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China has announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported.
China has announced it would indefinitely postpone a mandate requiring all personal computers sold in the country to be accompanied by a controversial content-filtering application, state media reported.
Had the government not delayed its controversial order that all computers be equipped with Green Dam by July 1, the result would have been the same -- Chinese computer retailers were far from ready.
China's last-minute decision to postpone a controversial content-filtering application on computers sold there is the latest example of the trouble that Western technology companies face doing business in the world's fastest-growing economy.
An online map showing where swine flu -- or H1N1 virus-- is spreading has gone viral, so to speak.
The frantic hunt for the right cell-phone charger will soon be a thing of the past -- in Europe at least -- as major manufacturers on Monday agreed to introduce a universal adaptor within six months.
Cyber criminals are setting snares that move at the speed of news.
Cyber criminals are setting snares that move at the speed of news.
On Saturday at 10 a.m. it's show time for Brenda Zhang and her subtitle team. They roll out of bed, meet each other online and chat, while their modems download the latest episode of "Prison Break," which just aired half a world away on Friday night in America.
If you like to search for "music lyrics" or "free" things, you are engaging in risky cyber behavior. And "free music downloads" puts 20 percent of Web surfers in harm's way of malicious software, known as "malware."
The Chinese government will require all PCs sold in China after July 1 to include software that blocks "harmful" content, news reports said on Monday.
It's hard for an editor to ignore an idea that hundreds of readers have voted for.
No longer is the promised land of Apple's App Store reserved for technical wizards.
Rupert Murdoch's plan to put News Corporation websites behind a pay wall is "going to be like putting toothpaste back in the tube."
When the rest of the publishing world herded to a free model of online news in the 1990s, Gordon Crovitz didn't follow suit. As a former publisher of the Wall Street Journal and journalist with Dow Jones, he was part of the team that decided news on the Web should be paid for.
A few nights ago Yulinar (full name withheld), a 23-year-old insurance agent in Indonesia's capital city of Jakarta, was in bed doing her usual ritual before falling asleep: updating her Facebook status and checking her friends' updates.
The European Commission handed down its ruling in a landmark anti-trust case against Intel Wednesday, fining the computer chip giant a record $1.45 billion for abusing its dominant position in the computer processing unit (CPU) market.
The European Commission found leading computer chipmaker Intel guilty Wednesday of violating European anti-trust rules and ordered that it pay a fine of 1.06 billion euros ($1.45 billion).
Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch expects News Corporation-owned newspaper Web sites to start charging users for access within a year in a move which analysts say could radically shake-up the culture of freely available content.
Nip-tuck tourism is already well-ensconced in its ways, but technology used to give prospective clients a user-friendly yet professional virtual space to explore their options is starting to break the skin of the industry.
In the age of digital audio, what does good old-fashioned radio still have to offer?
The next time you go to throw away your old mobile phone, Gert-Jan van Breugel hopes you bury it in a garden instead of tossing it in a garbage can.
A CNN.com journalist has achieved his goal of "tweeting" the London Marathon.
The race will be hard enough without the rain that's in the forecast, but one participant in Sunday's London Marathon is challenging himself further by planning to "tweet" while he runs.
Lectures, slide shows and notes are often boring, but people are using technology to find entertainment in these unlikely places.
Rapid-fire TV news bulletins or getting updates via social-networking tools such as Twitter could numb our sense of morality and make us indifferent to human suffering, scientists say.
Online retailer Amazon has said a system error caused it to remove a number of gay and lesbian-themed books from its sales charts.
As the "B" in BRIC (one of the world's fastest-growing economies alongside Russia, India and China), Brazil may very well owe its force to an emerging business and technology district in the heart of Sao Paulo, centered around an upscale avenue called Luis Carlos Berrini in the neighborhood of Brooklin.
"Still Alice," written by Lisa Genova, is a novel about a 50-year-old Harvard professor's struggle with Alzheimer's disease. It's also a book, Genova was told, that nobody would want to read.
Some interesting "hyperlocal" Web sites have emerged in the past few years, the idea behind them being to provide news at an extremely local level. Prominent among them is EveryBlock.com, launched last year in Chicago.
Over the years digital signage in public places has become an increasingly common sight in shopping centers around the world.
Amazon's new Kindle 2 has a synthetic voice that can read aloud e-books, articles and blogs. Described as an "experimental" feature, it has surprisingly good command of nuance and inflection, but some people are voicing concerns.
Matthew Baron is one of those gizmo guys, the kind who covets all toys new and shiny.
Yume-Hotaru's first novel was a best-seller in Japanese bookstores, and he wrote it entirely with his thumbs.
So what's your list of top 10 mobile applications of 2008? Does it include Twitterberry, Facebook, MySpace, BioWallet, Locale? Or do you favor Super Monkey Ball, Koi Pond, iSteam, iBeer or iFart?
The question means little to millions living in poverty with neither electricity nor electronics. But there are also millions now weaving the Web 2.0 ever more tightly into their social fabric -- witness the booming popularity of Facebook and other social networking sites -- so the question seems worth asking.
Under fire from tens of thousands of users, the social networking site Facebook said early Wednesday it is reverting to its old policy on user information -- for now.
Users of social-networking sites such as Facebook risk losing control of their personal information because they are not fully aware of the implications for their privacy, a freedom of information expert warned Wednesday.
If it weren't for the Internet, Murong Xuecun might still be working as a sales manager at a car company in the southern Chinese city of Chengdu. That is what he was doing when he started writing his first novel on his office's online bulletin board system back in 2001.
Google launched the latest salvo in the cellphone wars Tuesday with the unveiling of the newest handset to carry its Android platform.
Cell phone makers Tuesday pledged to end one of modern life's chief frustrations --- and introduce a universal charger for handsets by 2012.
Natural disasters like tsunamis or floods will always claim lives, but in the near future some of those lives will be saved by cell phone warnings, thanks to increasing use of a technology called cell broadcast.
A Web site started by a student as a way of staying in touch with friends celebrated its fifth birthday Wednesday as a billion-dollar business and a global phenomenon.
When Shi Rui Huan was led through the back entrance of a China Mobile store on the first day of April last year, he had no idea that he was about to be at the center of one of the most significant events in the history of telecommunications in China.
The Twitter universe is getting complicated. Or, depending on your viewpoint, ever more useful.
Teachers are often portrayed as being clueless about technology, but ever more of them are putting that stereotype to the test.
In the early days of the Web, the mantra "information wants to be free" made the rounds. In music circles now, "music wants to be shared" seems to be the idea.
The screen of Apple's iPhone has focused much attention on touch as a user interface. iPhone users can rotate and resize images with finger gestures for instance.
In the world of music-making, quirky new instruments tend to come and go. But one description-defying gadget from Yamaha, the Tenori-on, might prove to be more than a fad.
You've heard of give-and-take. How about give-and-show?
When the name of the game is escape, one gamer's boredom is another gamer's boon.
For some, "telemedicine" brings to mind remote-controlled surgery, or x-rays from Houston being read by radiologists in Bangalore.
Just as consumers are becoming increasingly tech-savvy, so are the brands that target them.
This holiday season, it seems highbrow concepts are better off making their commercial debut in low-tech gadgets.
As our mobile devices get smaller and smaller, so are the screens on which we view our mobile content. At the same time, mobile content made for our cellular, podular devices is becoming more and more enriched.
The "semantic Web" does not sound like it's fun and easy to use, but it could make surfing Web 3.0 a more rewarding and interactive experience. Some believe it could even lead to a new form of artificial intelligence.
Who could forget the scene from Tsui Hark's 1997 B-movie "Double Team," where an imprisoned Jean-Claude Van Damme scrapes the skin off his index finger, attaches it to an impromptu mechanical contraption and booby-traps it to hit the scanner at precisely the scheduled time each morning, so that his captors don't notice his escape?
For many of us, our mobile phone is already a smart prosthesis. Not only does it connect us vocally to others, link us to networks of information and entertain us during downtime, it captures what we see and hear.
It's called "The Internet of Things" -- at least for now. It refers to an imminent world where physical objects and beings, as well as virtual data and environments, all live and interact with each other in the same space and time. In short, everything is interconnected.
As bioengineers continue to build things with the stuff of life itself, the rest of the world is slowly waking up to the power of synthetic biology.
In a new video game for cell phones set to launch in Japan, the point is simple: Roaming players must point their handsets in the right direction to score.
So the credit crunch means this year's six-figure bonus has been put on hold, but you still need to keep up appearances at the country club -- what to do? Why not join the growing number of people who are choosing to rent, rather than buy, life's little luxuries?
"Don't be evil," goes the informal motto at Google. It's easy to see why a search giant might need those three words, but how about you?
It appeals to the venture capitalist in all of us, whether we be a stock broker, a ruthless talent scout or a proud patron of the arts.
Have you ever thrown away a power adapter that works just fine? Don't feel bad. It isn't your fault that the adapter was made for just one particular gadget. But it is a problem.
Back in the good old days of the Internet, the hacker was a teenager motivated by high-tech pranks and bragging rights. Today, the online thief could be anyone with 'Net access after a quick buck.
In the second Fantastic Four movie, a character called the Silver Surfer glides effortlessly over the Earth's terrain on a gleaming trans-galactic surfboard.
Very soon, the most common phrase transiting through mobile phone networks will no longer be "Where are you?" but "I see you."
"People have this inherited legacy from the 1940s and '50s that you've 'made it' when your film is shown on a big screen," observes Andrew Apostola, who co-founded the Portable Film Festival (PFF) online in 2006.
Down in the busy corridor of Shanghai's Nanjing Xi Lu subway station, a smiling salesman stands by a bright green kiosk. A guy walks up, and the two chat about music over the touch screen. The guy takes out his mobile phone and gives the salesman a few coins. A couple minutes later, another happy customer walks away, plugged into his handset and listening to the latest single by Russian singer Vitas.
Gone are the days when it was enough to simply Google your name to find out what people were saying about you in cyberspace.
You probably arrived here via a hyperlink. We hardly think about it now, but the hyperlink is a neat trick. It turns a word in a browser into an object that leads to more information.
As American Idol's success has shown, people love to vote -- and to see how others have voted.
As many surveys have suggested, fear of public speaking is one of our strongest anxieties, often ranking above the fear of dying.
Imagine a magic scroll, one that contains a myriad of stories and tells you a different one every night. One that fetches you the morning news, generates customized crossword-puzzles, keeps an eye on your favorite authors and an ear on the local grapevine. Imagine a living, breathing kiosk of brain-candy and a library of literature that's easy to read and rolls right up into the palm of your hand.
Way back in 1888, Kodak popularized the hobby of snapshot photography with its famous slogan: "You press the button, we do the rest."
Foreseeing the future is a tricky business. Why, for instance, should Hollywood moguls have paid much attention when the USB standard emerged in the mid-90's?
When you go shopping in a mall, you create an invisible path as you head from one store to another. For the manager of a mall, it would be useful to see the paths made by you and hundreds of other shoppers over time. Now, there's a tool for detecting those paths: the cell phone.
First it was instant messaging during office hours that gave us the thrill of passing notes in class. Then it was ogling ourselves on Web cams, ranting our minds on blogs, uploading our baby photos on Flickr and poking each other on Facebook. These days, as corporate records show, we choose to spend our lunch breaks watching YouTube, if not chatting over Skype.
Business travel sucks. It sucks energy, it sucks time, and mostly it just sucks. We're stuck with it because nothing beats a physical presence.
Do you think you will be using a personal computer for the rest of your life?
Cyberport officially launched in 2004 as Hong Kong's $2 billion IT flagship with the mission to become a leading information technology hub of the Asia-Pacific region.
Comfortable? Probably not if you're reading this online, in which case your back, shoulders, or eyes might be straining a bit -- or will be soon. The good news: designers are getting better at adjusting technology to our bodies and the way we behave.
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