Technology news

GUEST: My company, Radware, recently polled 205 C-level IT executives of companies with at least $50 million in revenue to find out how they’re reacting to recent high-profile security breaches.
We surveyed executives from the U.S. and U.K. to take their temperature on everything from ransom attacks to hiring hackers to test their systems.
These are some of the highlights of what we uncovered:
1. Executives talk tough on ransomware, but many victims pay up.Ransom attacks on a variety of ta

The US Consumer Product Safety Commission has issued a new, timely warning about the dangers of fireworks. In this year's PSA, the government teamed up with professional NFL player Jason Pierre-Paul, who explains how last 4th of July he tried to relight a firework, but instead blew off a part of his right hand, losing a finger and part of his thumb. "Anyone doubting the danger fireworks pose need only look at JPP's hand and listen to his story," CPSC Chairman Elliot Kaye said in a statement

It’s difficult to find success in game development, and once found, it’s rare for a team to sustain it for a decade. But that’s exactly the case for developer Hothead Games, which is celebrating its 10-year anniversary in 2016.
Today, Hothead is best known as the developer responsible for the popular mobile sniper game Kill Shot Bravo, which the studio recently updated and released in China. It is in the top-100 highest-grossing app on iOS and Android in the United States,

GUEST: The virtual reality (VR) market in China is expected to reach $860 million in 2016 and accelerate to $8.5 billion by 2020. In the last six months alone, the Chinese VR market has seen a flurry of investments, partnerships and new ventures involving both local and international players. With capabilities in low cost, mass scale manufacturing, a hot investment climate, and international support, China could become the epicenter of the global VR market’s growth.
While the cou

Though Tesla produced 18,345 cars in the second quarter, it only delivered 14,370 to customers. That second number is well below Tesla’s own estimate of 17,000 deliveries for the quarter. The results are disappointing and could explain why the company released the numbers on a Sunday of a holiday weekend, something companies are known to do when looking to bury bad news.
Still, there are promising signs for Tesla, which is under extreme pressure to get the launch of its more-affordable Mod

With the introduction of high-end devices such as the Oculus Rift and the HTC Vive, as well as the simple ones such as Google Cardboard, virtual reality is the next digital frontier. While it’s a world that can now be practically realized, it’s not a new idea: Science fiction has long been imagining virtual worlds within imagined ones.
From the early 1950s, authors had begun to experiment with stories involving simulated worlds. Ray Bradbury’s 1951 story “The Veldt&r

On Saturday, June 2nd, someone with access to Donald Trump's Twitter account tweeted an attack on Hillary Clinton containing anti-semitic symbolism. The original tweet was corrected, then deleted more than two hours later, without any explanation from the Trump campaign. It's been more than a day since the tweet was posted, and nobody from Trump's camp has commented on the tweet — except for former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who was fired in June and then inexplicably hired b

GUEST: As cities face new challenges, including but not limited to infrastructure growth, security, and resource allocation, the use of technology seems like a natural way to address these problems. In a perfect world, smart sensors and real-time data analysis could help monitor and provide insight into everything – from gun violence to traffic congestions, from electricity consumption to public health.
The real-world implementation of the Internet of Things to create smart, connected citi

Walmart introduced a mobile payment feature last year that lets customers use its app to pay at checkout, and now the service is getting close to reaching nationwide availability. As Engadget first reported, the service has just expanded to more than 30 states just in the past two months, including New York and California as of this week. Last year Walmart promised that the service would be available nationwide by the first half of 2016. The Walmart Pay feature lets customers simply us

I first met Rick Klau and Ken Norton several years ago when they were running a program called Startup Lab — on behalf of Google Ventures (now GV) — a venture capital firm along the lines of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Greylock, Andreessen Horowitz, and Sequoia Capital. At the time, the two worked to mentor the investment firm’s portfolio companies, offering advice on everything from design to product management, along with resources to grow the startups.
As GV has ev

Microsoft appears to be readying a new Surface device for launch this year. Shubhan Chemburkar, an Indian app developer, spotted a number of Surface hints at Microsoft's building 88 during a recent visit. Microsoft has a wall dedicated to its hardware efforts over the years, complete with the Surface Pro 4, Surface Book, and updated Surface Pen and Type Cover. There is one spot on the wall with a Surface placeholder for 2016 and the caption "coming soon."
While the silhouette is clearly a Surfac

"You might guess that the word ‘Steller' describes an exceptional jay," says a 2012 Audubon article on the bird. But you should guess again.
Steller's jays are the bird version of that person aggressively shouting nonsense on the street corner. They're the roommate who eats the lunch you packed the night before, and then denies it. They're every loud-talking, pompous, kleptomaniacal person you know, rolled into one admittedly stylish bird.
Steller's jays, also known as Cyanocitta stel

GamesBeat recently held two “road show” events on mobile gaming influencers in New York and Seattle (see part one here). At each event, we discussed the rise of influencers and their impact on marketing in the $34 billion mobile gaming market.
The cost of user acquisition and the difficulty of game discovery in a sea of releases on the app stores is forcing companies to reassess their marketing tactics. And influencers such as YouTubers and Twitch streamers have become a cr

GUEST: Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock, you’ve no doubt heard about chatbots. However, what’s not commonly known is that chatbots have been around for years. What differentiates today’s bots is the integration of back-end artificial intelligence, which enables them to do more than simply respond with the basic logic of yesterday.
I find that it’s important to make distinctions between a bot and today’s A.I.-powered intelligent assistants. Chatbots just

(Reuters) – Israel’s Minister of Internal Security on Saturday accused Facebook <FB.O> and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg, of not doing enough to prevent incitement against Israel and said the social network was “sabotaging” Israeli police work.
Israel has in the past said Facebook is used to encourage attacks and the government is drafting legislation to enable it to order Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media to remove online postings it deems incite ter

(Reuters) – A digital video disc player was found in the Tesla car that was on autopilot when its driver was killed in a May 7 collision with a truck, Florida Highway Patrol officials said on Friday.
Whether the portable DVD player was operating at the time of the crash has not been determined, however, and witnesses who came upon the wreckage of the 2015 Model S sedan gave differing accounts on Friday about whether the player was showing a movie.
Questions of why the car did not stop for

Ever since it introduced a pressure-sensitive 3D Touch screen on the iPhone 6S, Apple has been asking developers to adopt a new system of Quick Actions to surface shortcuts to functions within apps on the home screen. Give a compatible app’s icon a hard press and you’ll be presented with a set of the most commonly used options to help accelerate whatever you want to do. It’s great in theory, but we’re now close to a year into this endeavor and the results have so far been

At first glance, electric cars seem particularly well suited to urban driving.
Trips are typically short enough to quell range anxiety, and stop-and-go traffic gives drivers plenty of opportunities to make use of regenerative braking. Meanwhile, everyone else likely appreciates the lack of engine noise and exhaust fumes.
But in the real world, urban electric-car drivers can still face more than a few challenges.
New York City is not considered particularly car-friendly by most people, but i

(Reuters) – An Illinois man accused of breaking into the Apple iCloud and Gmail accounts of celebrities to obtain their private photos and videos has agreed to plead guilty to a felony computer hacking charge, prosecutors said on Friday.
Edward Majerczyk, 28, facing up to five years in prison, is the second man charged in a federal investigation into the leaks of nude photos of several Hollywood actresses, including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence, in September 2014.
According to a plea agr

Even the mightiest chieftain has to start out as a wood-cutting grunt.
Today, Blizzard is one of the biggest companies in gaming and celebrating its 25th anniversary. It is supporting modern hits like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, and Overwatch. However, before the release of World of Warcraft in 2004, Blizzard was a much smaller developer. This was also around the time Kaeo Milker joined the company as a tester for Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos, the real-time strategy game that was then i