Who knew netbooks would prove so resilient? By all means, the growing popularity and falling prices of tablet PCs along with the rollout of Intel's Ultrabook bandwagon could have spelled doom for the netbook form factor. But along comes Cedar Trail and suddenly there's renewed interest in these pint-sized notebooks, at least for one more generation anyway. [......]
When it comes to information privacy concerns, Facebook already has a bullseye on its back. That won't change now that Facebook is going public in its highly anticipated Initial Public Offering (IPO). But disclosure rules affecting publicly traded companies may force Facebook to reveal privacy-related investigations that it otherwise might have kept secret[......]
Facebook is hoping investors will "like" the social network just as much as its users already do. [......]
We’ve known for some time that Microsoft would be bringing official Kinect support to Windows this week, but one thing they kept quiet was the fact that they’d be debuting a new version of the hardware as well. It’s not tiny, as some hoped, or built into the bezel of a laptop, as we know it will be eventually , but it does improve on the original in a few ways[......]
Yesterday, Boxee made good on a promise it made the day after Christmas; it yanked all traces of the Boxee PC, Mac and Ubuntu clients from its website. Back then, the company announced it was abandoning the desktop in favor of the set top Boxee Box and mobile applications. Plenty of long-time PC users cried foul, but it did no good: Boxee for the desktop is officially gone. [......]
Carpathia Hosting, the Virginia company that owns more than 600 servers previously leased by Megaupload, today joined forces with the EFF to collect the stories of legitimate users who want access to their now-inaccessible files stored with the defunct file-locker. The new site, megaretrieval.com , hopes to hear from the "multitude of innocent users who stored legitimate, non-infringing files on the cloud-storage service were left with no means to access their data." EFF can't promise that the data will be retrieved, though, and Carpathia says it has no direct access to the content on the servers[......]
For months we’ve been waiting on Razer’s Blade notebook , a $2800, 17-inch beast that we weren’t sure whether to laud or mock. It’s just that it’s kind of a strange thing to see making a big debut when people are more cautious than usual with their money, and PC gaming (as ever) is being declared dead. [......]
Bad news for surround-sound gaming headset fans; Razer's Tiamat 7.1 headset was already delayed from its original 2011 launch, and now it's been delayed yet again. [......]
Break out the Apple cider if you live in/near Cupertino, California, and toast your hometown PC representatives for dethroning Hewlett-Packard as the worldwide client PC vendor in the fourth quarter of 2011, but only if you're willing to include tablet shipments in the overall tally. If you are, then congrats, Apple's iPad put your home team over the top and was three times more responsible for the achievement than Macs[......]
Recent controversy sparked by the installation of monitoring software on millions of smartphones has led US Rep. Edward Markey (D-MA) to propose a requirement that carriers and phone makers inform consumers about the presence of monitoring software and gain their "express consent" before collecting and transmitting information from phones. The controversy started a couple months back when a developer publicized the widespread use of Carrier IQ software, which phone manufacturers and carriers use to monitor what happens on a smartphone[......]
Love it or hate it, Twitter has become an influential medium capable of turning public opinion in the blink of an eye. It doesn't matter if you use the microblogging service or not, or if you despite all forms of social networking. There are plenty of people who do use Twitter, and their voices travel through the Internet in real-time. [......]
Beyond the remote control: using gestures Who needs buttons and onscreen menus when our hands and feet lay idle? It was the Nintendo Wii that first got us moving, before augmented reality apps and games-stuffed smartphones had us waving them in a ridiculous figure-of-eight, but so far the humble television has remained stoically still. [......]
In the latest twist on website exploits for profit, Web hackers have begun to turn sites they've exploited into sources of fraudulent Web traffic for anyone willing to pay. [......]
After the Internet's decisive victory over the Stop Online Piracy Act earlier this month, online activists have been looking for their next target, and a growing number of them have chosen the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), which was signed by the EU last week. [......]
One of the biggest complaints against Amazon's Kindle Fire device is you can't download apps directly from Google's Android Market unless you root it. You can also sideload apps onto the Fire, but by and large, the average user isn't savvy enough to venture away from Android's own App Store. Even so, Kindle Fire users are proving they're just as capable of consuming Android apps as anyone else, perhaps more so. [......]
