Latest News - Page 2879

Back in the mid to late 90's, the search engine we know as Google began as a research project between Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were Ph.D. students at Stanford University, and as with any website that is a product of the end of the 90's some aspects of the original design have remained. With Google search, one last fall back to days past has remained on the site since its inception.

Back in the day web developers use to set all hotlinks to display as underlined in an effort to make the links more visible to a not so computer savvy generation that was just beginning to use the web. The links in Google's search results were all underlined back then and while this trend died off in the mid 2000's, Google kept its links underlined. Today Google decided to remove those underlines as well as increasing the size of result titles.

"We've increased the size of result titles, removed the underlines, and evened out all the line heights," says Google lead designer Jon Wiley. "This improves readability and creates an overall cleaner look." With these changes also comes new ad labels , and a more modern and well refined search results page. Perhaps one of the best decisions Google made was to no move forward with banner ads in search results, something it had been testing for a few months.

Colleges and universities are popular targets for cybercriminals trying to compromise a large amount of users, stealing as much personal information as possible. However, university officials, after learning of a breach, often are unsure what to do - and struggle to alert students and faculty members in a streamlined manner.

Most recently, hackers compromised North Dakota University and Johns Hopkins University, with hackers stealing personal information.

In the Johns Hopkins University breach, hackers stole information on 850 current and former students, though no Social Security Numbers or highly sensitive information was taken. The breach reportedly took place sometime towards the end of 2013, but university officials didn't publicly report the incident until early March.

Today, Western Digital announced the launch of its latest edition to the company's long-standing My Passport line of external storage devices. The all new My Passport AV-TV is a high-performance compact media drive that is designed to store and playback hundreds of hours of TV entertainment. What makes the drive most unique though is its ability to record from your TV via USB.

Available in capacities of 500GB and 1TB, the new My Passport AV-TV is capable of recording up to two channels at once on TVs that are "Dual-Tuner" equipped with the recordings being saved in full HD format. Western Digital says that the My Passport AV-TV is engineers for high-speed AV applications and features error recovery and continuous streaming command support for accurate recording and playback of video content.

"TV lovers want to enjoy their shows at a time convenient to them," said Jim Welsh, WD executive vice president, Branded Products and Worldwide Sales. "Timeshifting, plus the popularity of global events and international sporting events, is increasing consumer demand for recordable TVs and optimized drives. Our customers want a fast and reliable solution. The high-performance My Passport AV-TV - specifically-designed for this application - is the result of their requests."

I think most of us know if you hang out with someone that is in a bad mood, you are more likely to get that bad mood for yourself. A new study has been published that looked at if the same holds true for online moods via status updates.

The study was conducted by Facebook, Yale, and the University of California San Diego. The results of the study found that your online mood could spread to others just as your offline mood can. The researchers looked at 100 million Facebook users in the US.

They also studied more than a billion posts. Using an algorithm they created, they were able to filter the posts based on a positive or negative mood. The results found that the mood of one user could affect the moods of their online friends. The researchers say that they knew moods were contagions, but this is the first study to look at how the process works online.

Nikon has rolled out a very cool new camera today called the Nikon 1 V3. The camera looks like a typical point and shoot, but it's not. The Nikon 1 V3 is an interchangeable lens camera that claims some interesting world firsts in its resume.

The camera has a hybrid auto focus system that promises the world's fastest continuous shooting mode good for 20 fps with full autofocus. If you fix the focus, you can get even faster burst shooting at up to 60 fps. The rear LCD is a 3-inch unit that supports touch and variable angles.

The resolution of that LCD is 1.037 million dots and it can be tilted 180-degrees. The camera sensor is an 18.4MP CX-format CMOS sensor that lacks a low-pass filter. Images are processed y the EXPEED 4A image processor and the camera has an ISO range of 160 to 12800.

EA seems to be trying to keep Battlefield 4 in the news for all the wrong reasons. Its bad enough that gamers have to pay for a game that is known to have multiple issues despite getting series of fixes and patches along the way, but the company decides to rub salt into its fan's wounds by adding advertisements.

It was found that Electronic Arts is now including in-game advertisements to Battlefield 4's main menu and the loading screen. The advertisement of a movie based on its own game 'Need For Speed' was spotted in the main page. What's even more shocking is that Battlefield 4's premium subscribers who paid as high as $110 may now see advertisements displayed in the game's menu and the loading screen.

EA did use many of its titles to push advertisements: Madden, NHL, FIFA and many racing game franchises through in-game-stadium billboards, banners and even on the loading & home screens.

WhatsApp has been one of the biggest news stories of the year after Facebook spent $16 billion in cash to acquire the app. Earlier this week WhatsApp was in the news for something that no software firm wants to be associated with- security issues.

A tech consultant earlier this week issued a repot outlining a method that would allow nefarious apps to gain access to the WhatsApp message logs stored on the memory card of the device. The consultant, Bas Bosschert, even offered up code that could be included in an app that would upload the chat logs to a remote server as a game loaded.

WhatsApp has now stepped up to address the issue. A spokesperson for WhatsApp says reports on the issue are "overstated." The company also says that a new version of the app on Google Play now has added security features. Bosschert says that his exploit code still works on the latest version of the app.

Security experts are keen to try and help traditional anti-virus software evolve into a layer of added defense for breach detection systems (BDS), though the industry is having trouble finding its way there.

If hackers are unable to gain access to PCs, they are finding success targeting voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) phones in the office - which sometimes leads to direct access to computer networks.

Red Balloon, founded by researchers from Columbia University, are interested in developing security for embedded devices, helps companies keep devices more secure.

NASA is always working on some sort of project to get the masses interested in science and space. About a year and a half ago, NASA rolled out an app for iPad users called NASA Visualization Explorer. The app was designed to share articles, images, and visualizations of satellite data with users.

The problem for users on iOS devices other than the iPad was that the app didn't support other devices. NASA has now announced that the app is available for all iOS devices. That means that iPhone and iPod touch users can now check out the app and its cool images and content.

Users will be able to access the 274 stories that have been published on the app and are in the archives. New stores will be added on Tuesday and Thursday. NASA says that the original app had about a million unique downloads.

Pioneer Electronics has been making audio gear for years. The company has a full line of home theater receivers that run the gamut from entry-level models up to high-end offerings that can cost thousands of dollars. Pioneer has rolled out a new home theater receiver aimed at custom installers called the VSX-80.

This receiver will ship at the end of the month for $700. The VSX-80 has a lot to offer for the price. It features seven HDMI 2.0 ports allowing you to connect a lot of sources to the receiver. It is Roku Ready certified so all the user has to do is plug in a Streaming Stick to get access to all sorts of streaming content.

Pioneer built-in support for 4K UHD video pass through. The best feature if the VSX-80 is that it is able to upscale standard HD content to 4K resolution on-the-fly. Using the receiver, you can set up a 7.2 channel audio system or use a normal 5.1 set up with the other channels for multiroom audio.

Tabu is a company that makes some very interesting LED light bulbs that are controlled via an app on your smartphone and Bluetooth. The Bulb is green since it uses LEDs that consume less power. The coolest part about the bulb is that you can use the smartphone app to control the color of the light.

With RGB LEDs inside and a fourth white LED, the original Lumen smart bulb can make any color you can think of. Tabu has announced a new project that is on Kickstarter right now. This project is for a smaller version of the original Lumen called the LuMini.

The goal with this smaller light bulb is to be able to fit it inside a lamp or other small fixture where the original couldn't go. Other than the size and the lack of a white LED inside, the LuMini is the same as the original.

If you spend a lot of time on your computer with a lot of tabs or programs open that consume memory, you know you can never have enough RAM. If you use a new round Mac Pro that debuted last year and are in need of a RAM update, a new product has launched you will want to check out.

A company called Transcend has rolled out some new RAM upgrades for the 2013 Mac Pro that can bring the total amount of memory in the machine to 128GB. RAM modules are available in 16GB and 32GB capacity. Apple puts four upgradable RAM slots inside the machine.

Transcend says that while the Mac Pro is advertised to support only 64GB of RAM, it has tested the machine to work with up to 128GB. The 16GB modules are DDR3-1866 units with the 32GB modules being DDR3-1333. Both RAM configurations are RDIMMS and are guaranteed 100% to work with the Mac Pro. Pricing is unannounced at this time.

Of all the tech in my home, the thing I would be least willing to give up is the DVR. I like my DVR even more now that it use a Dish Hopper Whole home DVR. With that DVR, I can watch any show on any TV in the house and it has three tuners for recording lots of stuff at once.

I still have conflicts on occasion with three tuners because we record lots of shows. Dish has announced that the Super Joey that goes with the Hopper Whole Home DVR system is now available. The Super Joey only works with the Hopper DVR and adds two more tuners to the mix.

With the Super Joey, you get a total of five tuners to use. Between those five turners you can record eight shows at once. If you are wondering how that happens, one tuner is dedicated to Primetime shows and they all come across a single feed letting one tuner record four primetime shows at once.

We know that Watch Dogs has been delayed until May this year, with the studio needing more time to work on it. With each day that passes, we're finding out more information on the game - where today, it has been revealed that Ubisoft Montreal was "forced" to unveil the game at E3 2012 by Ubisoft.

Jonathan Morin, Creative Director on Watch Dogs, talked with Edge, where he said: "They forced us to go at E3 2012. Yves [Guillemot, CEO of Ubisoft] was the one who wanted us to go at that E3, even though we felt it was a bit early." Morin believes that the CEO of Ubisoft was actually correct, where he said: "in the end I think he was right."

Dominic Guay, Senior Producer on Watch Dogs, talked with Polygon in a recent interview, where he said that the studio began development on the PC because at the time, the PS4 and Xbox One didn't exist. When referring to the next-gen consoles, he said: "We kind of suspected, maybe, there might be other platforms eventually. So, because we thought that would happen, we chose the PC as our first target to have when we started developing Watch Dogs, so that we [would] have the flexibility to adapt to a different platform."

Unreal Engine 4 is quite a beautiful engine, requiring some heavy hardware to get it running, but running it within a browser? Well, Mozilla has done just that with its Firefox browser.

Mozilla released a video showing Unreal Engine 4 running from its Firefox web browser to demonstrate "the power of the Web as a platform for gaming." The video above shows off Epic Games' "Soul" and "Swing Ninja" demos powered by Unreal Engine 4. These videos mark the first time we've seen UE4 running within a web browser without plugins, and according to the post, the engine is being designed to scale between everything: consoles, mobile devices, PC and of course, the web.

Mozilla's CTO and Senior Vice President of Engineering, Brendan Eich, said: "This technology has reached a point where games users can jump into via a Web link are now almost indistinguishable from ones they might have had to wait to download and install." Epic Games' Tim Sweeney joined in, where he said: "We were blown away by what this Mozilla-pioneered technology achieved with Unreal Engine 3 on the Web, so we had no hesitation in working with Mozilla to port Unreal Engine 4. We believe the Web has a crucial part to play in the future of game development and deployment, and Mozilla has proven it is the catalyst to make this happen."

Razer launched its new Razer Blade and Razer Blade gaming notebooks with

gaming notebook with the new GTX 870M discrete graphics that was launched very recently. The company went ahead and given a 14inch QHD+ IGZO multi-touch panel for its newer generation gaming system.

The new Razer Blade 2014 edition uses i7-4702HQ processor with 8GB DDR3L 1600MHz memory kits and NVIDIA GTX 870M. It uses Intel 7260 2x2 802.11ac Wi-Fi module and with an option to include SATA M.2 drives. The panel is 16:9 aspect ratio with 3200 x 1800 resolution that's found in many high-end notebooks. The previous model has 1600 x 900 paired with NVIDIA GTX 765M. The 'impossibly thin and light' gaming notebook is 2.03kg/ 4.47 lbs heavy.

Actress Shailene Woodley who was considered for the role of Mary Jane in The Amazing Spiderman 2 and is now the star of the upcoming dystopian film series Divergent is back in the news today after voicing a very honest opinion about the Twilight series. In a recent interview with Teen Vogue, Woodley referred to the central plot of the film series Twilight as "unhealthy," and "toxic," and expressed concern about the message the series is sending to adolescents.

When weighing in on Twilight, which is often compared to Divergent since both series have their roots in young adult literature, Woodley told the magazine:

"Twilight, I'm sorry, is about a very unhealthy, toxic relationship. She falls in love with this guy and the second he leaves her, her life is over and she's going to kill herself! What message are we sending to young people? That is not going to help this world evolve."

The Microsoft Windows XP operating system reaches end of support in less than one month, and utility companies face possible security problems. Security experts are most worried about potential service disruptions if cybercriminals successfully compromise XP-based PCs and control centers - and to make matters even more pressing, XP is a major OS used in almost all U.S. gas and electric utilities.

To help offer an additional layer of support, Microsoft will provide "Antimalware signatures and engine for Windows XP users through July 14, 2015." However, cybercriminals are still anxiously awaiting the deadline, when they know home consumers and business users will be susceptible to malware, virus attacks, and other cybercrimes to steal information.

Of reported incidents, the energy sector made up more than half of the Department of Homeland Security industrial control systems cyber emergency response team (ICS-CERT) complaints, with a focus on trying to test network limitations - and steal trade secrets.

Borys Kit of The Hollywood Reporter tweeted the names of potential directors for Marvel's phase three film based on the Marvel Universe character Doctor Strange. Rumors about Doctor Strange coming to the big screen have been flying around for quite some time now, and recently it seems the rumors are becoming reality, which is something Marvel fans are certain to be happy about.

Why all of the excitement for a Doctor Strange film? Well, the answer lies in the character himself:

Doctor Stephen Vincent strange is a Marvel superhero created in the 60's by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. The neurosurgeon gone crime-fighting sorcerer was an active member of the Avengers in the 2010-2013 run of the comic book series The New Avengers, and the founder of the Illuminati, a secret order created to protect planet Earth. The Sorcerer Supreme regularly teams up with other members of the Avengers like Spiderman and Wolverine, and defies the laws of physics when he battles the dark forces that threaten Earth. How could such a dynamic character NOT warrant a feature film?

When Fitbit first announced the recall of its Force fitness tracker, the company was doing so on a voluntary basis, but the recall became official today now that the US Consumer Product Safety Commission is handling things. Being an officially sanctioned recall means that it is now illegal to sell affected devices from this point forward, making transactions of the devices on Craig's List and Ebay illegal as well.

The recall started when dozens of users began reporting skin irritation after prolonged use. Official word seems to be that some of the chemicals used in the manufacturing of the wrist bands are allergens to many people who are in prolonged contact with the bands. About 1 million of the devices have been recalled in the US with another 28,000 being recalled in Canada. Fitbit has released an official statement on the recall which we have posted below.