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Microsoft is currently experimenting with a free version of Windows 8.1 that could boost the number of people using the operating system. Sources familiar with Microsoft’s plans tell The Verge that the company is building "Windows 8.1 with Bing," a version that will bundle key Microsoft apps and services. While early versions of the software have leaked online, we understand that Windows 8.1 with Bing is an experimental project that aims to bring a low-cost version of Windows to consumers... We’re told that Microsoft is aiming to position Windows 8.1 with Bing as a free or low-cost upgrade for Windows...

TECHNOLOGY 7887 kHz, Your Home for Classic Cuban Espionage Radio The shortwave radio signals that the alleged Russian spies were using are still surprisingly effective. By Brett Sokol Posted Tuesday, July 6, 2010, at 1:53 PM ET The FBI documents that accompanied last week's arrest of 10 alleged Russian spies are alternately creepy—who knew the Tribeca Barnes & Noble was a hotbed of espionage?—and comical—turns out even foreign spies wanted to cash in on suburban New Jersey's real estate boom. With a nod to Boris and Natasha, the accused are also said to have used short-wave radio, a 1920s-era technology...

“[The company D-Wave] makes a new type of computer called a quantum computer that’s so radical and strange, people are still trying to figure out what it’s for and how to use it…. The supercooled niobium chip at the heart of the D-Wave Two has 512 qubits and therefore could in theory perform 2^512 operations simultaneously. That’s more calculations than there are atoms in the universe, by many orders of magnitude…. Naturally, a lot of people want one. This is the age of Big Data, and we’re burying ourselves in ­­information—search queries, genomes, credit-card purchases, phone records, retail transactions, social...

There are a number of annual training requirements we have to meet in the Marine Corps. It being the 21st Century, some of those have to do with cyber awareness and protecting information of various kinds. Since common sense is not a common virtue we are all subjected to online training in protecting personally identifiable information and classified material. Not completing the training will result in the Marine Corps turning off our access to e-mail and internet at work. This sounds more like a reward than a consequence but remember what I said about sense being common. The cyber counter...

HISTORY OF MACINTOSHThe now famous Macintosh computer has just turned 30. When Apple President Steve Jobs launched this computer at the Flint Center on De Anza College campus on January 24, 1984 to the theme from Chariots of Fire he called it “insanely great!” The $1.5M “1984″ Superbowl commercial filmed by Sir Ridley Scott had appeared on TV two days before Macintosh went on sale and the world was holding its breath.When IBM released the so-called IBM PC in 1981, I remember saying at the time that it “legitimized the desktop microcomputer market,” at least for business. Though it...

I just purchased a Nexus 7. Any freepers own one? Do you have any suggestions?

As home networks have increased in popularity, so has the wireless router. The rise of Wi-Fi has also caused the downfall of wired networks (in homes, at least), and many consumers now see Ethernet cords as being rather old-fashioned – that is, if they see them at all. Some newer computer models, like Apple’s MacBook Air, don’t even have ports for Ethernet connections anymore. The blistering connection speeds offered by today’s Wi-Fi standards do make wired networks appear a bit of a relic, but appearances can sometimes be deceiving. Though Wi-Fi has improved significantly over the last five years, it...

As if you needed another reason not to wear your dumb Google Glass in public—or ever, actually—an Ohio man claims he was yanked out of a movie theater and interrogated by federal agents, who believed he was illegally filming the movie with his face computer. The man’s full account is posted on The Gadgeteer, but we’ll summarize it here so you can get the gist of it before you’re engulfed forever in this ghastly winter storm. Last Saturday, our Glass-wearing protagonist and his wife went to a showing of Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit at an AMC in Columbus, Ohio. About...

State officials have agreed to pull the plug after spending $85 million on a tax computer system project that was supposed to handle the processing of tax forms and other tax information for years ahead. A contract between the state and the CGI Group was canceled Friday. The state and CGI “mutually agreed” to a final $5 million payment for unbilled work not yet paid and that will close out the contract, according to Trevor Johnson, a Revenue Department spokesman. CGI had previously received $63.8 million for its work on the tax software project, which had been handling some aspects...

In the near future, you won't even need to know how to fire a rifle to be a crack shot. At the Consumer Electronic Show, the Austin, Texas-based start-up TrackingPoint showed off its all-new 500 Series AR Smart Rifle, a gun that makes it almost impossible for any user to miss. (Read more: Now there's a gun that let's you shoot.) TrackingPoint is the inventor of Precision Guided Firearms, a guided shooting system that the company says creates the most accurate guns in the world. The new rifle is the company's first semi-automatic series. This technology turns even a neophyte...

Confession. Credit: catholicrelics.co.uk.. Phoenix, Ariz., Dec 20, 2013 / 02:32 am (CNA/EWTN News).- A Phoenix, Ariz., priest has invented a computer system intended to help Catholics who are deaf, hearing-impaired or speech-impaired to make their confessions. Father Romuald P. Zantua, the system’s inventor, told CBCP News that his invention will help increase the practice of confessions, especially for deaf people who have limited access to priests who know sign language. The website for the system, called St. Damien’s Confession Box, says it is primarily aimed at the deaf and those with speech impediments who may not be able to communicate...

While employees may get the brunt of the blame for security breaches, company leaders are doing their fair share of damage as well, a new study finds. Research from ThreatTrack Security revealed that 40 percent of security professionals found that a device used by a member of their company's senior leadership team had been infected by malware because of a visit to a pornographic website, and nearly 60 percent of the security professionals surveyed have cleaned malware from a device after an executive clicked on a malicious link or was duped by a phishing email. In addition, 45 percent of...

Excerpt: Yes, you can get a ticket for driving while wearing the new eyewear-like Google Glass wearable computer, which is now being tested nationwide for possible entry into the consumer market. Cecilia Abadie, 44, who lives in Temecula and works at a golf store in San Diego, got just such a ticket Tuesday night after being stopped for speeding by a California Highway Patrol officer. Quickly, Abadie posted a note on the Internet: "A cop just stopped me and gave me a ticket for wearing Google Glass while driving! ... Is Google Glass illegal while driving or is this cop...

For some reason FR & Google are okay, but any other website, including small private sites, connect and then quickly disappear and I get a message that the tab has been recovered and immediately get the following message: We were unable to return you to yahoo.com.(or whatever) Internet Explorer has stopped trying to restore this website. It appears that the website continues to have a problem. I ran into some of this yesterday, but it's definitely worse today.

A Long Island man was arrested Friday after investigators say he attempted to travel to Yemen to join al Qaeda and conspired with the terror group from the United States, according to an indictment from the U.S. Department of Justice. Marcos Alonso Zea, 25, also known as “Ali Zea,” was arrested at his home in Brentwood, New York, on charges of conspiracy to commit murder in a foreign country, attempting to provide material support to terrorists and obstruction and attempted obstruction of justice, the indictment says. …

I just noticed this about 2 weeks ago. It took all night to update, then worked fine. Today's install seems to be updating even slower. Thinking it may be an issue with my ISP, I got a friend (many miles away) to do an install with his XP, and he's experiencing the same issue.My install cd came with SP2. I slipstreamed SP3 onto it many years ago, and it has worked flawlessly ever since. I can manually install a downloaded media player 11 which makes me validate and that passes, so that's not the problem.

I am an unrepentent Luddite, operating Mac0S9 in a Windows world. On Friday night I suffered the mother of all computer crashes....sent an email and just as it transmitted the background browser/email program crashed and the word processing program froze. Usually a forced reset cures all, but not this time. Nor did a "hard reset" by spiking the power. Each time reboot attempt resulted in a flashing icon indicating an unreadable hard drive. Hours and many dollar later the failing hard drive which had caused the freezes and crashes was replaced, and, most importantly, almost all the data was recovered...

It's elementary. Public education bureaucrats do the darnedest, stupidest things. Clever kids are ready, willing and able to capitalize on that costly stupidity in a heartbeat. Within days of rolling out a $30 million Common Core iPad program in Los Angeles, for example, students had already hacked the supposedly secure devices. The Los Angeles Times reports that the disastrous initiative has been suspended after students from at least three different high schools breached the devices' security protections. It was a piece of iCake. The young saboteurs gleefully advertised their method to their friends, fellow Twitter and Facebook users, and the...

Help! Somehow the task bar jumped to the top of the computer screen. Yes, I'm logged in. Yes, I know how to move the task bar around - right click, unlock task bar and move it. Problem is when I move it back to the bottom, it leaves an empty space where it was at the top and is ghosty when it's back at the bottom (the background shows through it). So, I clicked it back to the top and back down again and now the second problem... the internet screen is getting smaller and smaller. Each time I move...

Have used Windows Movie Maker but want to try something else. It's simply an audio track that I recorded (50Mb wav) and I have one still image. Would like to be able to enter some info about the song and location. Thanks