Articles by Richard Adhikari

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday publicly proclaimed he is gay, in an essay published in Bloomberg Businessweek While his sexual orientation isn't news, his strong acknowledgment sparked a wave of discussions on the Internet and drew kudos from his Silicon Valley peers and others....

Microsoft on Wednesday made another foray into the mobile health market with the introduction of the Microsoft Band, powered by its new Microsoft Health platform The band, which is available at Microsoft Stores for US$200 as of Thursday, is designed to be worn 24 hours a day. It has 10 sensors....

HP on Wednesday announced its Blended Reality ecosystem, consisting of HP Multi Jet Fusion, an advanced 3D printer; and Sprout by HP -- a combination scanner, depth sensor, high-res camera and projector that provides 3D images of items and enables real-time remote collaboration The ecosystem might revolutionize manufacturing, sharply reducing the d...

Twitter shares closed Tuesday at US$43.78, down almost 10 percent, even though the company's Q3 earnings report, released Monday, showed monthly active users grew 23 percent Granted, that was down a tick from the previous quarter's 24 percent growth -- but recall the World Cup was being held at that time, driving user growth explosively. Germany's ...

Elon Musk, CEO of both SpaceX and Tesla Motors, among his many roles, this week warned about the threat humans face from artificial intelligence AI is probably our biggest existential threat, he told students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology....

Slapping taxes on information and communication technologies (ICT) can cost countries more money than it brings in, says a study released Monday by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) Most of the countries imposing high taxes are lower- or middle-income nations in Africa, South Asia and America....

Fitbit on Monday announced three new fitness and activity-tracking wearables: the Fitbit Charge, Charge HR and Surge The Charge HR and Surge will be available early next year. The Charge is available now on Fitbit's site and is coming soon to retailers nationwide....

Microsoft last week announced better-than-expected Q1 2015 earnings, giving pause to its critics Granted, net income registered a year-over-year drop, standing at US$4.54 billion or 54 cents a share, compared with $5.24 billion, or 62 cents a share.

The White House and roboticists have set Nov. 7 to get together in a workshop to explore ways of using robots to help in the battle against Ebola The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy will cohost the workshop on safety robotics for Ebola workers, with Texas A&M University's Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue, or CRASAR. ...

When Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg went on stage at Tsinghua University in Beijing Wednesday for a 30-minute Q&A session, the audience expected him to do what foreigners generally do: Utter a few words in Mandarin to acknowledge their culture, then depend heavily on translators Instead, Zuckerberg elicited gasps of approval from the audience when he...

The third in a series of four simulated missions to Mars planned by NASA kicked off last week at a remote site on the Hawaiian island of Mauna Loa A six-person team, comprising the Hawai'i Space Exploration Analog and Simulation 3 mission, is inhabiting a dome for an eight-month study of the human factors that contribute to astronaut crew functio...

Amazon's tactics in its ongoing battles with content publishers, ranging from book publishers to Disney, are fast becoming a bone of contention The company has delayed distributing content from companies it's tussling with over content price points or its cut of the take. It's been steering customers to other publishers, at times overtly. Amazon's ...

Toll fraud -- the hijacking of a phone system to dial out to premium numbers in distant countries at several dollars a minute -- costs companies more than US$4.7 billion a year, up nearly $1 billion from 2011. It affects mostly SMBs, according to a report in The New York Times The Communications Fraud Control Association verified those figures, bu...

Yet another major retailer -- this time, office supply chain Staples -- has fallen victim to a data breach, KrebsonSecurity reported. More than half a dozen banks operating on the East Coast have seen fraudulent charges made at non-Staples businesses, such as supermarkets and other big-box retailers, by people using Staples cards, according to the...

Chinese authorities have launched man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on Apple's iCloud.com and Microsoft's Login.live.co, according to Greatfire.org Qihoo 360 browser users' local connections to iCloud.com are being rerouted to a dummy site that's identical to Apple's login page, Greatfire said....

IBM's earnings slipped in Q3, sending its share prices sliding 7.11 percent to close Monday at US$169.10 The company announced it is unloading its Microelectronics OEM semiconductor business and manufacturing operations to GlobalFoundries. IBM will pay GlobalFoundries $1.5 billion to take over the business. The deal will close in 2015.

FBI director James Comey, in a speech last week at the Brookings Institute, reiterated his concerns about encryption built into iOS 8 and Android stymieing law enforcement "I'm a huge believer in the rule of law, but I also believe that no one in this country should be beyond the law," he said....

Cybersecurity firm iSight Partners this week revealed that a cybergang it dubbed "Sandworm" has been exploiting a zero-day vulnerability that impacts all supported versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows Server 2008 and 2012 The announcement was held off until Microsoft issued its patch for the vulnerability, CE-2014-4114, earlier this wee...

Google on Wednesday announced three new devices in its Nexus line: a tablet, a phablet, and a streaming media game player-cum-Android TV device, all of which run Lollipop, the latest version of its Android OS Lollipop lets users sync content from phones to tablets to TVs and use it seamlessly. It has a consistent design across devices so transition...

A woman whose car rolled 500 feet down an embankment near San Jose, California, was located through the Find My iPhone feature on her smartphone after spending 19 hours in the ravine where her Chevy Cruze ended up The OnStar feature in Melissa Vasquez's car triggered a call to police at 2 p.m. Monday, but placed the car near her home in the town of...