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Because I've spent most of my working life writing about technology, people expect me to be among the first to adopt every new device and application that hits the market. It's because I follow tech trends closely that I'm seldom an early adopter. I know, for instance, that the first generation of a...
Facebook has introduced another new product to keep its 500 million user base engaged -- Friendship Pages, a new element to a Facebook page that displays content and connections shared between two friends. The page may contain photos in which they've both been tagged, wall posts, comments exchanged,...
One almost has to pity Facebook. Less than a month after it rolled out user enhancements that were lauded even by privacy advocates, it is back in the doghouse, facing a class action lawsuit and testy inquiries from two members of Congress. The problem once again is privacy. Many of the most popular...
As we should probably realize by now, not all tasks are created equal -- especially when it comes to making mistakes. For most of the things we do -- from brushing our teeth to typing an email -- making a mistake is usually relatively innocuous. Sure, we might have to clean a bit of the toothpaste ...
Facebook and Bing have teamed up in a move that could bring a touch more sociability to online search. Facebook users will see Web pages their friends like popping up when they launch a Bing search while logged into the social networking site. Further, when Facebook users search for their friends on...
Facebook rolled out a package of new user tools Wednesday that stunned onlookers -- and not just because it had been widely expected that Facebook would make some kind of mobile phone announcement. Rather, it was the fact that Facebook introduced new tools with no crisis or controversy brewing in t...
Defying expectations that it would announce a complete site redesign, a new integration agreement with Skype or even a phone of its very own, Facebook instead unveiled a revamped groups feature on Wednesday, along with new tools to audit how apps are using personal data and to download all of a user...
By all accounts, cloud computing is the future. The market will grow at five times the rate of traditional IT products, IDC has predicted, estimating it will be worth $55.5 billion by 2014. While the future should be rosy, some policy groups are warning that without proper protections, the sector ...
The White House is working with several federal law enforcement agencies to draft legislation that would make it possible to monitor all Internet communication services, including social networking sites, peer-to-peer messaging and encrypted email systems, according to a New York Times report. "Soci...
From Russia, where winters are cold and vodka is the best-known potato product, came news earlier this month that authorities there had cracked down on an environmentalist group, Baikal Environmental Wave, on the pretext of searching for pirated Microsoft software. The Putin government -- which is a...
A lot of folks have been making a big deal the past few days about Google employee David Barksdale. If you haven't caught the coverage, the fuss is centered around this one employee -- a mid-twenties "site reliability engineer" -- who (allegedly) inappropriately used his position of authority and c...
The brave new world of technology will include devices that change our whole relationship to them and, perhaps, to the world around us. That's according to Intel CTO Justin Rattner, who outlined the future of "context-sensitive" computing at his keynote address to IDF this week. The new class of con...
Consumer Watchdog, a privacy advocacy group, is running a 15-second spot on a 540-square foot digital display in Times Square to promote a longer video the group made highlighting what it perceives to be Google's intrusions on privacy. Both the 15-second spot and the longer video feature a ghoulish...
Technology is a wonderful thing. It has given us many good things, including the pacemaker, the radio, TV, prosthetic limbs and eyes that help the lame and the blind, instant communications by way of the Internet and mobile phones. Proponents of technology point to all this as evidence that technolo...
Facebook rolled out its Places feature this week to much fanfare -- so much, in fact, that the official Facebook Blog has an update note posted that users who are unable to access the service should try back soon to see if they can check in. The app, available on the iPhone as part of Facebook for i...