Articles by Richard Adhikari

Print media is limping along and TV news has gained some strength, even though the trend toward getting news online continues to grow, Pew Research reported this week. It all boils down to economics, said Mark Jerkowitz, associate director of the Pew Research Center Journalism Project.

The United States will tax bitcoin and other virtual currencies as property, the IRS announced on Tuesday Virtual currency will be treated as property for U.S. federal tax purposes, and transactions in virtual currency will be subject to general tax principles....

Bioprinting, Part 1 - The Promise and the Pitfalls Nearly 120,000 people in the United States are on the waiting list for an organ transplant that may save their lives, according to the American Transplant Foundation....

It's long been the dream of humans to be able to regenerate body parts. Scientists have been researching this possibility for years, but the subject is complex, and they are just beginning to get to a glimmer of understanding as to what's required "There are different layers of complexity in developing tissue-engineered products, so the easiest thi...

The political frenzy over the United States National Security Agency's collection of Americans' bulk telephone metadata is escalating, with both the White House and the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee announcing plans to introduce legislation to regulate the practice The White House's proposal reportedly would require phone co...

Apple and Comcast are discussing a streaming-TV service that will go through an Apple set-top box, The Wall Street Journal reported Apple apparently wants the service to be treated as a managed service, meaning it will run on cabling separate from that used for public Internet access....

Microsoft, which has been mocking Google's searching of Gmail subscribers' emails with its "Scroogled" campaign, is fielding criticism for having itself searched the email of a Hotmail user The search, which came to light last week, was conducted after Microsoft found that an employee, Alex Kibkalo, who worked for it in Lebanon, had stolen proprie...

IBM on Thursday launched a set of software and consulting services to help fight fraud and financial crime The so-called smarter counterfraud initiative draws from more than 500 fraud consulting experts, 290 fraud-related research patents, and the US$24 billion IBM has invested in its Big Data and analytics software and services capabilities over t...

Google on Wednesday released a developer preview for Android Wear, a day after announcing the project, which Android head honcho Sunder Pichai teased at SXSW earlier this month The preview, which includes a software development kit, an Android emulator and a preview support library, is for development and testing only -- not for production apps....

Facing unrelenting pressure to come up with a new killer device, along with strong competition from Android smartphones, Apple on Tuesday unveiled lower-cost versions of its iPhone 5c and 9.7-inch iPad The company debuted an 8-GB version of the 5c in Europe, and it revived the iPad 4, calling it the "iPad with Retina display."

In a move that has added fuel to the debate over the treatment of women in tech, Julie Ann Horvath, a developer at GitHub, has stormed out of her job, accusing the company of ignoring harassment in the workplace ...

CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that he called President Obama to complain about NSA surveillance "The Internet is our shared space," he wrote. Most people and companies "work together to create this secure environment and make our shared space even better for the world. When our engineers work tirelessly to improve security, we imagine we'r...

The latest Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance activities indicate the agency could infect millons of computers with malware, and has spoofed Facebook servers to capture traffic from targets. Documents previously leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden include detailed descriptions of its tools and techniques, First Look reported "It is n...

An Android developer's disclosure that it's possible to hack into the WhatsApp database and read the text of the chats from another application could be a big headache for Facebook, which has agreed to purchase the app for US$19 billion. "This is not a bug, but a design decision of WhatsApp," Bas Bosschert, chief technology officer of Double Think...

Apple has bumped up the discounts offered in a loyalty program available to customers who spend at least US$5,000 on its products over 12 months, TechCrunch reported. It reportedly added unlocked iPhones and Apple TVs to the program as well....

The drama surrounding Mt. Gox, once the world's largest Bitcoin exchange, has intensified The company on Sunday filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the United States -- less than two weeks after taking a similar action in Tokyo, where it's headquartered....

The consumer privacy backlash stirred up by Facebook's recent deal to purchase WhatsApp for US$19 billion is now in full swing The Electronic Privacy Information Center and the Center for Digital Democracy jointly filed a complaint about the deal with the United States Federal Trade Commission....

Getty Images, the stock photo giant that many professional photographers loathe but amateurs love, on Thursday announced it will allow consumers to embed and share its images free for non-commercial purposes on blogs, social networks and other websites The move indicates the company, whose battery of highly paid lawyers has gone after copyright vio...

Brash startup mobile carrier FreedomPop, which leases bandwidth from Sprint and has launched several aggressive programs to help it take off, on Wednesday unveiled the Privacy Phone -- nicknamed the "Snowden Phone" -- a Samsung Galaxy SII tweaked to be highly secure The fully encrypted device costs US$189, which includes unlimited talk, text and 50...

Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer will retire in September, when he'll be replaced by Corporate Controller Luca Maestri, the company's VP of finance. Maestri will begin taking the reins in June The move was expected. When Maestri joined Apple last year from Xerox, where he was CFO, the rumor mill began buzzing about his being groomed for Oppenheimer's po...