Texting and driving don't go well together — though not in the way you might think.
Computer hackers can force some cars to unlock their doors and start their engines without a key by sending specially crafted messages to a car's anti-theft system. They can also snoop at where you've been by tapping the car's GPS system.
Full StoryA German data protection authority is "unliking" Facebook's "Like" button.
The state of Schleswig-Holstein's data protection commissioner, Thilo Weichert, on Friday ordered state institutions to shut down the fan pages on the social networking site and remove the "Like" button from their websites, saying it leads to profiling that violates German and European law.
Full StoryThe Internet is letting a school sprout in the Amazon where teachers tend not to linger due to harsh living conditions and a scarcity of students.
Teachers in Manaus, the capital of the Brazilian state of Amazonas, conduct lessons streamed to students in the village of Tumbira using an Internet connection made possible with a generator-powered radio signal.
Full StoryThe stunning announcement by Hewlett-Packard, the world's top personal computer maker, that it is taking steps to exit the business is the surest sign yet the post-PC era is here.
"We tend to throw the 'post-PC era' term around a lot, but it's clear that, in the wake of HP's announcement, we’re closer than ever to that reality," said independent technology analyst Carmi Levy.
Full StoryA California judge ordered dating website Match.com Friday to show evidence it screens customers to exclude sex offenders.
The order by Superior Court Judge Carl West came in a case that saw a woman sue the popular matchmaking website after she was sexually assaulted by a man she met through the site last year.
Full StoryHong Kong police said on Friday they had arrested a 29-year-old man over a cyber attack on the city's stock exchange website which halted trading in the shares of seven companies.
Police said they detained the man on Thursday, seizing five computers, two mobile phones and other items, a police spokesman told Agence France Presse.
Full StoryCanada's Research in Motion (RIM) is developing a new service that would allow subscribers to play music on their BlackBerry smartphones, the Wall Street Journal has reported.
The option is "designed to work with RIM's BlackBerry Messenger," the newspaper reported, citing unnamed sources who had discussed the service with RIM executives.
Full StoryHewlett-Packard Co. is buying Autonomy Corp. to expand its lineup of business software products as it lowers its profile in consumer electronics.
The acquisition, announced Thursday, comes amid a flurry of other dramatic moves that will reshape HP, the world's largest technology company by revenue. The shake-up will sharpen HP's focus on selling products and services to businesses and government agencies, instead of making gadgets for consumers.
Full StoryComputers, like humans, can learn. But when Google tries to fill in your search box based only on a few keystrokes, or your iPhone predicts words as you type a text message, it's only a narrow mimicry of what the human brain is capable.
The challenge in training a computer to behave like a human brain is technological and physiological, testing the limits of computer and brain science. But researchers from IBM Corp. say they've made a key step toward combining the two worlds.
Full StoryTwo women washed clothes in the dark water of the Rio Negro as a boat glided past with a camera-laden Google tricycle strapped to the roof, destined to give the world a window into the Amazon rain forest.
A "trike" typically used to capture street scenes for Google's free online mapping service launched Thursday from the village of Tumbira in a first-ever project to let Internet users virtually explore the world's largest river, its wildlife and its communities.
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