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The market for streaming media players may no longer be a two-horse race between Apple and Roku. The introduction of Google's Chromecast has given the category a jolt -- but there were always more fish in the sea than the big two. Now that Google has gotten people talking about streaming media players in earnest, we've canvassed the competition, including some models you may have missed, to gage the strengthes and weaknesses of each.

(Reuters) - The annual Def Con hacking convention has asked the federal government to stay away this year for the first time in its 21-year history, saying Edward Snowden's revelations have made some in the community uncomfortable about having feds there. ... Last year, four-star General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, was a keynote speaker at the event, which is the world's largest annual hacking conference. The audience was respectful, gave modest applause and also asked about secret government snooping. Alexander adamantly denied that the NSA has dossiers on millions of Americans, as some former employees had...

Questions to Freepers using Firefox browser. I understood Adobe was open to hacking, malware and rootkits I use a Firefox browser. I have not been updating my Flash plug-in. Now, I cannot view embedded videos without updating Adobe Flash. Are substitutes available? Are the newer versions of Adobe Flash now secure??

Abstract. We describe the use of formal methods in the development of IRONSIDES, an implementation of DNS with superior performance to both BIND and Windows, the two most common DNS servers on the Internet. More importantly, unlike BIND and Windows, IRONSIDES is impervious to all single-packet denial of service attacks and all forms of remote code execution. Introduction DNS is a protocol essential to the proper functioning of the Internet. The two most common implementations of DNS are the free software version BIND and the implementations that come bundled with various versions of Windows. Unfortunately, despite their ubiquity and...

You’re not running a domestic terrorism group (well, there are those new DHS criteria…). You’re not even sending around emails about what a dismal failure President Obama’s administration is (THIS hour, anyway). You just want to be able to chat with friends, conduct your financial business, and argue with your spouse without Big Daddy Gummint all up in your biz. Believe it or not, that’s your right. Harry “Who Cares” Reid may blow it off and say the government’s been “doing that stuff for years,”but we’ve got a news flash for Harry: just because you’ve been doing it a while...

EDMONTON – When it comes to cell phones, there always seems to be a better model hitting the market. But before you ditch your old phone, make sure it’s completely wiped clean of all your personal information. That may seem obvious enough, but as Adam McKale saw firsthand, it doesn’t always happen. After switching his broken iPhone for a refurbished one at the Apple store in Southgate mall, he couldn’t believe what popped up when he plugged the device into his computer. “It was the guy’s name, all of his contacts, a bunch of his music – which isn’t so...

Mozilla is gearing up for a major user interface overhaul for the open source Firefox web browser. Code-named Australis, the new UI is likely to debut as part of Firefox 25, due out in October of his year.The Australis overhaul will be the biggest UI change since Firefox 4, which became generally available in March of 2011. After Firefox 4, Mozilla changed its release approach, from having only one or two releases in a year, to a rapid release cycle with new browsers released every six to eight weeks."Australis is our internal code name for a set of UI changes...

According to Google's own statistics released today, a version of Android called Gingerbread is the most popular version on Android devices today. This fall, Gingerbread will be three years old. So why are more Android phones running (by tech standards) an ancient operating system? There are a lot of reasons, but the most important one is that companies like Samsung, HTC, and LG that make Android phones are notoriously awful at supporting them with timely software updates after launch. That's because those manufacturers like to customize Android with their own look and special software features, meaning they have to put...

Georgia Institute of Technology has announced a partnership with Udacity to offer an online Masters Degree in Computer Science for $7,000, down 80% from the existing cost of $40,000 for the on-campus, instructor led program. Suddenly, masters programs around the country will have to compete with Georgia Tech‘s $7,000 program, and that won’t be easy or fast in coming. The traditionally taught graduate degree in computer science at Georgia Tech is a very well regarded program that is in high demand and has very positive outcomes in terms of jobs and earnings. Georgia Tech graduates tend to do very well...

Mozilla is out with the Firefox 21 open source browser release today, fixing at least 8 security vulnerabilities, three of which are rated as being critical. The new release also provides new features that – depending on your viewpoint – could either improve or reduce user privacy.One of the new features in Firefox 21 is the Health Report. Mozilla first began talking about the health report in September of 2012 as a non-invasive reporting mechanism. The report is intended to deliver information to users about the 'health' of the browser and its components. The report also shares that data with...

Full title: Snapchats Don't Disappear: Forensics Firm Has Pulled Dozens of Supposedly-Deleted Photos From Android Phones A 24-year-old forensics examiner from Utah has made a discovery that may make some Snapchat users think twice before sending a photo that they think is going to quickly disappear. Richard Hickman of Decipher Forensics found that it’s possible to pull Snapchat photos from Android phones simply by downloading data from the phone using forensics software and removing a “.NoMedia” file extension that was keeping the photos from being viewed on the device. He published his findings online and local TV station KSL has...

ORLANDO—Is it time for humans to get their own black box? That’s the provocative question behind an ambitious project by four undergraduate engineering students from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, presented at this weekend's Cornell Cup in Orlando, Fla. Over the course of a school year, the Amherst team built a prototype “black box for humans” that you could carry around wherever you went, and could be activated to record audio of your surroundings in case you ran into trouble. That audio recording—heavily encrypted, completely tamper-proof and admissible as evidence in a U.S. courtroom, per the Amherst team—would hypothetically...

Located in central Stockholm is the headquarters of Bahnhof, a Swedish Internet Service Provider and host with one of the coolest data centers on the planet. It gained notoriety a few years back as the former home of Wikileaks. Named Pionen White Mountains, it is located 30 meters (100 ft) under the granite rocks of the Vita Berg Park in Stockholm. The location was a former nuclear bunker and command center during the Cold War. It took more than two years to blast out the 141,000 cubic feet of extra space that Bahnhof needed to fit its backup generators and...

On April 25, Spanish police, at the request of Holland's national prosecutor's office, arrested Dutch citizen Sven Olaf Kamphuis. Kamphuis will likely face charges in Holland related to what Dutch officials describe as the most extensive criminal cyberattacks in the history of the Internet. The attacks, which occurred in mid-March, overwhelmed the website of Spamhaus, a European nonprofit organization that tracks computer viruses (malware) and spam (unwanted email). Spamhaus had blacklisted Kamphuis' Internet company, CyberBunker. Spamhaus alleged that CyberBunker provided hosting services for spammers. The attacks (distributed denial of service, DDOS attacks) not only denied Internet users access to the...

It would appear that Rep. Mike Rogers, the main person in Congress pushing for CISPA, has kept rather quiet about a very direct conflict of interest that calls into serious question the entire bill. It would appear that Rogers' wife stands to benefit quite a lot from the passage of CISPA, and has helped in the push to get the bill passed. It's somewhat amazing that no one has really covered this part of the story, but it highlights, yet again, the kind of activities by folks in Congress that make the public trust Congress less and less. It has...

US Visa Reforms To Help Skilled IT Professionals Ishani Duttagupta Apr 22, 2013 Reggie Aggarwal is the founder and CEO of Cvent, an online event management company co-located out of Washington, DC and Gurgaon. With about 60 of the top engineering positions in his US operations lying vacant, Aggarwal has a problem. "We need guys with deep engineering knowledge and every tech employer, from Fortune 500 companies to small start-ups in the US, knows that there's a huge shortage of such people in America," says the Cvent founder. "Like all other tech CEOs, I know there is a huge talent...

Our Internet Surveillance State I'm going to start with three data points. One: Some of the Chinese military hackers who were implicated in a broad set of attacks against the U.S. government and corporations were identified because they accessed Facebook from the same network infrastructure they used to carry out their attacks. Two: Hector Monsegur, one of the leaders of the LulzSec hacker movement, was identified and arrested last year by the FBI. Although he practiced good computer security and used an anonymous relay service to protect his identity, he slipped up. And three: Paula Broadwell, who had an affair...

Patches 42 security holes Oracle has released a major security update for the version of Java programming language that runs inside Web browsers. The patch fixes 42 vulnerabilities within Java, including "the vast majority" of those that have been rated as the most critical. Oracle Executive Vice President Hasan Rizvisaid that a series of big security flaws in the Java plug-in for browsers have been uncovered in the past year by researchers and hackers, and some have been used by criminal groups. One hacking campaign infected computers using Microsoft Windows and Apple software inside hundreds of companies.Earlier this year the US Department...

Hi. Just wondering if anyone who owns one of these external hard drives (portable or desk) have a preference. Or if they had some bad experiences or better yet, swear by either one of the 2 if they crash easily or last long. We're changing our hard drives and prefer something physical to store for our staff, instead of relying solely on cloud-based storage. (Got rid of Carbonite when those clowns backstabbed Rush and we switched to Mozy) It's almost 50/50 on people we spoke with (friends, co-workers, business partners etc). Some say Seagate sucks and crash easily while the...

First, if you follow the link, you'll find that this does not appear to be an April Fools prank. Nuance on Monday launched Voice Ads, a voice enabled ad platform that allows a consumer to talk to brands. Companies get a new monetization vehicle and consumers presumably will get a say in brand advertising delivery. snip"Nuance, which is using its voice technology in mobile, health and auto applications, is obviously hoping to get on the ad gravy train. Voice Ads promise to give marketers an avenue "to deepen the relationship with their consumers." The theory is that you'll chat with...