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The Defense Department has decided to retire its 19-year-old retiree pay system written in “antiquated” computer code and replace it with a lower cost, easier to use application based on off-the-shelf technology. The Defense Retiree and Annuitant Pay System, or DRAS, maintains military pay accounts for more than 2.6 million military retirees, former spouses and survivor beneficiaries totaling $40 billion a year. The system was introduced in 1995 and is based on Common Business Oriented Language computer code of the time. DRAS uses “antiquated mainframe technology dating back to 1980 that has exceeded the end of its planned lifecycle,” the...

When tech startups are willing to offer almost anyone -- even a journalist -- shares ahead of an IPO, a burst isn't terribly far behind. I was surprised but not completely flabbergasted by the phone call I received a few weeks ago. A representative of Arista Networks, a networking company I've written about recently, phoned to inform me that the company's chief executive wanted to offer me "friends and family" shares in Arista's upcoming initial public offering. The offer was explicit, down to the number of shares I'd have the opportunity to purchase at the IPO price. The caller specifically...

In January, the Obama administration put together a "working group" to analyze how huge swaths of Americans' data are being gathered and stored and what sort of privacy issues need to be addressed. The group's report was just released this week. Before you ask: No, it's not about the National Security Agency (NSA) sweeping up huge amounts of metadata from phone and online communications by Americans, even though that’s the big data conversation many Americans want to have right now. Such data gathering is vaguely mentioned in the full report, but primarily the 85-page study (pdf) is about consumer privacy...

The low level griping about law enforcement subpoenas requesting user information and instructing companies to not tell the subjects of the subpoenas has burst into full fledged rebellion. From the Washington Post: "This increasingly defiant industry stand is giving some of the tens of thousands of Americans whose Internet data gets swept into criminal investigations each year the opportunity to fight in court to prevent disclosures. Prosecutors, however, warn that tech companies may undermine cases by tipping off criminals, giving them time to destroy vital electronic evidence before it can be gathered." Now Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google have joined...

In a rare move that highlights the severity of the security hole in one of the Web's most popular browsers, the Homeland Security Department's Computer Emergency Readiness Team says to stop using Internet Explorer until Microsoft can fix it. Security firm FireEye said that it is currently being used to attack financial and defense organizations in the US via Internet Explorer 9, 10, and 11. Those versions of the browser run on Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows 8, although the exploit is present in Internet Explorer 6 and above.

<p>A Marin County technology executive was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon after he got off his bicycle and beat a motorist unconscious during an alleged act of road rage in Mill Valley, a city police official said.</p>

<p>The wife of Foursquare CEO Dennis Crowley allegedly wore a fake bib in order to gain entry to the Boston Marathon on Monday, according to a report from Boston news station WCVB.</p> <p>The story came out when registered marathon runner Kathy Brown spotted photos of someone else wearing her number, 34033, while looking for pictures of herself on the website MarathonFoto.</p>

President Obama plans to honor those who died in the Korean War with a surprising message for a foreign audience: a pitch for immigration reform back home. At a naturalization ceremony Friday for 13 U.S. service members and seven military spouses stationed in South Korea, he will offer a tribute to the contributions that naturalized American citizens have made through military service, according to an official familiar with the event.

Graphene is slated as the major breakthrough of this century. Infact it could very well propel the semiconductor a couple of decades easily (compared to the performance trend via Moore’s law ). Graphene transistors are more than capable of being clocked at 500Ghz so you get the idea of what Samsung is claiming to have achieved: a replicateable production process of Graphene nodes.Graphene.Experimental gFET Graphene Production – Scientific breakthrough of this century to be used in CPUs* of wearable devicesOK, I admit, I was being slightly sarcastic when I wrote the headline. It seems sort of ironic that if Samsung’s...

A new bill seeking to curb Utah’s government-owned broadband networks incited anger among observers, indicating confusion remains regarding the policy—and the state of broadband. Promoting broadband is in the public interest, but government-run broadband networks like Utah Telecommunications Open Infrastructure Agency—termed UTOPIA—are not the way to broadband paradise. In 2002, local government leaders commenced work on UTOPIA—the nation’s largest government-owned wholesale fiber operation—as a reaction to private telecommunications providers’ supposed unwillingness to make available high-speed broadband services. Altogether, 11 communities pledged approximately $500 million over several decades to back the bonds UTOPIA sold to finance network development. However, UTOPIA never...

The U.S. government’s plan to give away authority over the Internet’s core architecture to the “global Internet community” could endanger the security of both the Internet and the U.S. — and open the door to a global tax on Web use. “U.S. management of the internet has been exemplary and there is no reason to give this away — especially in return for nothing,” former Bush administration State Department senior advisor Christian Whiton told The Daily Caller. “This is the Obama equivalent of Carter’s decision to give away the Panama Canal — only with possibly much worse consequences.” The U.S....

Thermal imaging devices have been available for sale online, relatively cheaply, for at least a couple of years. But now, an iPhone attachment will let you carry a thermal imaging camera in your pocket. FLIR Systems, a specialized camera company, plans to release its thermal camera and app for iPhone for less than $350 this spring. These devices — which show you the image of what you are looking at but with colors highlighting heat levels from objects — are getting easy to own and use. And that means consumers could use them to spot a water leak in the...

As if you needed another reason not to wear your dumb Google Glass in public—or ever, actually—an Ohio man claims he was yanked out of a movie theater and interrogated by federal agents, who believed he was illegally filming the movie with his face computer. The man’s full account is posted on The Gadgeteer, but we’ll summarize it here so you can get the gist of it before you’re engulfed forever in this ghastly winter storm. Last Saturday, our Glass-wearing protagonist and his wife went to a showing of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at an AMC in Columbus, Ohio. About...

Much has been written, often with considerable glee, about the worsening divide in the Republican Party between its corporate and Tea Party wings. Yet Democrats may soon face their own schism as a result of the growing power in the party of high-tech business interests. Gaining the support of tech moguls is a huge win for the Democrats — at least initially. They are not only a huge source of money, they also can provide critical expertise that the Republicans have been far slower to employ. There have always been affluent individuals who backed liberal or Democratic causes, either out...

What a year 2013 turned out to be. We saw all-new PC form factors, interesting innovations in mobile hardware, and an explosion of gadgets in the home tech and entertainment spaces. And after testing, beating on, and writing about hundreds of products, the editors at PCWorld and TechHive have carefully compiled a list of our 50 favorites.

"An article at Ars Technica explains how, following stories of NSA leaks, FreeBSD developers will not rely solely on Intel's or Via's chip-based random number generators for /dev/random values. The values will first be seeded through another randomization algorithm known as 'Yarrow.' The changes are effective with the upcoming FreeBSD 10.0 (for which the first of three planned release candidates became available last week)."

Each trade results in a bitcoin being sent from the currency counter in red to the country on the map. The value in BTC is listed in green and plotted across the map. The last exchange rate for each currency is listed in @purple and updated for each trade....

merica’s traditional phone system is not as dependable as it used to be. Just last month, the Federal Communications Commission told phone companies to start . According to one estimate, as many as 1 in 5 incoming long-distance calls simply doesn’t connect. The problem may be in the way those calls are being routed — often via the Internet, which is cheaper. It may also have something to do with the gradual decay of traditional landline infrastructure. Dan Newhouse, a farmer in eastern Washington state, hears that decay on his home phone every day. “We live out in the country,...

In the months leading up to the 2012 presidential election, Silicon Valley was squarely in President Obama's corner. Google's executive chairman coached Obama's campaign team; executives from Craigslist, Napster, and Linkedin helped him fundraise; and when the dust settled, Obama had won nine counties in the liberal and tech-heavy Bay Area, scoring 84 percent of the vote in San Francisco. But a little over a year later, following explosive allegations from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that the government is exploiting tech companies to spy on Americans, some members of Silicon Valley are taking a new perspective: "F--- these guys."

The White House’s refusal to make a top technology official available to Congress is drawing some heat on the Hill. The White House declined this week to make Chief Technology Officer Todd Park available to testify at a House Oversight hearing next Wednesday on the rollout of Healthcare.gov. White House Assistant Director for Legislative Affairs Donna Pignatelli said Mr. Park is currently too busy helping fix the troubled healthcare website to appear, and suggested he testify in early December instead.