Articles by Richard Adhikari

Sectors of society ranging from public interest groups to Google and Facebook oppose the United States Federal Communications Commissions' mid-May passage of new Net neutrality rules However, they're going about the issue all wrong, comedian John Oliver said in a rant on Net neutrality....

Samsung this week officially launched its long-anticipated Tizen phone, at the Tizen Developer Conference being held in San Francisco through Wednesday One description of Tizen is that it's an open source Linux-based operating system from Samsung -- but that might be open to debate....

Snapchat in May agreed to implement a comprehensive privacy program and be audited for the next 20 years to settle U.S. Federal Trade Commission charges that it had, among other things, lied to users when it said messages sent through its service would be erased after a designated period of time However, Snapchat's privacy violation is infinitesima...

Google Glass, whose appeal so far seems limited to uber-geeks, may be taking on a new image, thanks to Google's hiring of Ivy Ross, known for her work at Calvin Klein, Coach, Gap and, most recently, Art.com, where she was chief marketing officer ...

A disgraced politician, a pedophile, and a doctor who received negative ratings from patients reportedly are among the hordes of people asking Google to take down links to information published about them. The requests followed Tuesday's preliminary ruling by the European Court of Justice indicating Google may have to remove links to people's names on request, if appropriate...

At a meeting with the press earlier this year, F-Secure Chief Research Officer Mikko Hypponen -- yes, the man who sparked the angry exodus of a small group of malware vendors from the RSA security conference after learning that RSA had worked with the NSA to make a pseudo-random number generator known to be insecure the default choice in its secur...

The hype around driverless cars, or autonomous vehicles as they're also known, is increasing, with Google on Tuesday taking reporters for spins around the city of Mountain View, Calif Figuring prominently in resulting news reports were the big red kill button between these cars' front seats; the emphasis on safety in their design; and yes, a few ab...

The European Court of Justice, which is the highest court for matters of European Law, on Tuesday handed down a preliminary ruling that indicates Google may have to remove links to consumers' names on request -- if appropriate The case was referred to the ECJ by Spain's Audiencia Nacional, or National High Court. The ECJ's ruling lays down the guid...

The United States Food and Drug Administration has approved the marketing of a prosthetic arm nicknamed "Luke" in a nod to the bionic hand grafted onto Star Wars hero Luke Skywalker after his was cut off by Darth Vader's light saber The arm, eight years in the making, was funded by the military....

Snapchat has agreed to a settlement with the United States Federal Trade Commission to resolve privacy issues resulting from a hacker's publication in January of data associated with 4.6 million of its users The company has not admitted any wrongdoing, but it has agreed to implement a comprehensive privacy program that will be audited by a third pa...

Scientists have created a computer simulation that not only models the evolution of the universe down to the formation of individual galaxies, but also matches astronomical observations Unlike earlier efforts, the simulation depicts ordinary matter in the form of hydrogen gas from the very beginning....

The market is waiting with bated breath to see the exact size of Alibaba's IPO, but investors in Yahoo, which owns about 23 percent of Alibaba's stock, don't seem impressed. Yahoo's shares closed Wednesday at US$34.07, down 6.6 percent Yahoo's stake is worth about $26 billion based on the fair value of about $109 billion Alibaba assigned to its sha...

Six major ISPs providing residential broadband services are refusing to augment their networks unless content providers pay more, according to Level3 Five of them are in the United States and the last in Europe. While Level3 has not named them, it has repeatedly mentioned writing to AT&T about broadband throttling....

Sony has announced magnetic backup tape with the world's highest areal recording density -- 148 GB per square inch It provides about 74 times the recording capacity of conventional mag tape media, Sony claimed....

When Microsoft included Windows XP in the Internet Explorer zero-day browser vulnerability patch it issued this week, some industry observers were stunned. Had the company decided to backtrack on its assertion that it would no longer support XP? Had it knuckled under to user protests? Not really. Redmond has not decided to backtrack on killing supp...

The volunteers who developed Tails, the open source operating system used by whistleblower Edward Snowden, this week released v1.0 This is the 36th stable release of the OS since the first public version, then called "Amnesia," was released in June 2009....

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Bitcoin Club plans to distribute US$100 worth of bitcoin to each of its 4,528 incoming undergraduates this fall, in an attempt to create an ecosystem for digital currencies at the institution Club founder and president Dan Elitzer and sophomore Jeremy Rubin have raised more than $500,000 for the MIT Bitco...

AOL on Monday disclosed that a "significant number" of user accounts had been hacked, confirming rumors swirling around the issue for a week and denying its week-ago statement that users' email accounts were being spoofed The hackers stole users' email and postal addresses, address book contacts, encrypted passwords and encrypted answers to securit...

What might be the world's smallest 3D glasses have been developed for praying mantises People, horses, falcons, cats, monkeys and even toads have 3D vision -- but until 1983, everyone thought that invertebrates didn't, because their brains were so small and simple. That year, Samuel Rossel of the University of Zurich in essence said that mantises h...

Vic Gundotra, who moved Google into the social media world, first with the ill-fated Buzz and then with Google+, on Thursday announced his departure from the company "Now is the time for a new journey," he wrote, fittingly, on Google+. The announcement was laced with the usual praise for colleagues accompanying such statements....