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The Commerce Department destroyed more than $170,000 worth of working computers, televisions and cameras, all in response to a cyber threat that “did not exist.” ... Commerce Department, feared its IT network was infected with a widespread virus, and ultimately spent more than $2.7 million to fix a problem that was nothing more than “common malware.”

Windows had no updates for a few weeks. Yesterday there were somewhere around 17 that kicked in with automatic update.My Win 7Pro desktop handled it apparently with no problem; my laptop was something else.The laptop is running Win7 premium and has always updated with no problem. This time, I left it running overnight and it would turn itself off. The following morning after it booted, it went through the configuring process, I got a cursor, but there was no taskbar. Pretty much nothing can happen without a taskbar, either logging in, starting the browser trouble shooting or anything else. I...

Doug Engelbart, who has died aged 88, will be remembered as the man who in 1963 invented the computer mouse, but that was incidental to his vision of computers augmenting the human intellect and increasing our "collective IQ". While he became a much-loved and oft-lauded Silicon Valley celebrity, his most visionary ideas were neglected and went unfunded.

This morning, first thing I see is a warning from Windows 7, that says the hard drive is in imminent danger of failing, and to immediately back up all files. What's up with this. Anybody else getting this. Could it be gubmint boys causing this or just normal failure. DELL laptop is about one year old. Otherwise, up till now =NO PROBLEMS. And ,YES it is turned on. PLEASE, no joking around this time.

Mozilla is gearing up for a major user interface overhaul for the open source Firefox web browser. Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year.The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two releases in a year, to a rapid release cycle with new browsers released every six to eight weeks."Australis is our internal code name for a set of UI changes...

Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a partnership with Udacity to offer an online Masters Degree in Computer Science for $7,000, down 80% from the existing cost of $40,000 for the on-campus, instructor led program. Suddenly, masters programs around the country will have to compete with Georgia Tech‘s $7,000 program, and that won’t be easy or fast in coming. The traditionally taught graduate degree in computer science at Georgia Tech is a very well regarded program that is in high demand and has very positive outcomes in terms of jobs and earnings. Georgia Tech graduates tend to do very well...

Located in central Stockholm is the headquarters of Bahnhof, a Swedish Internet Service Provider and host with one of the coolest data centers on the planet. It gained notoriety a few years back as the former home of Wikileaks. Named Pionen White Mountains, it is located 30 meters (100 ft) under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm. The location was a former nuclear bunker and command center during the Cold War. It took more than two years to blast out the 141,000 cubic feet of extra space that Bahnhof needed to fit its backup generators and...

(CNSNews.com) – Although no group has claimed responsibility for Monday’s deadly bomb blasts at the Boston Marathon, a leading al-Qaeda ideologue last year recommended that jihadists in America include sporting events in their list of prospective terror targets.

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

KATHMANDU SNIPPET: The Annapurna Post vernacular daily reported on Sunday that the arrest was made on April 13. Identified as Mohsin Khosravian, the suspect is currently in police custody.

 The security officials at the Embassy speculated that the suspect was scouting the facility with a harmful intention "for he carried a tourist map of the Lazimpat area" where the Israeli mission is located. 

He had stayed in a Thamel-based hotel. After his arrest, the suspect told police that he had ventured out to find out a shop to repair his laptop.

 According to the report, the Nepal Police's Central Bureau...

The research team of Antti Oulasvirta at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics has created a new keyboard called KALQ that enables faster thumb-typing on touchscreen devices. They used computational optimization techniques in conjunction with a model of thumb movement to search among millions of potential layouts before identifying one that yields superior performance. A user study confirmed that, after a short amount of practice, users could type 34% faster than they could with a QWERTY layout. Typing on today's mobile phones and tablets is needlessly slow. One limitation is that the QWERTY layout is ill-suited for tablets and other...

Am having trouble with Internet Explorer. Is anyone else experience problems with this browser. Return key won't work when typing emails and some attachments won't download with a note that there's a problem with IE. Any suggestions?

I've received my Lotus Solstice-15 with upgraded 1080p display. These are built in the USA by a small company in Orlanda called LotusPC. I negotiated a fair deal and received one-on-one help from the owner of the company. He built the machine to our exact specifications, including the absence of an installed OS (for which we were not charged). This PC is of high-quality, on the order of a Panasonic laptop, in the $800-$1000 range. It's extremely solidly built with keypresses not moving the adjacent keys, has a keypad, and even the base i5 CPU screams. Running Ubuntu 12.10.

I have an IPad2 but am looking for an android tablet. Which one is the best?

Hi all, Has anyone seen this thing called "coupon drop down" ? It is a redirect false flag to advertisements or surveys. You click on a "next" link, or the last page link, which are highlighted as active links, but the redirect takes you to someplace other than what is indicated. I am NOT a fan.....Any ideas on how to get rid of it ? Thanks, Onona

El Rushbo's Favorite Apple Tech Blogs March 22, 2013 BEGIN TRANSCRIPT RUSH: Rosie in Lake Havasu, Arizona, it's great to have you here. Hi. CALLER: Hi. I just wanted to start off by saying that I'm 16, I'm in the 11th grade, and I'm also a freshman in college. I just wanted to start off in saying, thank you for helping me. In one of and has us debate certain thingslike immigration, national debt, unemployment -- and, my favorite, Obamacare.It's really refreshing to go home and, like, listen to you and realize,no, I'm not crazy.Because, as classical liberals, they...

Hackers have revealed, and continue to release, the alleged financial records of various US politicians and celebrities including the First Lady Michelle Obama, Hillary Clinton, Kim Kardashian and even Donald Trump.

Linaro to Deliver Initial Linux Builds for ARM Servers in 1H 2013 Linaro, the not-for-profit engineering organization developing open source software for the ARM architecture, today announced the formation of the Linaro Networking Group (LNG) with twelve founding member companies including AppliedMicro, ARM, Enea, Freescale, LSI, MontaVista, Nokia Siemens Networks and Texas Instruments (TI) at the Embedded Linux Conference (ELC).With ARM-based SoCs at the heart of the transformation occurring in cloud and mobile infrastructure applications such as switching, routing, base-stations and security, Linaro’s members are collaborating on fundamental software platforms to enable rapid deployment of new services across a range...

I have a tech question: how does one make a jpeg picture link viewable as a picture on free republic? For example, if I want to show this jpeg photo of President Reagan and Mrs. Thatcher: http://www.donnamoderna.com/var/ezflow_site/storage/images/media/images/moda/accessori/thatcher/ronald-reagan-e-margaret-thatcher/67684353-1-ita-IT/Ronald-Reagan-e-Margaret-Thatcher.jpg How can I show the photo itself and not just the link? Many thanks in advance to whoever can show me how to do this.

Serial number tag does not match the serial number in bios. I just bought a used Lenovo Thinkpad off eBay. Received it yesterday and I noticed the serial number tag on the bottom was a little torn. No concern to me, at least at first. I also ran the s/n from the tag to see if it had any warranty time left on it. The s/n on the tag shows the warranty expired in 2011. Okay, as wthis as expected. So, I was checking the system out to ensure it was okay, the settings were correct, and I noticed the...