Items tagged with Data
At some point, you have to wonder if any database that can be hacked will be hacked. With so much of the world's precious information stored on drives in the forms of 1s and 0s, what's to stop ill-willed individuals from doing to every other company what they did last year to Target, for example? Clearly, not much, as...
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The Great American Road Trip isn't the same as it used to be, but perhaps that's not entirely a bad thing. With mobile connectivity becoming an asset that few professionals can live without, let alone the average teenager, General Motors has seen strong early interest from consumers in having LTE embedded into their next vehicle. While a number...
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Earlier this week, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler penned an open letter to Verizon telling the wireless carrier that he's "deeply troubled" by its decision to throttle data for the top 5 percent of users subscribed to the company's unlimited data plans. The way Wheeler sees it, Verizon isn't trying to relieve network...
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Verizon Wireless has a message for data hogs subscribed to its unlimited 4G LTE service, and to paraphrase, it goes something like this: 'Slow your roll, or we'll slow it for you.' To be more specific, starting in October of this year, Verizon will begin throttling the data connections of users who fall within the top...
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In a lot of ways, the public is resigned to the fact that almost nothing is truly "private." We're given identification numbers from birth, nearly everything about us is volunteered online, and even our mobile devices have GPS modules in them. In a lot of ways, those things are worth the hassle, and worth giving up...
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The numbers from Pinterest’s data request transparency report are either impressive or laughable, depending on your point of view. Although the tech industry is rising up in force in reaction against the NSA’s spying tactics and forceful and shadowy means of “requesting” data from major...
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DARPA, a wing of the U.S. Department of Defense, has developed quite a few technological innovations for the military that wind up trickling down to us civilians, and now the agency is open sourcing some of its projects with an eye toward fostering even better R&D. The DARPA Open Catalog is a “curated list...
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As we mentioned yesterday, mobile service providers are in a dogfight for our business and all of a sudden are offering sweet deals left and right. We feel like the prettiest belle at the ball, and more suitors are lining up. Ting is an MVNO using Sprint’s network and offers simple service options and a range of...
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Suddenly, mobile carriers are falling all over each other to woo customers, promising better and better deals and offering increasingly lucrative incentives to switch carriers. The latest shot in the volley is from AT&T, which is now promising a 10GB family data plan with unlimited talk and text with its AT&T...
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Google has shamed the likes of Dropbox by offering many gigabytes of storage to every user for $0.00, but as cloud storage becomes cheaper, more accessible, and more demanded, new entrants are pushing the envelope. Tencent, a huge company in China, is looking to make a major splash in North America. How? By giving out...
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The years haven't been kind to brick-and-mortar generalist stores. Kmart, Sears, Roses -- just a few of the names that were booming a decade ago, and now, can't seem to lure a customer in regardless of tactic. Rather than just throwing in the towel and cursing Amazon, Sears is thinking outside of the box a bit. A new...
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Earlier this month, T-Mobile drastically shook up the wireless market yet again. In the latest of its almost-too-good-to-be-true moves in a bid to become known as the Uncarrier, the company announced that it would be giving tablet users 200MB of free data per month for life. During the initial start-up process...
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A lot of companies in the technology realm make a lot of promises, but few live up to their claims. T-Mobile is not one of those companies. After changing its stance and coming out as the "Uncarrier," T-Mobile has made one groundbreaking move after another. First, by enabling phone swaps every six months in its JUMP program; next, by making...
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AT&T rolled out Mobile Share plans last year, which allowed multiple users on one account to pay for and use a single “bucket” of data. It’s a nice option for many consumers, as typically one family member may use more data than another, and it’s not a great deal if they’re each paying for the same amount...
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Hopefully you've never had to experience "bill shock" before, but if you're curious what it feels like, a trip overseas followed by liberal use of your smartphone's texting, data, and voice will do the trick. International roaming rates are obscenely high, and if you're not careful, you can come home to a bill that's...
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Payback? Perhaps. With the National Security Agency in the wrong kind of spotlight of late, this is probably sweet for many to read. What's being described as "chronic electrical surges" at an NSA data-storage facility have "hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of machinery and delayed the center's opening for a...
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On Friday, we learned that the mobile industry has developed a short-form notice for mobile apps that tells users if the app is collecting their data and in what areas (i.e., phone call and text logs, location data, and so on) that would appear before app download begins. The program is currently voluntary and being...
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Well, it's pretty easy to tell which U.S. carriers are doing well, and which aren't. Verizon and AT&T recently extended the length of time required for its customers to get a subsidy on a new phone, while T-Mobile and Sprint are both making some pretty consumer-friendly moves. Clearly, those first two are raking in the cash. Sprint, however,...
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If you ignored Facebook’s Graph Search when it was first announced at the beginning of the year, it’s time to give the controversial new search engine another look, because it’s rolling out to all U.S. accounts over the next few weeks. Whether you like the search engine will depend on how much you...
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Perhaps some users were unaware of this capability, but you can actually download your Facebook data, including all of your wall posts, photos, videos, and so on. According to blogger Damian Yerrick of Angry Math, Facebook has now removed the ability to download your own posts. There are three areas where Facebook...
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AT&T this week introduced new shared data tiers (again) that it claims will help businesses "raise the productivity bar" by offering expanded choices, but not without raising the phone bill, too. By a lot. The new plans aren't just for business customers, either; home consumers are welcome to pony up for a 30GB...
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Facebook is a huge, now-public company. With around a billion users, it has become far more than a social network. It's a bona fide destination on the Internet, for a variety of people, brands, companies, and marketers. It has evolved into something deeper than a place to share your most prominent feelings. It has...
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