Category: TECH

More IPv4 exhaustion alerts as ICANN address pool dwindles

The impending exhaustion of the IPv4 address space has been raised as an issue once more by ICANN, as it begins allocating the remaining blocks of addresses to the five Regional Internet Registries (RIRs). According to ICANN, this move signals that the global supply of IPv4 addresses is now reaching a critical level. With more and more devices coming online, especially with new trends such as the Internet of Things, the demand for IP addresses continues to rise, and IPv4 is incapable of supplying enough to meet demand, ICANN said.…

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Email exchanges between NSA and Google executives reveal far cozier relationship

Email exchanges between National Security Agency Director Gen. Keith Alexander and Google executives Sergey Brin and Eric Schmidt suggest a far cozier working relationship between some tech firms and the U.S. government than was implied by Silicon Valley brass after last year’s revelations about NSA spying. Disclosures by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden about the agency’s vast capability for spying on Americans’ electronic communications prompted a number of tech executives whose firms cooperated with the government to insist they had done so only when compelled by a court of law.…

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Tablet adoption in EU-5 to surpass 100 million this year

Mobile Apps

Tablet adoption in the EU-5 continues to rise steadily, and according to new eMarketer estimates, the region’s tablet user base will surpass 100 million by the end of 2014. By 2018, more than 146 million people will use a tablet at least once per month. More than half of all users in the region—52.3 million people—will reside in the UK or Germany, the EU-5’s largest tablet markets. France also has a significant tablet audience, with 22.8 million users, or 22.5% of the total. Italy and Spain will have smaller tablet…

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Big Data: Five things Big Data Experts warned Obama about

The rise of big data techniques poses risks to society that call for new laws, a White House report concludes When President Obama spoke in January about reforming U.S. surveillance, he also asked a panel of experts to spend 90 days investigating the potential consequences of the use of technology that falls under the umbrella term “big data.” The 68-page report was published today and repeatedly emphasizes that big data techniques can advance the U.S. economy, government, and public life. But it also spends a lot of time warning of…

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Heartbleed bug hit list, Why you need to change your password now

Staff Writer

An encryption flaw called the Heartbleed bug is already being called one of the biggest security threats the Internet has ever seen. The bug has affected many popular websites and services — ones you might use every day, like Gmail and Facebook — and could have quietly exposed your sensitive account information (such as passwords and credit card numbers) over the past two years. But it hasn’t always been clear which sites have been affected. Mashable reached out to various companies included on a long list of websites that could…

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Critical ‘homework’ before the U.S. relinquishes stewardship of ICANN

Staff Writer

The Department of Commerce announced on March 14 that it will give up its last bit of control of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) in 2015. As is often the case with government decisions announced late on a Friday, this decision is controversial. The U.S. has exercised light oversight of ICANN since it established the organization and emphasized the need for a free and open Internet. Other nations do not share America’s perspective and have sought repeatedly to work through U.N. organizations such as the International…

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Microsoft Office for iPad, How it all started

Staff Writer

Han-Yi Shaw didn’t like what he saw, and he told Microsoft so. The software giant, by Shaw’s reckoning, didn’t really understand Apple’s platform or how to develop Office for it. Shaw told Microsoft exactly what he thought — and the company responded by agreeing to all of his changes, then hiring him. That was more than a decade ago. Today, Shaw heads up Microsoft’s Office Design Studio and is the architect of one of the tech giant’s most important innovations in years: Office for iPad. The product is available now…

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BNA on Internet transition by US Ambassador Sepulveda and US DoC Assistant Secretary Strickling

Celebrating and Protecting the Global Internet By Ambassador Daniel Sepulveda, Deputy Assistant Secretary and U.S. Coordinator for International Communications and Information Policy, U.S. Department of State & Lawrence E. Strickling, Assistant Secretary for Communications and Information and Administrator, National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), U.S. Department of Commerce   The U.S. government, working through the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), has played a critical role in the stewardship of the Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS).  But now is the time to transition that role, based on the success and maturation of the multistakeholder…

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Edward Snowden: The Biggest Revelations Are Yet to Come

Staff Writer

VANCOUVER, Canada — Edward Snowden on Tuesday said the biggest revelations have yet to come out of the estimated 1.7 million documents he acquired from the National Security Agency. In a surprise appearance via satellite robot at the 2014 TED conference in Vancouver, Snowden said there is still a lot of reporting to be done, including diving deeper into the accusation that the NSA tricks companies into building backdoors into their systems that make data vulnerable to hackers across the world. “Is it really terrorism that we’re stopping? I say…

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Aereo’s CEO Chet Kanojia has the TV Industry Scared To Death

Staff Writer

CBS Threatens To Cut Off Broadcast Signal If Aereo Wins Aereo, a company that lets you stream live network TV (NBC, ABC, Fox, PBS, etc.) to your computer, smartphone or tablet, is gearing up for a big Supreme Court battle this spring with those networks that could dismantle the startup. The networks claim Aereo violates copyright by allowing customers to record TV shows in a virtual DVR that lets you stream shows later to your device. Aereo charges $8 per month to use the service and it’s available in a handful…

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