Articles by Richard Adhikari

Canadian businesswoman Julia Cordray's plan to launch Peeple, a Yelp-like app that would let people post reviews about other people, has drawn fierce criticism in the tech press and the blogosphere, including a petition against the app's launch and a Twitter campaign to boycott it "It's a legal and ethical minefield," said Alan Pelz-Sharpe, a resea...

Canonical last week announced plans to launch the Internet of Toys, an open source initiative calling on toy makers, hackers, Internet of Things fans and innovators to build the next generation of Web-accessing toys The company is partnering with theHybrid Group andErle Robotics for the initiative....

Microsoft on Tuesday held an event in New York City where it unveiled a laptop, a tablet, three Lumia smartphones and a fitness band -- all running Windows 10 -- along with a slew of other products It also announced new apps for Windows 10, including Box, Facebook, Instagram, Flipagram, Candy Crush Soda Saga and Uber. All of the apps will be availa...

Google on Monday released an over-the-air update for Nexus devices, which includes patches for the latest Stagefright vulnerabilities and other flaws. Android's Stagefright media processing feature, which recently imperiled 1 billion devices around the world, was once again putting them at risk, Zimperium revealed last week....

Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, who has been running the company as interim CEO for the past three months, has taken the reins for good, the company revealed in a document filed with the SEC last week Former CEO Dick Costolo has left Twitter's board of directors, and Adam Bain has stepped into the chief operating officer role....

For retailers that do not yet accept EMV cards -- credit and debit cards with chips embedded in them -- a spine-tingling deadline arrived last week. Liability for any payment fraud that results from acceptance of old-school plastic shifted to them The magnetic chips in EMV (Europay, MasterCard and Visa) cards will reduce in-store payment fraud, whi...

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has quit Facebook and shut down his account, sparking speculation as to his motives Is Salesforce at odds with Facebook? Is Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg no longer Benioff's BFF?...

Apple on Tuesday updated its privacy policy with new information regarding features in iOS 9 and OS X El Capitan Using clear language, the company attempts to set itself apart from rivals by noting that it doesn't build profiles about its customers to sell to advertisers....

TiVo on Wednesday urged users to give commercials the finger with its Bolt set-top box, which allows ad-skipping on some shows The Bolt is available immediately online, and it will show up on store shelves this weekend....

Microsoft announced a slew of corporate cloud solutions at Tuesday's AzureCon "The value for IoT is in control, data collection and analysis, and Microsoft is apparently building a cloud service that can do all three, and wrapping it with enterprise-level security," said Rob Enderle, principal analyst at the Enderle Group....

Dark, narrow streaks going downhill at four locations on Mars are evidence of water flowing on the planet, NASA confirmed Monday Called "recurring slope lineae," the streaks are approximately the length of a football field, according to NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They are believed to have been formed by the seasonal flow of water....

That trip down memory lane may never be the same. Those who feel their Facebook Timeline leaves out any important moments in their lives can call up Google Maps' Timeline to fill in the blanks. With tech tools like these, who needs enemies?...

The Internet of Things is poised to soar in the enterprise, a new survey from IDC indicates, with the planning stage rapidly shifting to deployment. Nearly 73 percent of about 2,500 respondents to the firm's IoT Decision Maker Survey said they already had deployed IoT solutions or would do so within the next year, the firm reported Tuesday....

Someone perhaps even more flamboyant than Donald Trump may be getting involved in the U.S. presidential race -- and not on the Republican side Notorious Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom is not running for office, but as his extradition case heats up in New Zealand, a possible Democratic candidate for the presidency -- mild-mannered Harvard law prof...

A perfect cybercrime storm is brewing, and two of the main ingredients are ransomware and the Internet of Things Cybercrime has become an industry with all the operational trappings of any legitimate sector, McAfee Labs noted in its five-year threat review released earlier this month. It has its own supply chain, market segments, service providers,...

Google is putting a new spin on the news. Instead of relying on journalists to gather facts and report events the old-fashioned way, the company's News Lab, launched earlier this year, aims to deliver news stories through data. Case in point: Who needs polls to reveal that Donald Trump is the most popular candidate in the Republican primary free-f...

Acer last week announced the latest in its family of Revo small-form-factor PCs at the IFA 2015 trade show in Berlin. The Revo Build M1-601 consists of a cuboid base unit with a footprint measuring about 5 inches square and a set of easily attachable modules There are two versions -- one with an Intel Pentium processor and the other with an Intel C...

Samsung last week announced the Gear S2 and Gear S2 Classic smartwatches at the IFA trade show in Berlin The product specs of the Gear S2 and Gear S2 Classic are the same. The main difference between the two is in the design of their faces -- the Gear S2 Classic looks more like a regular watch, while it's obvious the Gear S2 is a smartwatch with ap...

Microsoft last week rolled out versions of Skype 6.0 for iOS and Android. The company redesigned the applications to be more natural and intuitive, and it added new features Skype 6.0 for Android now has a floating action button, which makes it easy to start a new conversation. Its navigation is more streamlined, too.It's compatible with Android 4....

Nextbit earlier this week launched a Kickstarter campaign forRobin, a cloud-connected Android smartphone. Robin boasts a streamlined interface that does away with bloatware and automatically offloads data to the cloud The company expects to ship Robin running Marshmallow, the next version of Android -- unless the OS' launch is delayed. In that case...