Latest Technology News

I'm going to let you in on a little secret.

When Duke Nukem 3D came out, I thought it was stupid.

There has been a dramatic change in the Betanews poll asking readers if they would buy a Chrome OS laptop. The number for respondents answering "No" dropped significantly, while the yeses and maybes are way up. That's all just today. What does it mean?

The first Chromebooks went on sale today, from Acer and Samsung, ranging in price from $379.99 to $499.99. About seven hours ago, I posted the obligatory launch day story and included the buying-intention poll first posted six days ago. During the first days the poll was up, more than 85 percent of respondents said "No" to Chromebook. When I posted the earlier-day's story, the number was 69.4 percent, from 562 respondents. The number answering "Yes" was 11.57 percent, while 19.04 percent answered "Maybe."

One day after opening a hotline to take requests for its next hacking target, black hat security group LulzSec appears to have taken down the website belonging to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA.)

The image above is from the group's Twitter feed just about half an hour ago, CIA.gov remains unreachable (Error 7 (net::ERR_TIMED_OUT): The operation timed out.) from our location in Maryland (others claim to see no change to the site.)

There was some buzz earlier today -- wild speculation, really -- about when Microsoft would release its next major operating system. Let's skip over the rumors and get right to the important stuff: what matters to you. So I'm asking: When do you want Windows 8?

The immediate answer many people might expect is now. Sure there are enthusiasts who can't wait to get their grubby hands on the software's pristine packaging. But there are many other Windows users who would wait longer. For many reasons.

After initially surging out of the gate to $26 in early morning trading, Pandora's highly anticipated IPO ended giving up much of its gains by the close of trading on Wednesday. At the close, Pandora was only up $1.42 -- about 8.9 percent -- from its IPO price of $16 per share.

The music service's results were drastically different than that of LinkedIn, which saw its shares more than double in its first day of trading last month. It should be noted though that the social networking site's shares have given back about half of those gains, but are still trading some 65 percent above its IPO price.

With Android 2.3.4, Google equipped its Google Talk app with video and voice chat support, which became a banner feature for the Nexus S on T-Mobile. Unfortunately, in May, T-Mobile began to block users from connecting to video chat over their 3G/4G connections, and only allowed users to connect while on Wi-Fi.

Meanwhile, T-Mobile's Video Chat by Qik, which lets users video chat over 3G, remains exclusive to the myTouch 4G, GalaxyTab, Dell Streak 7, Vibrant 4G, Sidekick 4G, and G2x.

iolo has released version 10.5 of System Mechanic, its comprehensive system maintenance and performance tool. Version 10.5 adds two major new tools to System Mechanic's armory: Designated Drivers and SSD Accelerator. You also receive a comprehensive whole-home license, which covers all the PCs in a single household.

System Mechanic 10.5 also promises enhanced and improved versions of existing components, specifically Tune-up Definitions, DriveAccelerator, Memory Mechanic and -- Professional version only -- Secure Online Backup, which now offers 5GB of free online backup space. In addition to these major improvements, version 10.5 includes "hundreds" of minor improvements too.

Facebook is moving beyond its flagship mobile application, reportedly preparing to release a photo sharing application for the iPhone, TechCrunch reported on Wednesday. The site obtained about 50MB of images and documents detailing the social networking site's plans.

Photos on Facebook are a big deal: about 6 billion photos are uploaded to the site every month, and it currently hosts about 100 billion images in total. That's a whole lot of photos, and plenty for an app like the one Facebook's planning to start out with.

Today begins the great Google experiment. Will people really buy into the cloud?

On Sale Today

Mobile advertising company Millennial Media on Wednesday released a report that says MP3 players and gaming devices are still better vehicles for delivering in-app mobile ads than tablets such as the iPad, even though tablets have exploded in popularity over the last year.

It's Millennial's first Mobile Mix Report that counts mobile ad impressions on non-phone devices, and it appears that non-smartphone app consumption is still completely dominated by the iPod touch. 70% of impressions in the "connected devices" category (which itself makes up 16% of the total impressions) came from Mobile Gaming Devices/MP3 Players, which includes the iPod touch and Sony PSP, among other things.

Network hardware company Black Box announced on Wednesday a new line of 802.11n wireless access points for enterprise which utilize a cloud-based management system, eliminating the need for physical WLAN controllers and opening up IT to remote administration.

The service is called SmartPath, and when a new access point is connected, it hooks up with the SmartPath Enterprise Management System (EMS), Black Box's $99 per year cloud-based subscription management service, and automatically discovers nearby access points that it will be working with. By doing this, each access point does not need to be connected to a central wireless network controller.

Fire up your copy of Firefox and what are you greeted by? The last tabs you had open? A blank page? The Google search page? All of these are useful options, but EIGHT offers something a little different. It is basically a browser start page, in itself nothing new, but it takes inspiration from the look of Windows 8, giving your browser a clean and uncluttered feel while providing access to useful links.

Out of the box, EIGHT includes a series of tiles that link to various popular web sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google et al, as well as a search field. But no such tool is going to prove too popular if it cannot be customized -- one size rarely fits all, after all. Thankfully, providing you are happy to get your hands dirty in a little (albeit simple) coding, EIGHT can be tweaked and customized in whatever way you like.

Apple's iOS devices may have something of a stranglehold on the mobile market, but for anyone that has tired of the iPhone and iPad's dominance, the ever-increasing range of Android devices is something to be welcomed. Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 brought a new player to the arena and, as is customary with operating systems, there have been endless comparisons between Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7. Launcher 7 is a free utility for Android users who like the way their device works but are taken in by the look of Windows Phone 7.

The app is a combination of a skin and a launcher tool, and it closely mimics the Windows Phone approach with its interface. The app breaks the screen up into a series of tiles that can be used to house all manner of shortcuts. The main screen provides access to common features such as the dialer for your phone, displays information about your inbox and much more. As you would expect, the function and look of each of the tiles can be completely customized.

LulzSec has started crowdsourcing its nefarious online activities by opening a request line for future assaults.

Yesterday, the hotline number went out via LulzSec's Twitter account: "Call into 614-LULZSEC and pick a target and we'll obliterate it. Nobody wants to mess with The Lulz Cannon -- take aim for us, twitter. #FIRE." I called the number today. There's something there. I didn't leave a take-down request.

In what is an embarrassing oversight for Citigroup, attackers that got away with information on over 200,000 credit card holders only needed to make a change in the string of the URL itself. This means that as long as you had the account number, you would be able to access all personal data associated with that particular account.

Citigroup should consider itself lucky that more customers did not have their accounts compromised. How the hackers got the credit card numbers themselves is not clear yet, but the vulnerability allowed them to jump among accounts automatically by just being logged in and running a script.