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Microsoft president Brad Smith appeared before the UN in Geneva to talk about the growing problem of nation-state cyber attacks on Thursday.Smith, also Redmond's chief legal officer, last month publicly accused North Korea of the WannaCry ransomware attack.During the UN session on internet governance challenges, Smith made the case for a cyber equivalent of the Geneva Convention. He started off by noting the sorry state of IoT security before arguing that tech firms and government each have a role to play in reining in the problem."If you can hack your way into a thermostats you can hack your way into...

For the last eight years, baseball fan-turned-writer Becca Schultz has presented herself online as Ryan Schultz, a false identity she assumed when she was 13 years old, duping and harassing women on Twitter along the way. On Wednesday night, a woman named Erin tweeted a series of screenshots announcing that Schultz is not actually Ryan, a married father of two studying to become a pharmacist. Instead, Schultz is a 21-year-old college student in the Midwest, whose entire career as an aspiring baseball writer has been under a fraudulent byline. Schultz began contributing to Baseball Prospectus’s local White Sox blog at...

Sean Parker unloads on Facebook "exploiting" human psychology Sean Parker, the founding president of Facebook, gave me a candid insider's look at how social networks purposely hook and potentially hurt our brains. Be smart: Parker's I-was-there account provides priceless perspective in the rising debate about the power and effects of the social networks, which now have scale and reach unknown in human history. He's worried enough that he's sounding the alarm. Parker, 38, now founder and chair of the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, spoke yesterday at an Axios event at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, about accelerating cancer...

Humans rather than algorithms will view the naked images voluntarily sent to Facebook in a scheme being trialled in Australia to combat revenge porn. The BBC understands that members of Facebook's community operations team will look at the images in order to make a "fingerprint" of them to prevent them being uploaded again. Facebook will notify the person once the photo has been "hashed'. It will then be up to the sender to delete the image. The trial, which could be extended to other countries, is seen as a way of of allowing users greater control over their intimate photos...

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The two then allegedly went to the clearance section, where they took out the devices from their boxes and placed clearance price tags on them. The pair then proceeded to a self-checkout counter, where they allegedly scanned the clearance barcodes and paid a total of $3.70. The electronics cost a total $1,825.20. According to the arrest affidavit, the 25-year-old said, "I am just trying to get gifts for my son that I cannot afford. The computer is for my husband. Since he just got me a Coach purse, I figured he deserved something nice as well.”

DisplayMate: Apple’s iPhone X has the most color accurate display we’ve ever measured; it is visually indistinguishable from perfect IPhone X “Switching from LCDs to OLEDs is a major engineering and manufacturing challenge, so I was eager to test and evaluate the new OLED iPhone X,” Dr. Raymond M. Soneira reports for DisplayMate. “The result: Apple has produced an impressive Smartphone display with excellent performance and accuracy, which we cover in extensive detail below. What makes the iPhone X the best smartphone display is the impressive precision display calibration Apple developed, which transforms the OLED hardware into a superbly accurate,...

Unlike most cryptocurrency hacks, however, the money wasn’t deliberately taken: it was effectively destroyed by accident. According to the Daily Mail, the lost money was in the form of Ether, the tradable currency that fuels the Ethereum distributed app platform, and was kept in digital multi-signature wallets built by a developer called Parity. These wallets require more than one user to enter their key before funds can be transferred. On Tuesday, Parity revealed that, while fixing a bug that let hackers steal $32m out of few multi-signature wallets, it had inadvertently left the second flaw in its systems that allowed...

Attention parents and guardians: make sure your Paypal password isn't obvious or simple. One tech-savvy nine-year-old girl from Immingham, Lincolnshire, gave her father a bone-chilling shock after blowing roughly $1,300 on a dream trip to Disneyland Paris. Ian Wilson, the child's father, was fast asleep when his daughter, Susan, got ahold of his phone and began a little midnight shopping spree (well, maybe not so little) after figuring out his Paypal password. Dishing out the benjamins, Susan spent over $500 on flights and a hotel gift card, another $300 on a VIP trip to the Eiffel Tower and just shy...

Microsoft is suing the US government to prevent the deportation of immigrants – including at least 45 of its own staffers – who are in America under the now-dying DACA program.The Redmond giant has signed on to a lawsuit filed by Princeton University on behalf of one of its students seeking an injunction against the Department of Homeland Security and its decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allows for children who entered the US illegally to obtain protection from being snatched and kicked out of the country by deportation officials.Microsoft and Princeton, along with...

Trump’s initial grade was a B when we launched the report card in May. Strong job growth — including the manufacturing sector — and the seemingly unstoppable stock market pushed his grade to B+ over the summer, then to A- in September. The grade fell by one notch after a weak employment report for September, which was largely due to hurricanes that slammed Texas and Florida. But hiring came back strong in October, pushing the grade back to A-.

These people do not exist... CG people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XOxxP... Diminished reality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgTq-...

Makes the company more money per phone than its iPhone 8 model The iPhone 8 sells for $699 and has a gross margin of 59 percent Apple new flagship iPhone X makes the company more money per phone than its iPhone 8 model, according to an analysis, which found the iPhone X's flashier parts cost Apple 25 percent more than the iPhone 8, but that it retailed 43 percent higher. The iPhone X smartphone costs $357.50 to make and sells for $999, giving it a gross margin of 64 percent, according to TechInsights, a firm that tears down technology devices...

You've likely heard of conscious thought and subconscious thought, but humans may in fact possess three levels of consciousness, a new review suggests — and this concept could help scientists develop truly conscious artificial intelligence (AI) someday. Though AI technology has been advancing at a rapid clip, in many ways, computers still fall short of human performance. "Human consciousness is not just about recognizing patterns and crunching numbers quickly," said review co-author Hakwan Lau, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles. "Figuring out how to bridge the gap between human and artificial intelligence would be the holy grail."...

A year ago, 35-year-old developer Lindu Pranayama came across a great business opportunity: he realized that among the many mobile applications, there were no options for polygamists (those who have more than one wife or husband at the same), and there is a market for it. Nowadays polygamy is practiced in 50 countries, including Indonesia, the country with the most Muslims in the world, where 80 percent of the 250 million population adheres to Islam. Lindu’s aspiration was to unite all those men and women looking to create “great families.” So last April he launched Ayo Poligami (loosely translated as...

Readers routinely ask me whether it’s still possible to clean install Windows 10 with an unused Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 product key. Over two years after Microsoft first enabled this functionality, the answer is a resounding yes.And I can think of a number of reasons why one might need to do so.As noted, Microsoft first introduced this capability over two years ago, and in doing so it erased what had been one of the early install/activation issues with the then-new Windows 10.Almost a year later, I reported that this capability—which was supposed to be temporary, by the way–still worked....

The days are getting shorter and the nights are getting longer and you know what that means. The electrical bills are going up. No...it's time to fool around with resetting your clocks. Unless, of course, you are rich and have some of those clocks that are tuned to the time channel which is right between the oldies channel and public radio. Heave help you if you're trying to set your clock by public radio. You'll be back in the 70s or something. The worst clock to reset is the one in the pickup. You have to turn on the lights...

Myth: Apple computers can’t get viruses Truth: Apple computers are susceptible to malware just like Windows PCs. Apple once bragged they were not as susceptible until a Trojan infected thousands of computers in 2012. To learn more about how to protect against malware see Cyber Security: The Onion Approach Myth: It’s harmful to plug your phone in before the battery is drained. Truth: Much like the myth of leaving your phone plugged in to charge for extended periods of time, this is also false. In fact, it could even be beneficial to plug your phone into the charger prior to...

The Amish stance toward any invention isn’t that they reject it outright. It’s that they start by assuming they don’t need it, then adopt it only if it’s in line with their valuesThe basic stereotype about the Amish – drivers of horse-drawn buggies, wearers of huge beards – is that they’re stuck in the 18th century: if a technology wasn’t invented by then, you won’t find them using it today. (What goes clip clop, clip clop, bang bang, clip clop? An Amish drive-by shooting.) So it’s alarming to learn, as the New York Times reported recently, that smartphones, PCs and...

More than a year after ending its free Windows 10 upgrade program, Microsoft is getting ready to shut down the last official free upgrade extension. The news wasn't exactly shouted from the rooftops. If you've been waiting to claim your free Windows 10 upgrade using the "assistive technologies" exception, you need to act soon. In a quiet change to an obscure web page, Microsoft announced this week that those exceptions will end on December 31, 2017. On July 29, 2016, Microsoft officially ended the Get Windows 10 program, which offered free Windows 10 upgrades to anyone currently running a supported...