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According to Google's own statistics released today, a version of Android called Gingerbread is the most popular version on Android devices today. This fall, Gingerbread will be three years old. So why are more Android phones running (by tech standards) an ancient operating system? There are a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that companies like Samsung, HTC, and LG that make Android phones are notoriously awful at supporting them with timely software updates after launch. That's because those manufacturers like to customize Android with their own look and special software features, meaning they have to put...

Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a partnership with Udacity to offer an online Masters Degree in Computer Science for $7,000, down 80% from the existing cost of $40,000 for the on-campus, instructor led program. Suddenly, masters programs around the country will have to compete with Georgia Tech‘s $7,000 program, and that won’t be easy or fast in coming. The traditionally taught graduate degree in computer science at Georgia Tech is a very well regarded program that is in high demand and has very positive outcomes in terms of jobs and earnings. Georgia Tech graduates tend to do very well...

Mozilla is out with the Firefox 21 open source browser release today, fixing at least 8 security vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as being critical. The new release also provides new features that – depending on your viewpoint – could either improve or reduce user privacy.One of the new features in Firefox 21 is the Health Report. Mozilla first began talking about the health report in September of 2012 as a non-invasive reporting mechanism. The report is intended to deliver information to users about the 'health' of the browser and its components. The report also shares that data with...

Full title: Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly-Deleted Photos From Android Phones A 24-year-old forensics examiner from Utah has made a discovery that may make some Snapchat users think twice before sending a photo that they think is going to quickly disappear. Richard Hickman of Decipher Forensics found that it’s possible to pull Snapchat photos from Android phones simply by downloading data from the phone using forensics software and removing a “.NoMedia” file extension that was keeping the photos from being viewed on the device. He published his findings online and local TV station KSL has...

ORLANDO—Is it time for humans to get their own black box? That’s the provocative question behind an ambitious project by four undergraduate engineering students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, presented at this weekend's Cornell Cup in Orlando, Fla. Over the course of a school year, the Amherst team built a prototype “black box for humans” that you could carry around wherever you went, and could be activated to record audio of your surroundings in case you ran into trouble. That audio recording—heavily encrypted, completely tamper-proof and admissible as evidence in a U.S. courtroom, per the Amherst team—would hypothetically...

Located in central Stockholm is the headquarters of Bahnhof, a Swedish Internet Service Provider and host with one of the coolest data centers on the planet. It gained notoriety a few years back as the former home of Wikileaks. Named Pionen White Mountains, it is located 30 meters (100 ft) under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm. The location was a former nuclear bunker and command center during the Cold War. It took more than two years to blast out the 141,000 cubic feet of extra space that Bahnhof needed to fit its backup generators and...

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. It's somewhat amazing that no one has really covered this part of the story, but it highlights, yet again, the kind of activities by folks in Congress that make the public trust Congress less and less. It has...

US Visa Reforms To Help Skilled IT Professionals Ishani Duttagupta Apr 22, 2013 Reggie Aggarwal is the founder and CEO of Cvent, an online event management company co-located out of Washington, DC and Gurgaon. With about 60 of the top engineering positions in his US operations lying vacant, Aggarwal has a problem. "We need guys with deep engineering knowledge and every tech employer, from Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups in the US, knows that there's a huge shortage of such people in America," says the Cvent founder. "Like all other tech CEOs, I know there is a huge talent...

Our Internet Surveillance State I'm going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks. Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSec hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair...

Patches 42 security holes Oracle has released a major security update for the version of Java programming language that runs inside Web browsers. The patch fixes 42 vulnerabilities within Java, including "the vast majority" of those that have been rated as the most critical. Oracle Executive Vice President Hasan Rizvisaid that a series of big security flaws in the Java plug-in for browsers have been uncovered in the past year by researchers and hackers, and some have been used by criminal groups. One hacking campaign infected computers using Microsoft Windows and Apple software inside hundreds of companies.Earlier this year the US Department...

Hi. Just wondering if anyone who owns one of these external hard drives (portable or desk) have a preference. Or if they had some bad experiences or better yet, swear by either one of the 2 if they crash easily or last long. We're changing our hard drives and prefer something physical to store for our staff, instead of relying solely on cloud-based storage. (Got rid of Carbonite when those clowns backstabbed Rush and we switched to Mozy) It's almost 50/50 on people we spoke with (friends, co-workers, business partners etc). Some say Seagate sucks and crash easily while the...

First, if you follow the link, you'll find that this does not appear to be an April Fools prank. Nuance on Monday launched Voice Ads, a voice enabled ad platform that allows a consumer to talk to brands. Companies get a new monetization vehicle and consumers presumably will get a say in brand advertising delivery. snip"Nuance, which is using its voice technology in mobile, health and auto applications, is obviously hoping to get on the ad gravy train. Voice Ads promise to give marketers an avenue "to deepen the relationship with their consumers." The theory is that you'll chat with...

INDEPENDENCE, Mo. - Authorities have taken four computers from a Catholic parish office in Independence after determining child pornography had been downloaded on the parish's unsecured Wi-Fi address. A spokeswoman with the Catholic Diocese of Kansas City – St. Joseph said an investigation began when authorities discovered two child pornography downloads from peer-to-peer websites on Feb. 5 with an IP address from the church’s rectory. Carrie Cooper, the Director of the Office of Child Protection with the Diocese, said all the computers and electronic storage devices have been taken from the building. Independence police referred questions about the investigation to...

One of Yahoo’s newest employees is a 17-year-old high school student in Britain. As of Monday, he is one of its richest, too. That student, Nick D’Aloisio, a programming whiz who wasn’t even born when Yahoo was founded in 1994, sold his news-reading app, Summly, to the company on Monday for a sum said to be in the tens of millions of dollars. Yahoo said it would incorporate his algorithmic invention, which takes long-form stories and shortens them for readers using smartphones, in its own mobile apps, with Mr. D’Aloisio’s help. “I’ve still got a year and a half left...

El Rushbo's Favorite Apple Tech Blogs March 22, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rosie in Lake Havasu, Arizona, it's great to have you here. Hi. CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to start off by saying that I'm 16, I'm in the 11th grade, and I'm also a freshman in college. I just wanted to start off in saying, thank you for helping me. In one of and has us debate certain thingslike immigration, national debt, unemployment -- and, my favorite, Obamacare.It's really refreshing to go home and, like, listen to you and realize,no, I'm not crazy.Because, as classical liberals, they...

FULL TITLE: Solving nearly century-old problem: Using graphene, professor finds out what causes low-frequency electronic 1/f noise =========================================================== A University of California, Riverside Bourns College of Engineering professor and a team of researchers published a paper today that show how they solved an almost century-old problem that could further help downscale the size of electronic devices. The work, led by Alexander A. Balandin, a professor of electrical engineering at UC Riverside, focused on the low-frequency electronic 1/f noise, also known as pink noise and flicker noise. It is a signal or process with a power spectral density inversely proportional to...

Mozilla has a long running interest in fostering greater transparency, trust and accountability related to privacy and the many cookie-based practices we see today. fx nightly v22.0a1 privacy tabOn Friday, Mozilla released a Firefox patch into its “Nightly” channel that changes how cookies from third party companies function. Users of this build of Firefox must directly interact with a site or company for a cookie to be installed on their machine. The patch also provides an additional control setting under the “Privacy” tab in Firefox’s Preferences menu (see image). Many years of observing Safari’s approach to third party cookies, a...

Enemies' doctrines include devastating blow as part of 'strategic operations' WASHINGTON – Warnings from U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that enemy nations are carrying out cyber attacks on the U.S. are on the rise. The target? The U.S. electric infrastructure. Even President Obama has pointed out that “our enemies are also seeking the abilities to sabotage our power grid, our financial institutions and our air traffic control systems.” But that may not be the worst of it. Those same adversaries – China, Russia, Iran and North Korea – also incorporate in...

Emerging markets will be the first to get the devices *********************************************EXCERPT************************************** BARCELONA, Spain--Mozilla formally launched its Firefox OS here ahead of the start of Mobile World Congress. However, the smartphone platform is focusing its attention on emerging markets and will likely not launch in the U.S. market until 2014.Mozilla, best known for its Firefox browser, said the first Firefox OS devices will be available to consumers in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, and that additional markets will be announced soon. The platform seems clearly aimed at emerging markets, and Mozilla CEO Gary Kovacs said the platform...