Royal Canadian Mint challenges software developers to help create innovative new applications for digital payment with their MintChip Challenge. The incentive is payment of over two pounds of pure gold, spread out over seven different prize categories that include Best Micropayment Application, Best P2P (person to person) Application, and three Best Overall Application awards. All […]
U.S. District Judge Robert Blackburn has tossed out a 2010 Colorado law meant to pressure online retailers to collect sales tax. In his ruling, Blackburn claims the law and regulations required to carry it out “impose an undue burden on interstate commerce” and are unconstitutional. The law was part of a package of Democratic-backed legislation […]
Researcher Ashley Podhradsky from Dakota State University, along with colleagues Rob D’Ovidio and Cindy Casey at Drexel University, claim Microsoft isn’t doing enough to protect personal user information. In a recent experiment, they purchased a refurbished Xbox 360 from an authorized reseller and used a readily available modding tool to access folders and files on […]
Netflix announces one more solution to the complaint that “there’s nothing intelligent to watch on TV” with the addition of streaming TEDTalks. The TED conferences are private events organized by the nonprofit organization Sapling Foundation. Entry fees are as high as $7,500 to attend. TED conferences started in 1984 to bring together people from three […]
British researcher Mark Gasson became the first person to infect himself with a computer virus and spread the infection to a machine, in the name of science. To be fair, this isn’t a case of human flesh actually contracting a virus made of software code. The Senior Research Fellow at the University of Reading pulled […]
Purchasers of Apple’s latest revision of the iPad report many issues using them with various covers and cases on the market. Even some of Apple’s own smart covers aren’t immune. According to their support forums, Apple modified the design specification of their smart covers some time in 2011, changing the model numbers at the same […]
Not to be outdone by startup company Square, Inc.’s popular credit card processing service for the masses, PayPal introduces PayPal Here. The new service, announced just last week, reports over 1,000 new signups per hour. Unlike Square’s service, which requires a plastic cube-shaped dongle to swipe credit cards through (with an option of manually keying […]
On Tuesday, Adobe released the fourth revision of their popular Lightroom product for photo editing and organizing. For $149 (only $79 if you’re a student or purchasing an upgrade from a previous version), Lightroom 4 adds basic video editing capabilities and an improved photo editing interface. Sliders default to the zero position in the middle, […]
Websites everywhere are voicing issues over a new electronic gun designed by Kazutaka Kurihara of the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology and Koji Tsukada of Ochanomizu University in Japan. The SpeechJammer records the speech of targeted individuals and blasts their own voice back at them with a .2 second delay. This results […]
After the Washington D.C. election board announced a new e-voting system for absentee ballots in 2010, they invited the computer security community and general public to try hacking it, several weeks before using it in a real election. Professor Alex Halderman of the University of Michigan felt “It was too good an opportunity to pass […]
