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The sharing economy is changing the way we work, live and play. But nowhere have we better seen the benefits of this change than in our transportation and travel. In just a few years, we’ve added Lyft, Uber and SideCar to our zeitgeist for rides and turned to Airbnb for housing when visiting a city. We’ve lovingly termed this change “disruption.” It’s a disruption of industries that have remained relatively unchanged for decades and a disruption craved by us all. We’re turning our cars and homes into valuable assets and facilitating the type of customer experience we all want. Of...

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Google, a leader in efforts to create driverless cars, has run into an odd safety conundrum: humans. Last month, as one of Google’s self-driving cars approached a crosswalk, it did what it was supposed to do when it slowed to allow a pedestrian to cross, prompting its “safety driver” to apply the brakes. The pedestrian was fine, but not so much Google’s car, which was hit from behind by a human-driven sedan. Google’s fleet of autonomous test cars is programmed to follow the letter of the law. But it can be tough to get around if...

A recently discovered group of malware that infects jailbroken iPhones has gathered the login information for more than 225,000 Apple accounts, and is believed to be one of the largest breaches of Apple accounts ever. The malware, dubbed KeyRaider by its discoverer, found its way to victims via websites that hosted repositories of Cydia software. Cydia is an app that allows users of jailbroken iOS devices to access software and apps locked phones can’t normally access. The malware then steals Apple account information by intercepting iTunes traffic from the device. Palo Alto Networks (PAN) and WeipTech, which found the vulnerability,...

Comcast has slowly but surely been expanding the company's usage cap trials since around 2012, largely focusing them on less competitive markets where annoyed users can't vote with their wallets. In these seventeen (and counting) trial markets, Comcast broadband customers face a monthly usage cap of 300 gigabytes. After that, users need to shell out $10 for each additional 50 gigabytes of data consumed. The trials have expanded slowly but surely in the hopes of minimizing user backlash. Basically, Comcast is the hot water slowly coming to a boil, and you're the frog. It appears that Comcast has now added...

Standing in front of Francois Payard Bakery at Columbus Circle, Walter Piper shifts his weight nervously from one foot to the other. The 28-year-old is waiting for Jay, a bioengineering student whom he met online just days prior. To take the pressure off of their first meet-up, they planned to run the 10K loop in Central Park together before work. But this isn’t the beginning of a romance — the two men met through an online “friending” site, gofindfriends.com. Piper, despite having more than 300 friends on Facebook, found himself in a predicament shared by many millennials: He had no...

(Phys.org)—Due to quantum effects, it's possible to build a quantum computer that computes without running—or as the scientists explain, "the result of a computation may be learned without actually running the computer." So far, however, the efficiency of this process, which is called counterfactual computation (CFC), has had an upper limit of 50%, limiting its practical applications. Now in a new paper, scientists have experimentally demonstrated a slightly different version called a "generalized CFC" that has an efficiency of 85% with the potential to reach 100%. This improvement opens the doors to realizing a much greater variety of applications, such...

We recently mused, half seriously, whether the entire point of the Windows 10 upgrade was to harvest your personal information. With Microsoft suffering from a serious case of Google envy, perhaps it felt it had some catching up to do. Now Microsoft is revamping the user-tracking tools in Windows 7 and 8 to harvest more data, via some new patches. All the updates can be removed post-installation – but all ensure the OS reports data to Microsoft even when asked not to, bypassing the hosts file and (hence) third-party privacy tools. This data can include how long you use apps,...

***Episode 002 of Uncertain Tomorrow is now in motion. Our goal for Episode 002 is to expand on this storyline, but with several enhancements!

As the countdown for Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) launching its iPhone 6S and 6S Plus began, the expectations of an announcement on other key matters is also growing. There are already expectations that the company might disclose something on Apple TV. Things could even go a step further to suggest that the tech firm will also produce the original video content. The company has scheduled an event on September 9 and more news about the possible announcement will keep growing. Meeting Hollywood Executives The news about Apple Inc. producing original contents gain grounds because it held meetings with the executives of...

Apple and Cisco Monday announced a partnership that will optimize the way iPhones and iPads work in business environments. Above, Apple CEO Tim Cook delivers his keynote address at the Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco in June. Robert Galbraith/Reuters Apple on Monday announced a partnership with Cisco to help create improved experiences for professionals who use iPhones and iPads for business purposes. It's part of Apple's broader strategy to go after the enterprise market and revive iPad sales. The partnership, announced in Las Vegas at Cisco's employee Global Sales Experience conference, will create a so-called fast lane for Apple...

The Pentagon has partnered with Apple Inc. (Nasdaq: AAPL), Boeing Co. (NYSE: BA), Hewlett-Packard Co. (NYSE: HPQ), and 159 other private companies and universities to develop wearable tech for military use. "I've been pushing the Pentagon to think outside our five-sided box and invest in innovation here in Silicon Valley and in tech communities across the country," U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter said at Moffett Airfield near Mountain View, Calif. on Friday. "Now we're taking another step forward." Carter announced the creation of a new institute in San Jose called "Flexible Hybrid Electronic Institute." The institute will work to develop...

Every morning, I fire up my home computer (downloaded Windows 10 last week) and when I go to my Google Chrome icon, it takes me exactly 10 minutes for the Google main page to pop up on my screen. I like Google Chrome because I have GooglePlus and GMail, but it seems that Windows 10 is not supporting it because they want users to jump to Microsoft Edge (their browser) instead. What can I do to correct this? Should I uninstall and then install Google Chrome again? This delay is very frustrating.

According to a email today: The End User License Agreement (EULA) for Windows 10...is problematic and the opt-out does not ever allow you to fully opt-out. If I understand correctly, they explicitly tell you that they will take your:contacts, WIFI passwords, and content of your files and sell them, at their discretion to others, and will use the info for targeted marketing on your computer. Or any other use they may feel is appropriate as the future unfolds. I have not downloaded Win 10, so I don't know. Has anyone else read the EULA closely to render an opinion?

Is Apple about to enter the world of original programming, and if so, what sort of programming is it pursuing? Those questions are swirling in media circles after a Monday night report from Variety, a Hollywood news fixture, that Apple (AAPL, Tech30) is exploring such a move. One thing is for certain: Apple executives are reaching out to high-level entertainment industry types for confidential talks. An executive familiar with the outreach to Hollywood said Apple is assessing whether it should start to bankroll original TV shows and movies. This would put Apple into close competition with streaming services like Netflix...

Jailbreaking an iPhone gives you the freedom to run the apps and interfaces you want (rather than those allowed by Apple), but it also carries some inherent risks -- you're giving apps much more control over your phone. And unfortunately, some of these users are discovering this the hard way. Researchers have discovered a strain of iOS malware, nicknamed KeyRaider, that has stolen over 225,000 Apple IDs from jailbroken devices. The software takes advantage of Chinese app repositories that let people directly upload and share their own titles. If you happen to download the code, it'll either scoop up your...

An ‘intelligent’ robot offered a truly chilling answer to an interviewer’s question, ‘Will robots take over the world?’ ‘Don’t worry, even if I evolve into Terminator, I’ll keep you warm and safe in my people zoo, where I can watch you for ol’ times sake,’ the bearded robot intoned. His interviewer, from PBS, is visibly taken aback by the answer. The robot – modelled after Philip K Dick, the novelist whose work inspired Blade Runner – uttered the terrifying words in an interview with PBS in 2011, in response to the question, ‘Will robots take over the world?. The robot...

A Life in Games John Horton Conway claims to have never worked a day in his life. This adaptation from the biography Genius at Play shows how serious advances such as the surreal numbers can spring out of fun and games. Princeton University, Office of Communications, Denise ApplewhiteJohn Horton Conway at Princeton University in 2009. By: Siobhan RobertsAugust 28, 2015 Comments (6) Gnawing on his left index finger with his chipped old British teeth, temporal veins bulging and brow pensively squinched beneath the day-before-yesterday’s hair, the mathematician John Horton Conway unapologetically whiles away his hours tinkering and thinkering — which...

Plus, a robot bartender is slingin' cocktails in Germany. The human race's pancake flipping days could soon be over. MIT Technology Review reports that RobotHow — a European robotics research project focused on teaching robots to understand language — has developed a robot chef capable of using instructions to complete complex tasks like flipping pancakes and making pizza. While things like flipping a pancake might seem simple, for robots it's a challenge to determine how much force and what exact motion is required to complete the action, writes Quartz. The robot called PR2 learns tasks by following instructions on wikiHow....

Amazon and Microsoft are quickly becoming the king and queen of cloud computing. Here's another case in point: the two of them just won a huge contract with the FAA, led by IT consultant CSC. This contract will consolidate the FCC's data centers, moving data to both Amazon's cloud Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft's cloud, Azure. CSC says the contract is worth $108 million out of the gate, and because its a long-term contract, could be worth as much as $1 billion over the next 10 years. The FAA isn't getting rid of its data centers altogether to run...

Exclusive: The former Apple chief executive on Steve Jobs, the greatest current technology leaders and why Aaron Sorkin’s Jobs biopic will tell the truth about his and Jobs’ “amazing relationship” Steve Jobs (L) and John Sculley, pictured in 1983 Photo: CAP/NFS It goes without saying that Steve Jobs is perhaps the most famous business leader of the century, if not of all time. The late co-founder of Apple has become a deified figure since his death in 2011 aged 56 from pancreatic cancer, with each new product launch incurring a rash of ‘What Would Steve Do?’ think pieces and endless...