowed to view online pornography.
Artifical Intelligence being developed by Facebook has invented its own language system to convey detailed information with greater efficiency; however, to human eyes, the messages are completely nonsensical.
According to the Information, Amazon is considering opening up access to private transcript data from its Alexa devices to third-party developers, raising concerns of privacy for users.
According to a report by the Campaign for Accountability, Google has paid researchers that produced papers and projects painting Google in a positive light, including at least one who did not disclose that he had received any funding from them.
Spotify has launched an artistic collaboration called “I’m with the banned,” in an effort to protest against President Trump’s travel ban, which was recently put back into effect after a previous court order against it was struck down.
Glenn Brown, the Chief Digital Officer of the Obama Foundation, announced in a blog post that the Foundation was requesting input from ordinary citizens on what they thought the best model of “digital citizenship” was, and how they could push the concept forward.
Facebook is rolling out an update that would throttle links from users who are judged to be posting “vast amounts” of low-quality content onto their profiles and clogging up the news feeds of their friends.
Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have donated millions of dollars via the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative to TheDream.US, a program that will award over 100 college scholarships to illegal immigrants in the Bay Area.
The Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a warning against fidget spinners that have inbuilt Bluetooth speakers, after incidents of the toys catching fire when charging were recorded.
Based out of Silicon Valley, Zume Pizza uses robots to produce freshly-baked, artisanal pizza. With their new van, which contains on-board ovens, they can deliver their pizza to customers as quickly as four minutes after it was ordered.
Investigative journalism outlet ProPublica criticized Facebook’s “secret censorship rules” for not putting emphasis on protecting minority groups from so-called “hate-speech” but instead trying to “defend all races and genders equally.”
Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have created a machine learning technology that utilizes brain activation patterns to identify complex thoughts and sentences, which is, in effect, an ability to “mind read.”
Shotspotter, a system that uses microphones to pick up the location of shootings faster than 911 calls can, is now in place in over 90 cities across the country.
The National Security Agency has recently joined the code-sharing site, GitHub, uploading many of their projects as open-source to share with programmers across the world. This is the latest step in the trend of the NSA, a usually secretive organization, opening itself up to society at large.
According to multiple tech companies, Walmart is telling vendors that they are not allowed to run any applications for the retail giant using Amazon Web Services, and should instead use alternate solutions, such as Microsoft’s Azure.
Rowan University has published a guide for their professors instructing them how to “call out” supposed microaggressions in the classroom, with ideas such as meritocracy and wanting to be inclusive highlighted as especially negative.
After Netflix CEO Reed Hastings dismissed net neutrality as an issue that was only important to “the Netflix of ten years ago” at a conference two weeks ago, the company’s Twitter account sent out a tweet claiming they would “never outgrow” the cause.
A bug in Facebook’s software exposed the identities of moderators to potential terrorists, the Guardian has revealed.
As the temperature increases in the coming months across the country, incidents of children being trapped in hot cars is set to increase. More than 700 children died from heat exhaustion in cars in 1998; 12 have already lost their lives this year alone. The HOT CARS Act of 2017 would require cars to be fitted with a system that alerts the driver if a child is left in the back seat after the engine is switched off.
Foxconn, a Taiwanese corporation that assembles iPhones in East Asia, is considering building a plant in Wisconsin as part of a $7 billion investment that will create up to 50,000 jobs, according to the Associated Press.
