The electric toaster turns 100 this year.  As the UK’s Daily Express newspaper notes, General Electric technician Frank Schailor built a prototype, on a hunch, back in 1909 — 20 years before someone else invented pre-sliced bread! Schailor’s idea was to provide a way for people to make stale bread palatable again. It worked. It [...]

Internet security giant McAfee is treating the Conficker worm’s potential April 1 trigger date as a serious threat, even if other observers are taking a wait-and-see stance and still others are saying that the trigger date embedded in variant ‘C’ of the bug is, itself a hoax to distract researchers around the world who are [...]

Pioneering consumer Internet phone (VoIP) service provider Skype is available on the iPhone today. “The number-one request we get from customers is to make Skype available on iPhone. There’s a pent-up demand,” Skype CEP Scott Durchslag told Reuters news service at the CTIA annual mobile showcase in Las Vegas. Skype already offers versions of its [...]

A researcher at the University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) has successfully built a prototype of a cell phone that can function as a mobile medical lab. Edit Cell phone lab scanner prototype, showing image of a test sample. Actually, it can image the microscopic particles and cells in body fluids and send the [...]

Call it a practical application of social engineering technology… Professor James Murray of Oxford University has devised a mathematical formula which he says is 94 per cent successful in predicting which newly-wed couples will eventually divorce. Murray and his research team filmed more than 700 newlywed couples discussing issues deemed likely to cause stress, such [...]

Microsoft (MS) usually never responds to Apple Inc.’s taunts (in its own advertising), about the quality, security or ease of use of MS’s Windows operating system. But MS is now fighting back on the one issue where it can blow Apple and it’s Macs out of the water: Price. The first of a new series [...]

Cell phone sales are expected to drop by more than eight per cent this year, over last, according to a new IDC thinktank survey. That’s bad news for the major cell handset makers, who are already feeling a major pinch from sagging sales last year. Motorola, Ericsson and other have already announced production cutbacks and [...]

Apple has finally released a promised graphics firmware update for its 17 in. MacBook Pro portable. The 17 in. MacBook Pro — recently released. The patch, announced at Macword back in January, addresses stability issues with the computer’s display. A sigificant number of users reported seeing vertical lines disrupting their screens, after the new 17 [...]

As a security guy, I can’t help but find Skype interesting.  Some people love it, others hate it.  Individuals flock to it, yet many corporations avoid it.  Some privacy advocates herald it, yet some in the open source community slam it.  Oh, and it uses encryption. I don’t remember how it came up, but I [...]

Industry observers are watching closely as a new online game streaming service steps up to challenge the game console industry for supremacy in the gaming sector. OnLive, a start-up backed by WebTV founder Steve Perlman and former Eidos CEO Mike McGarvey, will digitally distribute first-run, ‘AAA’ games, from major developers including Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Ubisoft [...]

Earth Hour will be celebrated tonight, from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. local time, all around the world. People everywhere are being asked to turn off their lights for one hour to dramatize the link between global warming and energy use. A spectator in space viewing Earth from its dark side would, ideally, see a rolling [...]

A major curriculum revamp for British schools reportedly institutes requirements for digital literacy while stripping out traditional requirements for cornerstone subjects including science, history and geography. The proposals, leaked recently to the Guardian newspaper, would dramatically alter not only what British primary school children are taught but how they learn. Instead of learning about the [...]