Technology

Your phone rides around in your pocket or bag all day, making it a great eavesdropping device. After all, it has a constant internet connection, a microphone, and plenty of your personal data. Online criminals have sometimes created spyware apps that aim to make phones into listening devices, and a …

Last week, Consumer Reports yanked its recommendations on the four Microsoft Surface products it had previously recommended. The organization then compounded the situation by switching the entire Surface product line over to ‘Not Recommended’ status based on its findings that 25 percent of Surface owners experienced problems with the device …

It’s been over two years since AMD last launched a high-end graphics card that could compete in the upper echelons of the GPU market. That gap is literally unprecedented in the modern era. Starting with the launch of the 3D Rage in April 1996, ATI/AMD have consistently churned out a …

Weaponized drones aren’t new. The US military, and more recently that of other countries, have been using large, expensive, missile-equipped models for remote strikes for many years. But lightweight drones have been limited by the amount of gimbal required to deal with recoil, and the weight of a weapon plus …

Google today is expanding its speech recognition capabilities to support dozens of new languages, particularly those in emerging markets in India and Africa, the company announced this morning. That means more people around the world will gain the ability to search the web by voice as well as type via …

Facebook is rolling out a “Trending News” section on mobile that includes its own link in the app’s main navigation. This follows the company’s earlier announcement this spring of a redesign for Trending Topics, an increasingly important part of Facebook’s social network, where it tracks the news stories that are buzzing across …

The phone industry may officially have many players, but in the United States its nearly a duopoly between Samsung and Apple. Worldwide, those two companies extract virtually all the profit from the phone market, but that’s a different topic. It can be difficult for other companies to stand out in …

Andy Rubin has been involved in the mobile industry for years, including a role in founding both Danger (makers of the Sidekick) and Android before it was acquired by Google. Now, Rubin is heading up an effort to build new phones at his new company, Essential. Rubin says the phone …

Once upon a time (read: prior to the late 1990s), you had workstation-class hardware and desktop-class hardware, and never the twain shall meet. If you had a workstation, it meant you ran a CPU based on a real ISA, like MIPS, SPARC, or Alpha. In later years, after Wintel buried …

As you may know, the classic 1982 sci-fi movie Tron turned 35 years old in 2017, and it happens to be a film that I quite like. So, I’m celebrating in the most fitting way I know, with a Tron-themed keyboard. It wouldn’t do just to get some Tron keycaps …