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Kory Kessel

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Swedish hacker Emil Kvarnhammar is reporting that an unpublished OS X API — he dubs it a "backdoor" — can be used by nefarious types to gain root access through local users without Administrator status on Mac computers that have not yet been migrated to the 10.10.3 iteration of OS X, which was released just two days... Read more...
Facing accusations from the Belgian Privacy Commission dating back to February that it is violating the privacy rights of its users, Facebook yesterday confirmed that the watchdog group had uncovered a "bug" that mistakenly tracked people even when they were not on the social media giant's website, but denied the... Read more...
Despite reviews that ranged from "mostly magical" to "steep learning curve" to "fancy, but not necessary" and a swath of middling "Will Buy" polling percentages, the Apple Watch is ringing the registers online and appears to be an out-of-the-box hit, as less than an hour after the opening of pre-orders at 12:01AM PST... Read more...
Back on March 28th hothardware.com alluded to the imminent release of a second Windows 10 for Phone technical preview, and yesterday Microsoft's Gabe Aul confirmed on Twit.tv's Windows Weekly podcast that the new build will be available as of this Friday, April 10th, at 10AM PST (1PM EST). Specific details of the... Read more...
And now we cannot even trust critics and reviewers! Jay Gentile, a man based in California who is said to be the operator of a number of sites that sell 4-star and 5-star reviews to Amazon sellers (among them buyazonreviews.com and buyreviewsnow.com) is the target of a lawsuit filed by Amazon in an effort by the... Read more...
Overly Paranoid Rob Lowe, Crazy Hairy Rob Lowe, Super Creepy Rob Lowe... thanks in no small part to complaints made by Comcast to the National Advertising Division (NAD), these most unwelcome guests who came into many of our homes via television throughout the 2014-15 NFL season are mostly likely being shown the door... Read more...
In line with a HotHardware report published last October, officials yesterday confirmed to CNN that the White House was hacked last year and that the alleged culprit is the Russian government. The hackers — believed to be the same group that managed to gain entry to State Department computer system last October —... Read more...
While not on par with the free iPhone the company doled out to every employee when that device first hit the market in 2007, the news that Apple will offer a 50% discount to all of their personnel who envision themselves adorned with either the Apple Watch Sport ($349) or the Apple Watch ($550-$1,099) no doubt brought... Read more...
Leaving the realm of science fiction behind, the super-fast charging mobile phone is inching its way ever more closer to science-fact. As reported in Stanford Magazine in advance of publication this week in the journal Nature, researchers at Stanford University have developed a high-performance aluminum-ion battery... Read more...
Following a shutdown of over two years for upgrades, the Large Hadron Collider — no doubt one of the largest pieces of hot hardware in the world — was brought back online yesterday at CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. The LHC, which made good on its promise of delivering the Higgs boson in 2012, is now at last poised to... Read more...
Samsung yesterday announced three additions to their nascent curved display line, diverting attention from the looming official release next Friday of their two new Galaxy S6 smartphones. The new models, all featuring 1080p panels and priced significantly lower than the $1,199 SE790C Curved Monitor Samsung debuted in... Read more...
Many wonderful things can be and have been said about the Raspberry Pi — it's adroitness as a programming learning tool, its remarkably low cost-of-entry, the strong and varied community that has developed around it, the user creativity it inspires, its oh-so-oh-so-cool factor — but one thing never said is that it... Read more...
Anyone who has carried a smartphone of any stripe has come up against the question at some point: Do I shell out for the pay-for version of [insert whatever app name applies to you here, friend reader], or should I keep my money by installing the advertising-sponsored version instead and suffer a few (or more than a few) tap-through ads? Typically, Read more...
As wearable tech concepts go, the idea of a "smart helmet' — a motorcycle helmet equipped to deliver usable information to its wearer via heads-up visuals projected onto the visor, such as GPS data — really is quite smart, allowing riders to keep their eyes on the road. And even smarter? Configuring said helmet to respond to voice commands, Read more...
Many of us are no doubt frustrated with our televisions, convinced that they simply aren't contributing enough to earn their keep, acting only as passive entertainment and information delivery conduits and occasionally as defacto babysitters for our kids (or defacto — and never argumentative — friends for ourselves)... Read more...
Light a candle for the 300-word news bite. The New York Times has announced its initiative to produce an app for the soon-to-be-everywhere (or not) Apple Watch that will offer all the news you need when you need it, in the form of one-sentence stories that are curated by an editorial team dedicated to the... Read more...
With a full-throated "Me too!" targeted straight at Microsoft's recently-released Outlook app, Google yesterday upgraded their Gmail email app for Android to better support non-Google email accounts, including @yahoo and @outlook. Since last year users have been able to configure their other IMAP/Pop accounts to... Read more...
While so many of us were getting our college basketball on this weekend, Rutgers University was dealing with an entirely different kind of challenge in the form of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack. Triggered by the efforts of a malicious entity consisting of two or more people or bots, the intent of a... Read more...
The countdown to the Apple Watch is growing ever louder with the lead up to April 10, the date on which online pre-sales for the device begin. With that heightening of the drone...er, buzz comes greater clarity on precisely how Apple is planning to sell their latest must-have device. This window into the process is in... Read more...
Mars rover Opportunity is in the news again, this time for suffering a spell of "brief amnesia" related to its 256MB flash memory just five (5) days after a full reformatting of its memory banks. No scientific data was lost as a result of the blip in the device's nonvolatile memory, though, and the rover continued its... Read more...
In these days filled with visions of cars that will soon drive themselves and cars that will be able to fly (no word yet on cars that can fly themselves, though that also seems inevitable), the news of a technology that will help drivers ensure that they do not exceed speed limits may seem somewhat anticlimactic. That... Read more...
In step with Apple's move towards fingerprint recognition technology with the introduction of the iPhone 5S, Samsung introduced similar (yet by all accounts not as good) functionality when their Galaxy S5 bowed last spring. Now, though, just a year later, Samsung looks to be pointing the finger elsewhere, coming... Read more...
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