Articles by Richard Adhikari

Motorola has announced two new Droid tablets, both of which will run on Verizon's 4G LTE network The Xyboard 10.1 and 8.2 will be available this month, both online and at Verizon Wireless stores....

Verizon will not include the Google Wallet mobile payment functionality in its version of the Samsung Galaxy Nexus smartphone, which is set to launch in the U.S. later this month The carrier cited security reasons for its decision.

What a week it's been in the cybersecurity business! On Monday, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report that called for the establishment of a body with nationwide authority to oversee the securing of the United States' national power grid....

The United States needs an overarching national authority to oversee cybersecurity efforts connected to the national power grid, an MIT study suggests The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) and the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) have authority over the development of cybersecurity standards for the bulk power system...

Google has launched a major interface redesign for YouTube. This latest change revamps the site overall. It also provides a new home page and simpler, customizable channels "We want to grow the amount of time people spend on the site, and we feel that growing channels is a way to help them find the videos they love," YouTube spokesperson Chris Dale...

WikiLeaks launched a new spinoff website called "Spy Files" on Thursday that will publish documents about surveillance and privacy violations worldwide The site has a page displaying a map of the world indicating where various violations are occurring, and it lists companies involved in monitoring and surveillance....

It appears that Google's relatively new Chrome browser has displaced Mozilla Firefox from the No. 2 spot in the worldwide browser market, following leader Microsoft Internet Explorer "Three years ago, we built Chrome to help spur more innovation on the Web, and we're excited that over 200 million people around the world are using it," Google spokes...

Software from the company Carrier IQ that's preinstalled on many mobile devices sold in the United States is capable of recording many of the activities performed on those phones and potentially relaying the data back to carriers, according to security researcher Trevor Eckhart. Eckhart refers to the software as a "rootkit." The revelation has caus...

Windows 8 tablets may have a very difficult time competing when they finally hit the market, according to the findings of a recent Forrester Research report U.S. consumer desire for Windows tablets halved between the first and third quarters of this year, said J.P. Gownder, one of the report's authors....

Online music service Spotify on Wednesday announced that it's launching a series of integrated apps from various partners These include apps from entities like Rolling Stone and Billboard and Songkick....

Researchers at Columbia University have demonstrated that a remote firmware update command in some HP LaserJet printers can be hijacked, according to a report from MSNBC. In one case, a hacked printer was reportedly given commands that might cause it to get hot enough to scorch paper loaded in it The researchers rewrote a test printer's firmware an...

Research In Motion on Tuesday announced a mobile device management (MDM) solution that will include iOS and Android devices BlackBerry Mobile Fusion will consist of BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) version 5.0.3, new management capabilities for BlackBerry Playbook tablets, and MDM capabilities for iOS and Android mobile devices....

The holiday shopping season is in full swing, even for malicious hackers Cybercriminals are lining up to lay hands on a new exploit that takes advantage of a recently patched critical security flaw in Java, security researcher Brian Krebs warned recently....

The European Union may begin an overhaul of its 1995 Data Protection Directive next year to provide one single unified body of legislation on this issue EU Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding will propose the reform in January, her spokesperson, Matthew Newman, told TechNewsWorld....

Researchers at Stanford University have used nanoparticles of copper hexacyanoferrate to create electrodes that could lead to large batteries for storing excess power from the electrical grid for future use These might be best used in wind and solar farms, the researchers stated in a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Communications....

This story was originally published on July 29, 2011, and is brought to you today as part of our Best of ECT News series. It appears that scientists at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology proved recently that you can't travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum....

Microsoft will release an update to the Xbox 360 dashboard for all Xbox Live members on Dec. 6 The update is reportedly modeled after Microsoft's new Metro user interface, which is used for Windows Phones and will be part of Windows 8....

Six degrees of separation may be good enough for most people, but for Facebook members, it's only 4.74 degrees, according to a study conducted jointly by the social networking giant and the University of Milan Conducted earlier this year, the study examined all 721 million active Facebook users, who had 69 billion friendships among them, Facebook s...

All things considered, this past week has been hell on security professionals On Monday, AT&T Wireless announced that hackers used automatic scripts to target some subscribers in a bid to steal information stored in their online accounts. They apparently didn't succeed....

A small water utility in Illinois has been hacked, reportedly leading the FBI and the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to look into the matter The attack came from Russia, according to control systems cybersecurity expert Joseph Weiss, whose blog first publicized the matter. He suggested the hack might have been linked to a break...