Technology

The second quarter of 2018 was another record-breaker for mobile app downloads and revenue. According to a new report this week from App Annie, there were over 28.4 billion app downloads worldwide across both iOS and Google Play in the quarter, up 15 percent year-over-year. That number is even more …

It’s no secret that general-purpose compute performance has been largely stuck in idle these last few years, with top-end improvements limited to single-digit increases. DARPA has a plan for revitalizing CPU performance by fundamentally changing how we design chips — and it’s an approach that could yield real benefits in …

Corning has announced Gorilla Glass 6, the latest iteration of its simian smartphone display technology. This time around, the major feature being advertised is multi-drop protection, with GG6 supposedly capable of withstanding up to 15 drops. Corning writes: On average, in lab tests, Gorilla Glass 6 survived 15 drops from …

Apple has long been on a quest to make its laptops almost impossibly thin, but that darn keyboard keys always take up too much space. The company introduced the butterfly switch several years ago to make its MacBook keyboards thinner while still maintaining some degree of tactility. However, MacBook owners …

Got an odd screw, nut, bolt, washer or fastener you need to buy more of, but have no idea to how to find the right one? Amazon’s “Part Finder” can help. The company has rolled out a new feature on mobile that lets you point your camera at the item …

Apple’s new top-end MacBook Pro 15-inch, with the optional Core i9 CPU, is markedly slower than last year’s Core i7 design despite fielding two more CPU cores. That’s the result of empirical tests of the system, which show that under full load, Apple’s redesigned MacBook Pro  can’t handle the heat …

Back in the days of Android Jelly Bean, Google focused much of its AI efforts on a feature called Google Now. The idea was Google Now could scrape useful data from your account activity and proactively give you helpful alerts and actionable notifications. Google phased out Now as a brand …

A multi-year investigation of Alphabet’s Google in the European Union has resulted in a record $5 billion (€4.34 billion) fine for the search giant. At issue is the way Google requires device manufacturers to build Android software for phones and other devices in order to get access to the Play …

Ookla has released its annual report on US download speeds, powered by SpeedTest Intelligence. The US improved its download speeds markedly from 2017 to 2018, but is still ranked poorly overall relative to our overall economic strength. The data set Ookla uses is drawn from over 12 million speed tests …

In February 2018, Election Systems and Software told the press that it had never installed remote-access software in any of the e-voting systems it has sold in the various US states or to local governments. In April, the company told Senator Ron Wyden’s office (D-OR), that it had sold pcAnywhere …