Articles by Richard Adhikari

NSA official Rick Ledgett, who has been with the agency for 25 years, suggested offering whistleblower Edward Snowden amnesty, but agency head Gen. Keith Alexander squashed the idea, CBS reported Ledgett, who runs the NSA task force assessing the damage caused by Snowden's leaks of classified data, said about 31,000 of the possibly 1.7 million docu...

Corporate America has been quaking in its boots since Microsoft announced in August that CEO Steve Ballmer would retire within 12 months and launched its search for a replacement Given the enormous task Microsoft's next CEO will face, the compensation is likely to be substantial, and the lure of all that pelf will not be easy to resist....

NASA on Wednesday shut off one of the two external cooling loops on the International Space Station and has been struggling to fix it since The problem appears to be in the flow valve within a pump module....

Red Hat on Wednesday launched Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 into beta RHEL 7 incorporates several changes, including a move from Oracle's MySQL to the open source MariaDB, the adoption of the XFS file system, and improvements in various areas, including storage and file size....

Nothing stirs up speculation like success, and right now questions about Bitcoin are on everyone's lips. Is it headed for the moon after once again breaking the US$1,000 mark on Wednesday? Or is it, as former United States Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan said, overpriced, lacking in intrinsic value and, essentially, a bubble? Bitcoins are b...

The United States National Security Agency is using at least one type of Google cookie -- PREF, which stores a user's preferences -- to home in on the PCs of targets it wants to hack, according to a Washington Post report. NSA's Special Source Operations division, which works with private companies to slurp data from the Internet's backbone and f...

Viber on Monday launched v4.1 of its eponymous VoIP chat application. It includes Viber Out, a feature that lets users call anyone mobile phones or landlines anywhere. Calls to other Viber users are free; otherwise, a fee is assessed. The company also unveiled additions to its line of stickers....

The Linux Foundation on Tuesday announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance, a cross-industry consortium working on a standard of interoperability among devices connected to the Internet of Things Alliance members include LG Electronics, Panasonic, Sharp, Silicon Image, Qualcomm, HTC, Cisco, D-Link and Sears Brand Management. LG will incorporat...

Sen. Edward Markey, D-Mass., plans to soon introduce legislation that will restrict the bulk collection of Americans' cellphone data by United States law enforcement agencies "We need a 4th Amendment for the 21st century," he said. "Disclosure of personal information from wireless devices raises significant legal and privacy concerns, particularly ...

Eight major United States high-tech companies have called on governments worldwide to reform surveillance practices Google, Microsoft, Twitter, Yahoo, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple and AOL want governments to ensure that data collection by law enforcement and intelligence agencies is bound by rules and focuses on targeted suspects....

Microsoft announced last week that it had disrupted the ZeroAccess botnet, which has been around since 2011 It joined forces with the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the European Cybercrime Center, and several high-tech companies including A10 Networks....

The United States House of Representatives on Thursday passed the Innovation Act, a bipartisan bill seeking to curb frivolous lawsuits by patent trolls, by a vote of 325-91 Bill H.R. 3309, whose chief sponsor is House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, will go before the Senate where another bill, the Patent Transparency and Improvements A...

Every day, the United States National Security Agency collects nearly 5 billion cellphone location records worldwide, The Washington Post reported The information, obtained from documents released by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, indicate the records are stored in the agency's FASCIA database....

A postulate stating that quantum-entangled black holes in our three-dimensional universe are connected by microscopic wormholes created when the black holes are pulled apart might be correct, based on findings by researchers Andreas Karch and Kristan Jensen The suggestion, put forth by physicists Juan Malcadena and Lenny Susskind, "is a very exciti...

Following news that Amazon plans to use unmanned drones for rapid delivery of goods to customers, security researcher Samy Kamkar has developed a way to skyjack drones The hack may resonate with many Americans, who are concerned about the increasing use of drones by law enforcement to conduct surveillance on citizens within the United States' borde...

Yahoo has purchased SkyPhrase with the intention of enabling computers to deeply understand natural language and intentions. SkyPhrase will be joining Yahoo Labs "Yahoo uses Bing for their search engine, so it's unclear why they would buy a natural language technology for search because they can use Microsoft's technology," Rob Enderle, principal a...

The Google Compute Engine became generally available on Tuesday, almost 18 months after its introduction at last year's Google I/O "We have been taking time and doing careful work to ensure that as we open Compute Engine to developers, they have a great experience with things like billing and support, tools, and our operating system support -- and ...

Microsoft's wave of operating systems updates planned for 2015 has been code-named "Threshold," ZDNet reported. They involve the addition of a set of common elements -- high-value activities such as Microsoft Office, possibly the coming "Remix" digital storytelling app, Bing, Intune and Workplace -- to Xbox One, Windows and Windows Phone....

Akamai Technologies is buying Prolexic, which offers protection against distributed denial of service attacks. The deal, which is expected to close in the first half of 2014, will cost Akamai about US$370 million in cash plus the assumption of outstanding unvested options to purchase Prolexic stock....

iBuyPower is working on prototypes of a commercial Steam machine, Engadget reported Valve recently announced that it was working with multiple OEMs to bring Steam gaming machines to market in 2014. All will run its Linux-based SteamOS....