Latest Technology News

Back in April Amazon released 14 original TV shows, exclusive to Prime customers. The company, through its video production studio, promised to take the most popular of these and turn them into series. The viewers spoke, and now the retail giant today announces those results.

Five of the original 14 pilots have been accepted -- Alpha House, Betas, Annebots, Creative Galaxy and Tumbleaf all make the final cut. Meanwhile, one of the hot favorites, Zombieland, was not picked up. It became much less popular after customers actually watched it.

On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook appeared for the second time at the D: All Things Digital conference. The interview, lead by perennial hosts Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, mostly centered around the current state and the future of the fruit company, but also briefly touched other popular topics like Android and wearable technology.

Tim Cook, who wears a Nike+ FuelBand, says that "wearables [the category] is extremely interesting" and capable of deeply impacting people's lives. The man, however, asserts that folks are reluctant to wear things that they don't normally do, giving glasses as an example. For this reason, he believes that products like Google Glass don't appeal to most users and are only attractive to "vertical markets".

A few years ago, if you wanted to join a website you had to create a brand new account, enter your email address and come up with yet another password to try and remember. That’s all changed of course and now you can log into a vast amount of sites using existing credentials for services like Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Today, Amazon adds itself to the list of services you can use to gain access to other sites with the introduction of Login with Amazon.

Although Microsoft has yet to officially reveal the price of its next generation games console, Amazon has decided to set the figure at £599.99 on its pre-order page.

This is considerably higher than most people would have expected -- closer to £400 would have been a reasonable guess -- and dwarfs the launch price of the Xbox 360 which cost gamers £209.99 for the core system back in December 2005.

On Wednesday, Microsoft's Japanese arm revealed that on June 6 the Surface Pro tablet will finally be available in the land of the rising sun. The fondleslab is set to arrive in two different trims with 128 GB and 256 GB of internal storage, the latter of which is offered for the first time on the Surface Pro.

The 64 GB Surface Pro will not be available in the local market, likely due to the fact that users can access just 23 GB of storage (practically less than half of the advertised capacity). Microsoft took heavy fire for this caveat, which it appears to avoid in Japan. Prospective buyers can also grab Touch Covers with different design themes, a move that the company carried over from other supported markets.

153,000 iPhone and iPod owners are in line for a payout from Apple after the company agreed to a $53 million settlement to a 2010 lawsuit. The class action suit concerned malfunctioning devices that the Cupertino, Calif. based company claimed had been damaged after coming into contact with water.

A "liquid damage policy" allowed Apple to deny warranty coverage if the liquid indicator inside the device changed color from white to pink or red, "proving" contact with water.

These days, the ability to browse the web anonymously is built into most web browsers. Firefox has a special Private Browsing mode where no trace of your history -- including searches, downloads, web forms and cookies -- is kept, although any downloaded files and bookmarks will remain as evidence of your secret browsing session.

It’s certainly more robust than a general browsing session, but it’s not as secure as it might be. That explains the reasoning behind Private Browsing by PortableApps.com 3.0, a free add-on for Firefox Portable Edition for Windows.

Google gets a lot of attention for its Street View adventures -- it's travelled from the Great Barrier Reef to the Grand Canyon -- but Microsoft is not taking this lying down. The software giant has teamed up with David Breashears and his non-profit, GlacierWorks, to scale the heights of the Himalayas.

The IE10 team, Microsoft Research, and the developers at Pixel Lab have come together to create a multi-touch experience that allows users to explore the work of David Breashears, who has spent considerable time exploring and photographing the world's tallest mountain chain.

Multifunction printers have many useful features, but the ability to work as a photocopier has to be one of the best. Place your document on the scanner, click the Copy button, and a duplicate should appear in just a few seconds.

You don’t have to miss out on this kind of convenience just because you’ve a separate printer and scanner, though. Grab a copy of iCopy and the program will combine your devices into a straightforward yet very capable photocopier.

We all know that the internet is home to illegal software, music, movies and much more. It may seem like an impossible task to put figures to piracy levels, but a report by Ofcom, the independent regulator for the communications industries in the UK, has done just that. The Online Copyright Infringement Tracker report found that a staggering 30 percent of regular downloaders of media did so illegally.

The report looked at the period from November 2012 to January 2013 and analyzed UK consumption of online music, film, TV programmes, books, games and software. Compared to the previous three months, the percentage of web users accessing any of this type of content increased from 57 percent to 60 percent.

EaseUS Software has released EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Free and EaseUS Todo Backup 6.0 Workstation, major new versions of its image- and file-based backup tool. Version 6.0 adds support for recovering individual files from partitions, while WorkStation users also gain tools for simplifying migration between physical and virtual machines.

The major new feature affecting all users is support for recovering selected files from image-based backups. Previously users could only recover entire partitions or disks, but now users can either recover individual files using the Recovery wizard, or mount the image as a virtual drive for browsing and extracting files.

Few are those who still profess a bright future for PCs and, starting today, even fewer will. According to IDC's latest forecast, in 2013 the PC market is expected to take another dive with shipments dropping by 7.8 percent. This is triggered by a shift in computing needs as users look for more versatility and less raw power.

"As the market develops, usage patterns and devices are evolving", says IDC program vice president Loren Loverde. "Many users are realizing that everyday computing, such as accessing the Web, connecting to social media, sending emails, as well as using a variety of apps, doesn't require a lot of computing power or local storage". Naysayers, it's time to face the music -- the average user can get away with a tablet or smartphone to get the job done.

If you’d like to automatically run an antivirus scan at a particular time, or maybe defragment your hard drive, then it’s usually very easy. And that’s because security packages and defrag tools almost always include a scheduling option, which allows them to carry out some preferred action even when you’re not around.

Most programs don’t have this kind of feature, unfortunately, but automating them may still be possible, with just a little help from System Scheduler.

On July 1 Google pulls the plug on Reader and, like many other users, I have decided not to be caught unprepared by its rapidly-approaching demise. Shortly after the search giant revealed its execution plans I migrated all my RSS feeds to Feedly, telling myself "OK, now's the time to move on". Skip forward a couple of months and Reader is still open in a Chrome tab.

I can't really move on. The RSS feed aggregator holds a very special place in my heart as I rely on it every single day to write news stories and catch up on things that I'm passionate about. It's like the perfect relationship except for that one tiny detail (huge actually) -- the expiration date is near.

The Best Windows 8 Launcher, from PRR Apps, is a new app designed to bring the Windows 8 Modern UI experience to Android devices.

It offers two modes -- tablet and mobile -- with full screen support and is highly customizable. There are 150 downloadable images of apps you can use as tile backgrounds, as well as 50 Windows 8 style icons, and widget and live wallpaper support.