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Fox News continues to propagate the propaganda that the NSA needs to have our personal phone record metadata in order to prevent terrorism and that Americans against government intrusion of our privacy are hurting America. Phone record metadata includes the phone numbers involved, the time of the call, and the location of the phones at the time. This information is available from the phone carriers. We all have cell phone bills that show each and every phone call. For the San Bernadino muslim terrorist shooting, Fox News claims the FBI does not have access to metadata phone record information of...

Sure, it's just an iPhone battery case, but what marks this one out from the many others is the manufacturer: Apple. The US$99 iPhone 6s Smart Battery Case is the first sign that Apple is ready to acknowledge that its phones are too thin to contain adequate batteries. The case adds 80 percent to the battery life -- and about 100 percent to the thickness -- of an iPhone 6 or 6s. Unlike most third-party battery add-ons, the back of the case isn't flat, but has a bulge in the middle housing the battery.

Ok Freepers, so my question is are these services (LifeLock and others) worth it? Or are they just a waste of money? Can anyone recommend a particular one based on personal experiences? Reason I ask is one of my credit cards was apparently hijacked today. No fraudulent charges but they did manage to change my profile info and password for online access. Received an email from the bank saying my personal info was changed and if I didn't do the changes contact the bank at the number on the card. Sure enough they had successfully changed all the info including...

Lawmakers continue to wrangle over a bill that would overhaul the nation's immigration system. One provision in this bill would allow companies to import a lot more skilled workers. The tech industry has lobbied hard for this, despite fears among some American workers about the extra competition. Illinois Senator Dick Durbin says the bill has American workers covered. --Employers will be given a chance to hire a temporary foreign worker when truly needed. But first, they'll be required to recruit Americans. No exceptions, no excuses,-- he said. Still, making companies recruit Americans isn't the same as making them hire them....

Windows 10 IoT Core Pro lets thing-makers opt-out of security updates Microsoft's released a new flavour of Windows 10. Windows 10 IoT Core Pro is a version of the OS destined for original equipment manufacturers cooking up connected things. Redmond says the Pro cut's big differentiator is "the ability to defer updates and control distribution of updates through Windows Server Update Services." "With these servicing options," Microsoft's Billy Anders writes "we are bringing flexibility for our partners and customers to help meet their servicing needs while helping ensuring their devices are secure and managed." That's a good thing if thing-makers...

Disk vault Bitlocker snubs self-encrypting drives - when's the fix? We know Microsoft can be pretty secretive about its spyware-as-a-service Windows 10, but Redmond has now taken its furtiveness to a whole new level. You may or may not know that its disk encryption tool Bitlocker has suddenly stopped working in the latest version of its operating system for a number of people. Bitlocker refuses to work if you try to enable it on a self-encrypting drive with the hardware-accelerated encryption switched on: when you do a clean install of the latest build of Windows 10 - the November 2015...

As promised earlier in the year, Apple’s Swift team has now posted source code for the Swift compiler and standard library functions and objects. Open-sourcing Swift is a big win for the developer community as it means Swift can now be setup to run on a server and many other use cases, bringing Apple programming talent and expertise beyond ‘just’ making apps iOS devices and Macs.Making Swift open-source also gives the developer community as a whole more confidence in the language. Theoretically, if Apple ever decided to move away from Swift (which is unlikely), the language could be picked up...

Samsung has agreed to pay Apple $548m in damages over iPhone patents. But the five-year legal battle is far from over. Although it has now agreed to pay $548m, Samsung has also claimed "all rights to obtain reimbursement from Apple", pending further appeals. Image: CNET/CBS Interactive Samsung has finally agreed to pay $548m in its long-running patent dispute with Apple.The smartphone rivals on Thursday filed a joint court statement confirming that Samsung would, by December 14, pay Apple the $548m awarded to it in September. The damages bill stems from Apple's court award of $1bn in damages over a patent...

Uber is reportedly shopping itself to investors for another round of funding, and this time it's seeking a valuation of $62.5 billion. As this chart from Statista shows, that means Uber is now more valuable than the major U.S. car companies Ford and GM, more than media giants like Fox and Time-Warner Cable, and almost twice as much as eBay. This is despite the fact that Uber almost certainly loses money, and has a fraction of these companies' revenue. Uber was expected to have net revenue of about $2 billion this year, compared with 2014 revenues of almost $18 billion...

"We put in more, so you'll pay by the core" Microsoft looks to be moving to per-core licences, rather than per-CPU licences, for Windows Server 2016. "Directions on Microsoft" chap Wes Miller tweeted links to a "Pricing and licensing FAQ" for Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 Standard and Datacenter Editions. Dated December 2015, the meat of the document offers this description of Redmond's future licensing plan: The licensing of Datacenter and Standard Edition will move from processors to physical cores, which aligns licensing of private and public cloud to a consistent currency of cores and simplifies licensing across...

Researchers at the Gedik Lab at MIT use strong ultrafast laser pulses to stimulate changes in material, followed by a weaker probe laser pulse after some time delay to monitor the changes with femtosecond time resolution. Tungsten (W) atoms are black, and sulfur (S) atoms are yellow. Credit: Edbert Jarvis Sie =================================================================================================================================== Monolayer films of tungsten disulfide, just three atoms thick, have unique electronic valleys which can be manipulated with laser light. This finding, by MIT physics graduate student Edbert Jarvis Sie, Associate Professor Nuh Gedik, and colleagues, was significant enough to warrant placement on the cover of Nature Materials...

I have Spybot/licensed installed. I get error message "SDOnAccess.exe error" endlessly. How can I get rid of it? Thanks.

Ex-CEO Steve Ballmer has a huge holding of Microsoft stock. At yesterday's shareholder meeting, he tore into the company and its current CEO, Satya Nadella, cursing about the financial reporting and saying a key part of its strategy "won't work." Ouch. Far be it for you humble blogwatcher to repeat the actual naughty word Ballmer used. Let's just say he was alluding to bovine excrement. NSFW language aside, the ex-CEO seems unhappy about changes made to the Windows Phone strategy he put in place. In IT Blogwatch, bloggers settle in with some delicious popped corn. Not to mention: He loves...

Whatever brand you swear by (or at) there's good news, and bad, in the findings. But this Consumer Reports survey of 58,000 notebook owners finds one vendor has a huge edge in reliability and satisfaction - and it probably isn't yours. Notebook computers can be one of the most maddening consumer devices ever - especially when they break. A survey of 58,000 Consumer Reports subscribers adds some welcome evidence into just how likely notebooks are to break - by brand. Consumer Reports is the world's largest independent, nonprofit, consumer product testing organization. They buy the products they test, don't accept...

Does ANYONE know anything about extracting log messages and calling the STIX library to create STIX objects?

With the Black Friday weekend now behind us, analysts and market researchers are crunching numbers to determine how many billions Americans spent on the annual sales bonanza. (It's an inexact science, as The Atlantic noted.) Consumer insights firm ShopperTrak, for one, is estimating that shoppers spent over $1 billion less in brick-and-mortar stores on Black Friday this year than in 2014, thanks to the growth of e-commerce and to retailers "successfully elongating the holiday." What is becoming clear is that some retailers and brands fared far better than others on the biggest shopping day of the year, based on both...

Windows-based tablets may have gotten off to a slow start, but things are changing, and changing fast. According to Strategy Analytics, Windows tablet shipments jumped 58 percent in the first nine months of 2015, and with the holiday shopping season in view, they'll reach 22 million shipments by the end of the year. If that comes to pass, Windows will account for 10 percent of the global tablet market. That would still put Windows way behind Android (68 percent) and iOS (22 percent), but it's far better than the measly 1.7 percent of the smartphone market Windows owns (based on...

Cute canines safe, 'Potentially unwanted programs' now nixed by System Centre or Forefront Remond has updated its paid System Center Endpoint Protection and Forefront Endpoint Protection services with a feature to kill spammy and advertising injecting programs operating from within enterprise networks. The upgrades will help system admins to eliminate potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) from networks that are not explicitly malware but at minimum are annoying and will escalate corporate attack vectors. Microsoft security bod trio Geoff McDonald, Deepak Manohar, and Dulce Montemayor say the PUP destroyer will be delivered through automatic updates. "These applications can increase the risk of...

photo credit: Benjamin Child When it comes to mobile shopping on Thanksgiving, e-commerce sites probably saw nearly 80 percent of purchases come from iOS devices, according to a report from online retail analytics company Custora. Nevertheless, there was an uptick in e-commerce purchases coming from Android mobile devices this year.Online Black Friday sales revenue rose 16.1 percent from the same day last year, according to Custora. The number of orders rose 15.6 percent and the average order value grew 0.5 percent. "Retailers did a good job growing the top line without being overly promotional compared to last year," the company...

I'd like to get wireless speakers to enjoy MP3 music I've downloaded on my ASUS laptop but have found out I don't have Bluetooth capability.My tech savvy nephew verified no Bluetooth on my laptop and recommended I get a Bluetooth dongle.'A what, I said?'So, I looked at the Bluetooth dongles on Amazon, priced from $2.00 - $30.00+.What's a good, quality dongle to buy?And wireless speaker recommendations would also be appreciated.