Have the copyright enforcers been caught with their hands in the cookie jar? The blog TorrentFreak today published its claim that the US Copyright Group, which has filed more than 14,000 lawsuits against anonymous P2P movie sharers, ripped off anothe...

"The operating system is called Windows," claimed Steve Ballmer when asked about Microsoft's plans for the tablet/slate/pad form factor at the company's annual Financial Analyst Meeting on Thursday. He expressed dismay at the iPad's strong sales figu...

Corroborating a rumor from The Wall Street Journal earlier this summer, a new Bloomberg report cited "two people familiar with the company's plans" to build an iPad-like touchscreen device and release it this fall. Dubbed the "Blackpad," the device w...

Microsoft has announced plans to release of an out-of-band update on Monday to address the Windows Shortcut flaw revealed less than two weeks ago. The software giant has been keeping a close watch on the use of .LNK files exploiting the vulnerability...

Students care about Facebook privacy more than the world thinks, and their use of privacy controls has skyrocketed recently, according to two researchers. Eszter Hargittai, Associate Professor of Northwestern University, and Danah Boyd, Research Asso...

Apple launched the iPhone 4 in 17 additional countries today, causing another round of debate over whether or not the iPhone 4's external antenna design is flawed or not. A UK consulting firm says its tests show the "death grip" problem is real, and...

Fossil fuels may be doing an even more efficient job of warming the planet than we thought. A new study shows that black carbon generated by fossil fuels seems to warm the planet more than other sources, and sulfates generated by burning cheaper fuel...

If your government had decided to install a national, open-access fiber-to-the-home network to 93 percent of all residents, if the installation was free, and if the fiber hookup had no effect on your existing phone or cable service and committed you...

The Federal Communications Commission has finally approved the first 4G Long Term Evolution (LTE) phone for sale in the US. Though the first LTE handset will be available through MetroPCS, the FCC has now opened the door for other LTE devices, includ...

Every year since 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has released an annual report detailing the state of the climate. Early versions were typewritten and authored by a handful of experts. The new version is a shiny, 218-page PD...

Much of this post originally ran in July 2009, but the issue is still on the minds of gamers. We've edited the post to add some thoughts now that the game has launched, and added a section at the end dealing with the rumors of officially supported LA...

When it comes to preservation, video games are problematic. Hardware becomes outdated and the media that houses game code becomes obsolete, not to mention the legal issues with emulation. In short, one day, there may not be a way to play Super Metroi...

As SIGGRAPH 2010 winds down, one thing has been obvious: GPU rendering has matured quickly. GPU-based rendering initially got a bad name because public attention has been mostly on real-time ray-tracing implementations for games, where corners are cu...

For centuries, people have tried to pinpoint what makes humans unique. The most current scientific theory suggests that three main qualities separate Homo sapiens from other animals: the construction and use of complex tools, the use of symbolic be...

Recently released FCC documents reveal that Sprint is set to launch what appears to be a new case for the iPod touch that would enable 3G networking on the WiFi-only device. Manufactured by ZTE and called the "Peel," the case is essentially a MiFi-li...

At a Congressional Internet privacy hearing on Tuesday, a group of middle-aged men had some questions about the 'Net. Why was it such a creepy place? How come replying to spammers doesn't get one immediately removed from their e-mail lists? And what...

The latest hole in WiFi security is quite serious, but it's unlikely to cause widespread disruption in the corporate and government networks for which it would have the potential to cause the biggest headaches. In fact, the exploit continues to dem...

Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner revealed today at the company's annual financial analyst meeting that the first beta of the Internet Explorer 9 Web browser is planned for release in September. This is a little later than expected; leak...

When I was 12, using a Performa 600CD, my parents gave me an external trackpad accessory that connected via ADB (a moment of silence for Apple Desktop Bus, please... thank you) for my birthday. The useable surface area was tiny—maybe three-quar...

This week's issue of Science takes a look at work that could help bridge the gap between biomass fuel production and traditional petrochemical engineering. Modern society relies on petrochemicals not only for our primary transportation needs, but als...

The Internet, taken as a sort of buzzing collective, can be hard on games. The Amazon ratings for StarCraft 2 have become a battlefield, with many rating the game based on features that gamers feel should have been included, or trashing the game beca...

The Information Commissioner's Office has said that Google did not grab "significant" amounts of personal data when photographing the UK with its StreetView cars, and that the information captured is unlikely to include "meaningful personal details"...

Mindteck, a company that offers embedded software development and consultancy services, has released power consumption data after testing sleep, idle, low-use, and high-use scenarios of various Windows PCs. The researchers also built a model to estim...

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling...

Apple is looking into user complaints about hardware and software performance issues reported by iPhone 3G users after upgrading to iOS 4. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is investigating the myriad complaints that have surfaced si...