Latest Technology News

There are plenty of tools available to help you calculate file hashes, but using them may not always be convenient. You’ll need to load the application, import your files, choose appropriate options, export the hashes, maybe more.

If you get tired of all this, though, you could always install the free HashTab, which makes life much easier. Just right-click a file, select Properties > File Hashes, and maybe copy your hash of choice to the clipboard in a couple of clicks.

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The Pope may be making news headlines in the tech world by opening his own Twitter account, but there's a much more worrying headline that is keeping its nose under the covers this week. The Internet as we know it could be in trouble if representatives from free-speech oppressors such as China and Russia have their way at a UN telecom regulations conference starting this week in Dubai.

The 11-day conference is billed as a gathering of the world's top nations to discuss ways to update rules last touched in 1988 on oversight related to telephone networks, satellite networks, and the Internet at large. Proponents of the conference say that the Internet has changed so radically since the 1980s that it is now time for others to have greater say in how it's regulated and controlled.

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Microsoft would like everyone on the planet to adopt Office 365 and in doing so, move to subscription pricing. Customers get access to their stuff anytime, anywhere and on anything, while Microsoft sees consistent revenue stream and everyone using the newest features. But that's not happening soon. So for the majority of businesses presumably continuing with what the company describes as "on-premises versions", Office 2013 desktop and server software is now available for purchase.

Office 2013, Exchange Server 2013, Lync Server 2013, SharePoint Server 2013, Project 2013 and Visio 2013 are immediately available to volume-license subscribers. Everyone else must wait. "Broad availability of the new Office through retail and online channels is planned for the first quarter of 2013", Microsoft's Sanjay Manchanda says. The company released a trial version to MSDN and TechNet subscribers.

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Iolo technologies has released System Mechanic 11.5, the latest edition of its flagship PC maintenance and optimization suite.

And the company points to the new Guided Recommendations as the highlight of this build, claiming they “harness the collective intelligence of the entire System Mechanic community base”, in particular when helping to figure out exactly which startup tools you need to run, and which you can safely do without.

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In a new report released under the Maverick Research brand on Monday, IT market research company Gartner said the Capitalist structure as we know it is being threatened by "Web-inspired values."

The next generation of workers, the study suggests, will have a more democratic and egalitarian approach to decision making, and the increasing gap between the elites and the "99 percent" will have to be bridged with new social technology.

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Microsoft recently announced 40 million Windows 8 licenses through the end of November 2012. The verdict is not in yet if that is a big, an okay, or disappointing number. It is also not clear what is meant by that. Are the 40 million licenses retail sales or business to business sales? Or both?

We need to look elsewhere for now to evaluate the success of the operating system.

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The iPad's flagship newspaper is finished. Today News Corp. promised what some of us in the media long hoped for. Big boss Rupert Murdoch will take The Daily out back of the barn and shoot it in the head on December 15, putting the godawful digital rag, its editors and the few readers out of their misery. Thus ends the iPad's big, publishing experiment. In ruins.

What a mess it is, too. News Corp. spent $30 million just to launch The Daily, which debuted in February 2011 on iPad. Apple joined the revelry that made the then less-than-year-old device seemingly legitimate -- a truly compelling platform for digital publishing. But News Corp's. digital newspaper stumbled right at the start. Early users complained about constant crashes and slow updates. The Daily promised ongoing content updates to the app, but they proved to be too much -- even after new versions released. Fundamentally, however, The Daily's failure is about editorial content.

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"Merry Christmas". Those were the two words that Neil Papworth, an engineer in the United Kingdom, sent to Vodafone's Richard Jarvis. The world has come a long way since that very first text message sent on December 3, 1992. With that simple holiday greeting the world changed and a generation of kids began to cause headaches for their parents in a whole new way.

There are lots of numbers and statistics out there surrounding the amount of messages sent, the data costs of SMS, and every other subject under the sun. I won't waste your time with a bunch of boring numbers though. What's much more interesting is the many creative uses that texting has been put to, and the funny and memorable stories that surround the technology.

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Android devices from Verizon Wireless are known among the modding community as fairly restrictive when it comes to rooting or unlocking the bootloader. The Samsung Galaxy Note II, now available at the big red, is no exception, but the controversial smartphone can be modded to run apps using elevated privileges, with plans to unlock the bootloader as well.

The process is fairly simple to carry out and can enrich the software experience by allowing users to perform otherwise restricted tasks, such as disabling carrier-branded apps or making full-system backups. In order to unlock the modding gates on the Galaxy Note II, Odin, the Samsung driver, and a modded stock image with elevated rights enabled must be downloaded. Then "system.img" has to be extracted from the stock image and used in the flashing tool to finally get root up and running. But what about the bootloader?

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If you live in the Dublin area, or are looking to move there, cloud storage service Dropbox may have a job for you. This morning the company announced it will be opening its first foreign office and has chosen Dublin, Ireland as the location. Until now, despite having customers in more than 200 different countries, the company's operations were all handled via its offices in San Francisco.

Aside from the obvious job creation benefits, Mitra Lohrasbpour writes that there will be numerous upsides for customers as well, including user support in more languages and extended hours of support for Dropbox for Teams.

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Pope Benedict XVI sent his first tweet last year via the Vatican's official Twitter account but now he's got his own personal account and plans to start telling followers what he had for dinner, posting communion wafer recipes, and retweeting comments from the likes of Ricky Gervais and Kayne West.

Well, maybe not. His account @pontifex (meaning both pontiff and "builder of bridges") will actually be used to send spiritual messages translated into eight languages (English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, and Arabic), and he'll likely be agreeing with the message rather than composing it himself.

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Smartphones and tablets can take on many roles, like delivering recipes in the kitchen to beginner chefs or entertaining owners with kitten videos during their commute. However, the very same devices can also be used to control PCs through an Android app like WiFi Mouse.

As the name might suggest, the app allows green droid smartphones and tablets to operate as wireless mice, that can be connected to a Mac OS X or Windows PC. The interface is fairly simple to use as it employs a classical three-button layout, with a scroll wheel in the middle, and touchpad-like surface. Even though modern mobile devices come with motion sensors, WiFi Mouse still sticks to the tried-and-true touchscreen interface, which is more accurate, to move the cursor around.

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Popular blogging site Tumblr is reportedly in the grips of a rapidly auto-reposting worm similar to the one that struck Twitter two years ago.

The worm's main symptom is a message from GNAA, a group of hackers whose exclusive purpose seems to be "annoyance warfare" and trolling. When users click on an infected Tumblr and they're logged in, the message is automatically reposted on their own page. Here is the message that hacked sites display: (WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE)

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When Motorola introduced the Droid Razr HD and Droid Razr Maxx HD for Verizon Wireless there was one major feature missing from the spec sheet -- Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. Three months later, the big red finally announced that the two smartphones will be upgraded to the first Jelly Bean iteration starting this week.

The software update for the Droid Razr HD and Droid Razr Maxx HD comes in at a fairly significant 276MB in size and it bears the "9.1.41.XT926.Verizon.en.US" moniker. Users should expect a customized Android 4.1 Jelly Bean experience with the typical Motorola add-ons and Verizon-branded apps. Some of the most significant changes introduced by the upgrade include better voice search capability through Google Now, expandable notifications, revised keyboard and an overall improved responsiveness due to Project Butter.

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Less than a month after it debuted the public beta, German developer TeamViewer GBMH has released the first stable version of its cross-platform, free-for-personal-use remote support, presentation and file-sharing tool, TeamViewer 8.0.16447 FINAL.

The latest release combines new features -- including multi-touch gestures, Mac Retina displays and the ability to record both sound and video during a remote session -- with “visibly improved” performance improvements.

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