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These days, we read about the latest reports from Edward Snowden but they’re old hat now. We all know the American government is spying on everyone. But as more leaks come out, it’s increasingly evident that the NSA’s nefarious behavior will leave a deep scar on Silicon Valley. Snowden whistleblowing and escaping from the NSA could be one of the most important boons for Asian tech companies and startups in the next decade. If, as Spiegel recently reported, the NSA has a backdoor into major US companies like Dell, Cisco, IBM, Western Digital, Seagate, and more, then Silicon Valley is...

Sorry, IT job-hunters: If you're hoping for surprising predictions about what 2014 has in store, you're probably going to come away dissatisfied. That's because it's unlikely there will be any seismic shifts that completely upend the technology skills, roles, and titles that employers want."There's nothing that I would say is the new 'hottest thing ever' " coming in 2014, said Jack Cullen, president of IT staffing firm Modis, in an interview.Indeed, much of what follows should sound familiar. This could be a good thing. Earth-shattering predictions have a knack for missing the mark. (Apocalypse 2012, anyone?) So the job-market calls...

As more and more human rights of U.S. citizens are violated in the name of safety and security, the group Anonymous stands to fight at the side of Americans. Over the holiday weekend, they have even gone as far to announce a call to arms. The fact that many people are still unaware of the “hacker” group Anonymous is sign of censorship by today’s mainstream media. There is a clear need for groups such as Anonymous as the fact of this direct censorships shows just how clouded the media’s freedom of speech has become. anon5 (See also: Obama Secretly Signs...

<p>State police have charged a western Pennsylvania woman with putting child pornography on a computer in an unsuccessful effort to frame her estranged husband.</p> <p>Online court records don't list an attorney for 42-year-old Meri Jane Woods, of Cherry Hill Township, who also doesn't have a listed phone.</p>

Adobe has released this legacy version of the ever popular Photoshop as freeware. Download and enjoy. Windows Serial number: 1045-1412-5685-1654-6343-1431 Mac OS X Serial number: 1045-0410-5403-3188-5429-0639The Power to Create the Extraordinary Adobe Bridge— The next-generation File Browser for Photoshop CS2.Vanishing Point— Groundbreaking ability to clone, paint and transform in the perspective of your images.Image Warp— Warp any object, with customizable presets and adjustable control points.Noise Reduction— Advanced correction of noise created in high-ISO shooting, plus JPEG artifact reduction.32-bit HDR— Create and edit 32-bit, High Dynamic Range images, for the widest range and richest detail.Spot Healing Brush— Fast, efficient one-click retouching...

On a recent weekday in a sunny, computer-strewn classroom at the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts in Hot Springs, one of teacher Nicholas Seward's printers was busily whirring out a squirrel. Not a picture of a squirrel. Not a drawing of a squirrel. An actual, three-dimensional toy squirrel: bright orange, plastic, tough enough that when the reporter managed to drop a similar piece on the hard concrete, it simply bounced with a bright, ping-pong ball clink. The machine — called "Simpson" after the scientist George Gaylord Simpson, who came up with the idea that when animals evolve,...

2014 is right around the corner. Most of us can look into our crystal balls and see that a handful of tech trends which became big in 2013 will probably get bigger next year: cloud computing, big data, the rise of tablets, the Internet of Things. But market research firm IDC has gone one better by predicting how these trends will unfold next year — and generate billions of dollars. People and companies will spend $2.1 trillion on technology. Worldwide IT spending will grow 5% next year to $2.1 trillion, IDC says. People and companies will buy smartphones and tablets,...

Productivity. Every employer loves it, and every employee is fascinated by it, especially if it comes in cute colors, a retina screen, and weighs under a pound... at least until such time as "productivity" results in the loss of the employee's job, which in turn makes the employer love it even more as it results in even higher profits, even if it means one more pink slip and a 91 million people outside the labor force. With a labor force already in turmoil as millions drop out every year never to be heard from again, made obscolete by the...

We worry about robots. Hardly a day goes by where we're not reminded about how robots are taking our jobs and hollowing out the middle class. The worry is so acute that economists are busy devising new social contracts to cope with a potentially enormous class of obsolete humans. Documentarian James Barrat, author of Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, is worried about robots too. Only he's not worried about them taking our jobs. He's worried about them exterminating the human race. I'll repeat that: In 267 brisk pages, Barrat lays out just how...

The progress in 3-D printing has been nothing short of astounding over the last decade. The soaring stock prices of publicly traded 3-D printing companies 3D Systems (NYSE: DDD ) and Stratasys clearly illustrate the industry has made advances. Today, even consumers can get their hands on a plastic 3-D printer at a reasonable price -- an unheard-of possibility just five years ago. This phenomenal industry progress has led some to believe Moore's law applies to 3-D printing. Are they right? One inventor in Colorado disagrees. Moore's law? Not really At the Inside 3D Printing conference in Chicago this year,...

Calgary - Maker6 is a very different ballgame for 3D printing. This is an integrated service, including assistance with design and consumer-friendly services. It’s also a very interesting business approach, making 3D printing easily accessible. I was fortunate enough to get an interview with MacKenzie Brown, CEO of maker6 and its related CAD design company, CAD Crowd. I was extremely interested in what looked to me to be a very effective way of managing 3D printing across a very wide range of commercial and consumer needs. I don’t need to do a lot of talking here. I was lucky enough...

The American intelligence service - NSA - infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. Documents provided by former NSA-employee Edward Snowden and seen by this newspaper, prove this. A management presentation dating from 2012 explains how the NSA collects information worldwide. In addition, the presentation shows that the intelligence service uses ‘Computer Network Exploitation’ (CNE) in more than 50,000 locations. CNE is the secret infiltration of computer systems achieved by installing malware, malicious software. One example of this type of hacking was discovered in September 2013 at the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom....

An important—and costly—plank of Obamacare is the forced changeover to EHR. However, as health care informatics guru Scot Silverstein MD tells us, there seem to be endless issues with EHR products. Case in point: University of Arizona Health System. As Silverstein reports, upwards of $100 million was spent on EHR, which could have financed an entire new wing to the facility. As the University’s own internal website devoted to EHR proclaims, “We’ve resolved 6,036 issues and have 3,517 open issues.” Scot continues… “These issues are in a supposedly mature product for which this organization has spent...

If you're team Microsoft — or just anti-Google in general — you now have your pickings of "Scroogled" gear, a term coined by the Redmond, Calif.-based software company. The products, which range from hats to T-shirts to mugs, poke fun of Google collecting personal data about its users. The items come just in time for the holiday shopping season.

This article in in PDF form so be aware of that. Here's a snippet that's indicative of the overall style and the points that Mickens makes: When you debug a distributed system or an OS kernel, you do it Texas-style. You gather some mean, stoic people, people who have seen things die, and you get some primitive tools, like a compass and a rucksack and a stick that’s pointed on one end, and you walk into the wilderness and you look for trouble, possibly while using chewing tobacco. As a systems hacker, you must be prepared to do savage things,...

I just upgraded my home PC, reluctantly so because my XP worked so well. But as all support for XP will be stopping in 4/2014, I knew I had no choice. But I have no idea why the people at Microsoft changed the OS from something people got used to over a period of 20 years. I find myself using the desktop almost exclusively and never using what I consider to be silly apps. Am I seeing this incorrectly and these apps are truly useful? After a day of using this, I think I may never use them. Would be...

Spam filters, overflowing browser histories and web caches on the computers of Americans trying to sign up for Obamacare are now being cited for why consumers can’t complete their applications for federally-sanctioned health insurance.

President Obama wanted to go in himself and fix glitches that have plagued HealthCare.gov since its rollout last month, he told a crowd Friday at the Port of New Orleans, "but," he added, "I don't write code." The president couldn't ignore altogether lingering dissatisfaction with the botched health insurance exchanges, despite that the crux of the speech was intended to move back on the offensive with other aspects of his second-term agenda - specifically, job growth through investments in infrastructure and increasing U.S. exports.

Edward Snowden's stolen secrets and the dismal failure of the rollout of Obamacare is giving electronic technology a bad name. But blaming high-tech tools is more like blaming the messenger. We have to work harder to master the secrets of the Internet, but the human element remains our biggest weakness. It's hardly news that the screening process for giving Snowden access to sensitive data was deeply flawed. So, too, were the instructions to the National Security Agency that enabled the abuse of the rest of us. For whatever good intentions the NSA might have had, the snoops cost America the...

The Crypto Locker virus is a new piece of “ransomware” that is said to be one of the worst viruses to ever infect Windows PCs. The virus takes over a computers files, encrypts them, and then holds the files ransom until a user pays to have them freed by clearing out the virus. The Crypto Locker virus is sent to users through emails that have innocent enough looking senders, such as UPS or FedEx. Once the file is installed a display pops up demanding upwards of $100 to restore a users important files. In same cases users have stated that...