Articles by Richard Adhikari

Facebook last week introduced OpenCellular, an inexpensive, open source wireless access platform. Telecom operators, entrepreneurs, OEMs and researchers will be able to build, implement, deploy and operate wireless infrastructures to serve people living in remote areas The platform is available in various options, ranging from a network in a box t...

Google on Wednesday released an update of its online antipiracy efforts YouTube has generated more than US$2 billion to content copyright holders by monetizing user-uploaded content through its Content ID rights management system, Google said, adding that more than 90 percent of all Content ID claims result in monetization....

Microsoft on Tuesday introduced to attendees at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Toronto what amounts to pay-as-you-go plans for the enterprise One is Windows 10 Enterprise E3 in CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) which is "basically the OS wrapped with security and management delivered as a subscription," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the E...

SiFive on Monday announced its flagship Freedom family of system-on-a-chip platforms The platforms are based on the free and open-source RISC-V instruction set architecture, which several of the company's founders created at the University of California, Berkeley....

Google last week announced an experiment with post-quantum cryptography in Chrome. A small fraction of connections between Google's servers and Chrome on the desktop will use a post-quantum key-exchange algorithm in addition to the elliptic-curve key-exchange algorithm already being used The idea is that large quantum computers -- if and when they'...

Salesforce on Monday announced it had completed its US$2.8 billion acquisition of e-commerce cloud software platform Demandware The deal "gives Salesforce the e-commerce piece to compete against Oracle, which already has e-commerce capabilities, as well as SAP," said Rebecca Wettemann, vice president of research at Nucleus Research....

Airbnb recently filed suit against San Francisco over a new rule governing short-term rentals, which the city's Board of Supervisors approved last month An Airbnb-supported law adopted earlier this year requires short-term rental hosts to register with the city, but it's estimated that only about 20 percent of them -- about 1,400 out of 7,000 -- ha...

Americans have expressed outrage at Wednesday's police shooting of Philando Castile, an African-American man, which happened in St. Paul, Minnesota, during a traffic stop for a broken tail light Castile was shot in front of his girlfriend Diamond Reynolds and their 4-year-old daughter, who were in the car....

The United States Federal Trade Commission has launched an investigation into philanderers' dating site Ashley Madison, Reuters reported Tuesday The company, which suffered a massive data breach last year that resulted in extortion attempts and ruined lives, as well as class-action lawsuits, earlier this week announced that it hired a new CEO and a...

More than 85 million Android devices worldwide have been taken over by the Yingmob, a group of China-based cybercriminals who created the HummingBad malware, according to a Check Point report released last week HummingBad establishes a persistent rootkit on Android devices, generates fraudulent ad revenue, and installs additional fraudulent apps....

BlackBerry on Tuesday announced it will cease manufacturing the BlackBerry Classic "The Classic has long surpassed the average lifespan for a smartphone in today's market," noted COO Ralph Pini. "To keep innovating and advancing our portfolio, we are updating our smartphone lineup with state-of-the-art devices."

It's summer, and Walmart and Amazon are celebrating by escalating their e-commerce competition Amazon on Thursday announced it would hold its second annual Prime Day on July 12. A shopping day for Amazon Prime members worldwide, it is billed as the biggest global Amazon event ever. The company will offer more than 100,000 bargains, with new deals p...

Hackers late Sunday broke into CEO Sundar Pichai's Quora account and through it accessed his Twitter followers, according to reports. The group taking credit for the breach, OurMine Security, previously hit other prominent high-tech figures, including Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Spotify CEO Daniel Elk, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels and former Twitter...

BitTorrent on Thursday announced a revamp of its Bundle offering as a pilot project, giving it a new name, "BitTorrent Now." Heavily used by independent musicians and filmmakers, as well as the BBC and other organizations, the service now accepts ads....

The rumor that Apple will get rid of the headphone jack in the iPhone 7 resurfaced Tuesday with an article in The Wall Street Journal citing people familiar with the matter Apple is expected to launch the new iPhone later this year....

Docker on Monday announced Docker Engine 1.12 with built-in orchestration, which allows automated deployment and management of Dockerized distributed applications and microservices at scale in production Users can select Docker Swarm mode to turn on built-in orchestration, or they can use their own custom tooling or third-party orchestrators that r...

Google on Monday began rolling out a new two-step authentication feature, Google Prompt, targeting enterprise employees The new option consists of a pop-up that displays a mobile user's name and profile image, and that specifies the location and device involved in the attempted sign-in. The device owner is asked whether to allow or deny the sign-in...

Plume last week introduced its eponymous self-optimizing WiFi system for the home. Plume adapts in real life to the different network demands made by various devices and ensures that each gets the fastest speeds possible, according to the company.

Snapcraft -- the Linux package format Canonical developed for Ubuntu -- now works on multiple Linux distros, including Arch, Debian, Fedora and various flavors of Ubuntu, Canonical announced last week. They're being validated on CentOS, Elementary, Gentoo, Mint, OpenSUSE, OpenWrt and RHEL....

Facebook on Thursday unveiled its redesigned Messenger app, which replaces the list of conversations it previously displayed with a home screen that will let users perform more actions within a chat The Home tab now organizes Messenger into recent conversations, favorites, active users, and messages awaiting a response....