Data Management

A court in Saudi Arabia reportedly has declined to hear the case of Raif Badawi, a liberal blogger who was accused of apostasy. Apostasy,defined as the abandonment of one's faith, is a particularly grievous charge in Islam. Had it been so inclined, the court that turned down the case could have sent...

Kim Dotcom on Sunday opened the doors to the new file-sharing website Mega. The site is making a splash in the file-sharing world with its promise of exceptional privacy and security. That is not the only reason Mega's debut is notable, though: Dotcom is the founder of Megaupload, which was shut dow...

Google seems to have had a dustup with a donkey -- literally. Images plucked from Google Street View have raised questions about whether a Google Street View car ran over a donkey in the African nation of Botswana. Images culled from Street View show a donkey lying in the road. One of the images als...

There are three big changes in Windows 8, the latest version of Microsoft's operating system. All three affect how you organize your computer. First, Microsoft replaces its Start menu search box with a new, always accessible Search charm. Second, the Windows Explorer file browser gains ribbon funct...

American and British intelligence agencies on Tuesday were warned by the NDB, Switzerland's federal intelligence service, that some shared information related to counterterrorism had been stolen. Last summer, an NDB IT technician reportedly downloaded terabytes of data that had been shared between t...

The iTunes store has opened up in Russia and a slew of other countries that were previously left off its coverage map. The 56-country expansion nearly doubles the number of countries in which iTunes is now available. Turkey, India and South Africa were also part of the launch, which Apple says will ...

Amazon Web Services on Wednesday launched RedShift, an on-demand data warehouse service that is optimized for the analysis of huge sets of data. RedShift is "profoundly disruptive," said Merv Adrian, research vice president of information management at Gartner. Its success will move the economic bou...

We've had a couple of weeks to think about the election outcome, and both sides are positioning the results around the issues. This has become so divisive that there is a significant move by Texas to exit the United States and become a country. I've spent some time looking at this, and the real reas...

Alleged digital pirate and German Internet entrepreneur Kim Dotcom on Thursday announced plans for Mega, a service that would replace his shut down file-sharing website Megaupload. The new Mega -- besides dropping a few letters form the name of the service -- will reportedly avoid any dealings with ...

Google on Wednesday threw open the doors of its Lenoir, N.C. data center to the public, posting a virtual tour of the facility on Street View. Meanwhile, a detailed story about the facility by author Stephen Levy, who toured the data center by invitation, has been published. Add to that a new sectio...

Living Without Audio CDs

During a recent apartment move, I became aware of how much stuff I had that was redundant. It was with great pleasure that I was able to dump a lot of it rather than paying guys to move it all across town -- again. Books and CDs were the principal weighty items I got rid of, along with a svelte cher...

Web hosting company and self-proclaimed world's largest domain registrar GoDaddy suffered a major outage on Monday, taking down what's believed to have been millions of websites. A hacker with the handle of AnonymousOwn3r claimed responsibility in a Twitter feed. The hacker is apparently not connect...

VMware has launched what it claims is the first solution to deliver what it calls the "software-defined data center" -- its vCloud Suite 5.1. This integrates the company's virtualization, cloud infrastructure and management portfolio into one bundle. It lets users set up their own virtual data cente...

Cloud security skeptics were given yet another reason to doubt the fortitude of online storage when the strange tale of Mat Honan emerged earlier this month. Through the clever use of social engineering, a hacker was able to wreak havoc on the Wired journalist's digital life. Apparently, the hacker ...

Dropbox has unveiled an experimental build that adds two-factor authentication to subscribers' accounts. Subscribers can try out build 1.5.12, and Dropbox is asking those who are experimenting with it for their comments. The response so far appears to be overwhelmingly positive. Dropbox plans to rol...

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