On April 9th of last year, someone called Iceeey proposed a change to an obscure document written by the federal government’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The document wasn’t that important. It had something to do with transit subsidy requests. And …
Back when Jerry Seinfeld was still a touring comedian, aspiring comic Brad Issac asked him for advice.
Java is on the wane, at least according to one outfit that keeps on eye on the ever-changing world of computer programming languages.
Bob Nystrom is the author of the first programming language that automatically deletes your code if it doesn’t behave the way it’s supposed to. He calls his creation Vigil because it exhibits “external moral vigilance.”
Fifty years ago today, Ivan Sutherland introduced the first graphical computer application: a drafting program called Sketchpad.
This past summer, General Motors announced an initiative to bring 90 percent of its information-technology positions back inside the company. The decision was newsworthy for its creation of US jobs at a time when the country’s economic recovery remained anemic …
The internet was built on TCP/IP, networking protocols originally created by American computer scientists Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn. But Cerf and Kahn were building on the work of Louis Pouzin.
Ubuntu Linux is coming to smartphones. Canonical — the British outfit that oversees Ubuntu — has built a new version of the open source operating system for touch screens, and unlike other smartphone operating systems, it will work as a …
In 2012, we said good bye to a long list of tech titans who pushed our world in new directions — though you may not have known their names. Here, we remember nine of those names. And if you have …
When something called Imageoptimiser said it could improve Erik Michaels-Ober’s software on the GitHub code-sharing website last Sunday, Michaels-Ober wasn’t sure what to make of it. In fact, he was pretty certain that the request had come from an automated …
Last year, RIM — maker of the BlackBerry smartphone line — acquired NewBay, a cloud hosting service, for $100 million. But on Friday, Synchronoss, a mobile software company, announced that it is buying NewBay from RIM for $55 million cash.
Joe Woodland invented the bar code — that collection of lines and numbers used to ring up your groceries every time you visit the supermarket — and after the longtime IBMer passed away earlier this month at the age …
The tech world never ceases to amaze. Sometimes, people build amazing things. And sometimes, the people who build amazing things do other stuff that leaves your jaw on the floor. Some of it’s good. Some of it is oh so …
On the day after Christmas, McAfee posted a long blog post describing how he gave Belizean authorities the slip and snuck out of the country to avoid questioning (and in his estimation, wrongful prosecution) following the murder of his neighbor, …
Chip-maker Marvell has vowed to fight a federal jury verdict that found the company had infringed on patents owned by Carnegie Melon University and awarded the university $1.17 billion in damages — one of the biggest patent awards on record.
Peter Kirstein is the man who put the Queen of England on the internet. In 1976.
Christmas Eve movie streaming was a little bumpy for some Netflix customers, thanks to an outage at Amazon’s North Virginia data centers. The problems started at about 12:30 p.m. Pacific, and it didn’t take long for customers to start reporting …
It all feels so new, doesn’t it? Facebook. FaceTime. Google+ hangouts. Hashtagging your memories on Twitter and Instagram. But this holiday season, as you and your enormous collection of Apple gadgets spend all your extra time connecting with distant friends …
Joe Woodland — who died last week at the age of 91 — is the man who dreamt up what became the Universal Product Code, the ubiquitous bar code used to ring up your groceries every time you visit the …
The massive database that stores top secret information inside the National Security Agency may yet spread to the rest of the U.S. Defense Department and other government agencies, after a change to the proposed Defense Department budget for the coming …
You’ve heard about Apple’s Cupertino spaceship. Now meet the company’s Austin, Texas crash pad.
By day, Benjamin Sloss Treynor is the guy Google hired to make sure its websites never go down. But that’s not his only identity. On another part of the web, Treynor is a kind of automobile-collecting demigod who enjoys the …
Judd Bagley set out to build a web app that would serve up a never-ending stream of news stories tailored to your particular tastes. And he did. It’s called MyCurrent. But in building this clever little app, Bagley also pushed …
The company behind the credit card sized Raspberry Pi mini-computer has launched its very own app store.
Whereas businesses once purchased servers from these big three to store and transport their digital goods, they’re now choosing to make their own servers and data centers. The server industry is being disrupted, and three key trends have evolved …
Google Fiber — the search giant’s brand-new, ultra-high-speed internet service — is only available in Kansas City, and even there, it only runs to homes, so there’s no trying the thing out during a Kansas City hotel stay. But if …
The HP boardroom spying scandal once transfixed the national media. It sparked Congressional hearings and lawsuits, and it changed the law. But it ended on Thursday in a mostly empty San Jose, California courtroom with a three-month conviction for Bryan …
A final chapter in HP’s pretexting scandal is set to end today as the last person facing criminal charges in the case — private investigator Bryan Wagner — is flying in from his Evergreen, Colorado home to be sentenced in …
Jason Wang once bought a home robotics kit. He had studied aircraft design in college and spent years at an electrics engineering outfit, but he still found the instructions completely incomprehensible. And the pieces were flimsy. And after he broke …
On January 2, 1991 a young Helsinki student named Linus Torvalds went shopping for the most badass computer he could afford. He spent FIM 18,000 — about $3,500 — on a gray brick that came with a 33 megahertz processor …