Articles by Richard Adhikari

The makers of a video surveillance program developed by former United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffers attempted to sell their system to several big-name tech firms, according to leaked memos One of several internal emails written by executives at intelligence firm ...

Hackers have hit Blizzard's Battle.net online gaming network, stealing users' email addresses, the answers to their personal security questions, and information relating to mobile and dial-in authenticators The intruders hit the company's North American servers, which support players in North America, Latin America, Australia, New Zealand and South...

The fallout from the Flame malware that was identified in May continues. Ongoing research into the malware has led antivirus vendor Kaspersky Lab to discover a new malware platform, which it has named "Gauss." This platform has several similarities to Flame, Kaspersky said....

Earlier this week, Microsoft OEM Acer criticised the company's plan to launch its own Surface tablets -- a decision that led to consternation among Redmond's hardware partners. Lenovo could be the first vendor to offer a product that might help kill off Microsoft's plans....

Once again, reports that troubled smartphone maker Research In Motion (RIM) may enter a deal with burgeoning smartphone rival Samsung are making the rounds Shareholders appeared to welcome the news, sending RIM's stocks soaring to close up 3.3 percent at US$7.56....

Starbucks has selected Square to process mobile payments at its approximately 7,000 stores nationwide in the United States, in a move that could shake up the nascent mobile payments market in the country The coffee company had introduced the first mobile payment via iPhone app in 2009. It took mobile payments nationwide in January 2011 after testin...

If you're young, male and well-heeled, you're more likely to purchase an iPad than an Android tablet or a Kindle Fire, according to comScore research If you make less than US$100,000 a year and you're female, you're more likely to prefer a Kindle Fire. For the purposes of this research, comScore separated general Android tablets from Kindle Fire ta...

Acer Chairman and CEO JT Wang has lashed out at Microsoft over the software giant's plans to launch its own Surface tablets in October Microsoft should think twice before going forward with the tablet, as the move would be detrimental for the worldwide PC ecosystem, Wang said during an interview with the Financial Times....

Mobile processor manufacturer ARM on Monday announced the second generation of its Mali T-600 family of graphics processor units (GPUs), based on ARM's Midgard architecture The new chips represent the second generation of Mali-T600 processors; the first was announced in November....

Samsung on Monday announced that its Galaxy Note 10.1 tablet, which primarily uses a stylus for input, will hit the market this month ...

MetroPCS on Friday launched what's claimed to be the first smartphone in the U.S. offering mobile digital TV access The Samsung Galaxy S Lightray 4G is available at US$460 at MetroPCS stores and at the company's website....

Facebook, which has seen its share prices fall since it went public in May, has disclosed that its user base may contain as many as 83 million illegitimate accounts Facebook made the disclosures in its 10-Q form, filed with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on July 31....

Twitter has launched the Twitter Political Index, also called "Twindex," which serves up what its users feel about the candidates in the upcoming United States Presidential election The index was created together with Topsy, as well as pollsters the Mellman Group and North Star Opinion Research....

SAP on Wednesday unveiled a rapid-deployment solution for marketers It lets users analyze customer sentiment from social networking sites, communities, wikis, blogs and other sources. Users can combine the information with CRM text data and, if they so choose, business intelligence applications to get results in real time....

Dropbox says reused passwords are to blame for a wave of spam that's hitting subscribers to the service The company found that usernames and passwords recently stolen from other websites were used to sign in to some Dropbox accounts. One of these accounts belonged to a Dropbox employee, and it contained a project document with some users' email add...

Microsoft on Tuesday released a preview of its latest webmail client, Outlook.com Built from the ground up, Outlook.com has a strong social component, with links to Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Google. A link to Skype is coming soon....

Netflix on Monday released the source code for its Chaos Monkey tool into the open source jungle Chaos Monkey is a tool the company built in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) system. Its job is to randomly kill virtual machines and services within Netflix's architecture....

United States National Security Agency Director Keith Alexander has urged hackers to contribute to securing cyberspace Speaking at the DEFCON 2012 security conference, Alexander said the hacker community and the U.S. government cybercommunity share some core values....

Google on Thursday launched its high-speed Internet Google Fiber network in Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Mo. Residents of the two cities have to preregister for a US$10 fee. They have six weeks to rally their neighbors to sign up, and have to achieve a goal pre-set by Google. Residents of communities that don't meet the goal will be refun...

The Google Talk chat application went down some time on Wednesday night, provoking many users to anger. Some said they had switched temporarily to Skype or Twitter Google posted updates regularly on its App Status website, and began restoring service on a rolling basis....