Tag: FEATURES

Today the iPad 2 goes on sale and, as with most iDevices, there will be a gaggle of geeks lined up outside your local Apple store to snatch it up. It's only a small evolutionary update to the original iPad, but there's no denying its intrigue. Yet even after reading all of the glowing reviews, I'm still not sold. There's no doubt that the iPad 2 is going to sell like hotcakes, but I won't be ...

Overdue Reviews takes a critical look at tech-centric films that are well-loved, well-loathed or eye-rollingly obscure. For better or worse, they love Dick in Hollywood: 'Blade Runner,' 'Total Recall,' 'Impostor,' 'A Scanner Darkly,' 'Paycheck' and 'Next' all have roots in the notorious paranoiac Philip K. Dick's fiction. Last week, in fact, saw the release of the latest adaptation, 'The ...

With SXSW less than a week away, everyone's racing to push out new apps and updates -- and inexplicably road tripping on a StartupBus -- to beat the rush in Austin. Today's unavoidable app is Zite, a personalized magazine that's being touted as a 'Flipboard-killer' because of its learning capabilities. Unlike iPad publications like The Daily or Sir Richard Branson's 'Project,' Zite mixes the ...

InPrivate, Incognito, Private Browsing -- whatever they want to brand it -- all modern browsers offer a special mode designed to keep what you do online a secret from prying eyes. Despite different names and origins at different companies, they all work in basically similar ways: A new browser session is created that operates separately from your existing one, with its own history and cookies ...

What it is: A multi-purpose rolling bag that also serves as a portable seat and a take-along boombox. Why it's different: The Trip Sound is a bag, chair and boombox all at once, which makes it pretty unique. It's designed for travelers who find themselves restless in airports, with no free seat to relax upon, and no decent sound system to crank in their hotel rooms. If there's ever been ...

Crowd-sourcing is not just a hot buzzword. When done right, turning to the Internet and its many voices can raise money, awareness and the profile for a project, putting a really great idea into practice. Kickstarter, the site that allows anyone with an e-mail account to invest in whatever great proposals they find (with some perks, of course), is a great example of the collective power of the ...

For our second annual spotlight on cyber-security, Switched turned to a renowned expert in the field: Eugene H. Spafford, Professor of Computer Science at Purdue University. Among his many professional associations and corporate and governmental advisory roles, Spafford is the Executive Director of the Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS), which supports ...

It may not be top-secret or espionage-worthy, but the information we keep on laptops and smartphones is still something we all would like protected. Saved passwords, addresses, bank balances, friends' contact info -- all sorts of information could have potentially devastating effects in the hands of a crook. Large companies have long had the technology to remotely lock-down and wipe mobile ...

Symptoms: Imagine the pit in your stomach: finding charges on your credit cards or bank statements for items you didn't buy; applying for credit or a mortgage and being denied due to delinquencies on accounts you didn't open. The amounts for the previous year's reported income on your annual Social Security statement is incorrect, and for more than you earned. Or you get a letter or call ...

Symptom: Maybe your Twitter or Facebook friends have gotten viciously spammed with fake offers for a free iPad, or a link to a fake app -- from your profile. Or, maybe you've discover posts on your profile that you never wrote, often with links leading to websites, apps or coupons. You may discover personal messages sent to friends that you didn't write, perhaps asking them to wire money. Or, ...

What's the point of watching The Oscars if you can't have the entire Internet screaming in your eyes at the same time? The pomp, the glitz, the gladhanding and the empty ceremony of the biggest awards show of the year all demand collective commentary. For the Academy Awards, we like to grab a cheap bottle of cava, don our finest sweatpants, and hop on the Web for an evening of glamour that ...

Symptom: You reach into your pocket or bag, and, well, it's empty! Diagnosis: Beyond the understandable distress of losing a pricey smartphone, laptop or tablet PC, the real trauma is the sudden and unfettered access afforded to the slippery-fingered jerk who took it. The cost of a new laptop is meager compared to the personal and even financial havoc that a motivated thief can wreak ...

Symptoms: People listed in your e-mail contacts report being flooded with spam messages sent from your account. Or, you start receiving a bevy of "bounced" e-mails from random addresses you don't know. You aren't able to log into your account or change its settings, or you've discovered the settings have been altered. You attempt to use e-mail, and find it has been blocked by your provider. ...

Symptoms: There are a range of telltale signs that your PC has been infiltrated by a binary ne'er-do-well, but, counterintuitively, the worst case scenario is when there are no obvious symptoms at all. For starters, you may have an infection if your PC or Internet throughput has become consistently sluggish, and a restart doesn't cure it. Frequent, random pop-up windows with ads or system ...

There's another streaming media box on the market, but you won't be able to find the 'Scooby-Doo' movie on it. Oh, wait -- yes, you can. That is, if you're looking for the version that features Shaggy and Fred double-teaming Velma inside Old Man Withers' haunted dildo factory. Those meddling kids! But seriously, the FyreTV streaming porno box (NSFW link, obviously) is perhaps the best gift ...