allen

Every year, Apple's chief executive is invited to the Allen & Co. summer retreat for media executives. And each year, Apple declines. But this time around, Tim Cook has done quite the opposite.

Cook was spotted in Sun Valley, Idaho, home to the Allen & Co. retreat, where he briefly spoke with reporters. He told the New York Times' Dealbook that he's "looking forward to all the private discussions" he set up for this week, and reported to the New York Post that he's "talking to a lot of people here." When pressed … Read more

It's hard not to be affected by an article titled "Kids Raped, Sodomized on Facebook Pages," the first of a four-part WND series about child porn and Facebook.

The article alleges that the blog "located dozens of child porn images after 'friending' many likely pedophiles and predators who trade thousands of pornographic photos on the social network."

Unlike legal "adult pornography," child porn depicts sexual exploitation of children, in some cases very young children. Child porn is illegal in the United States and many other countries. Anyone who knowingly produces, transmits, stores, or … Read more

Google will no doubt come up with slick iterations of Motorola's hot Droid Razr mobile phone. And it may someday use the Motorola brand to launch a new tablet.

But make no mistake, Google is picking up Motorola to get its hands on the company's vast patent portfolio.

So says Allen Lo, Google's new deputy general counsel. Lo, who oversees Google's patent law group, joined the Web giant in January from Juniper Networks, where he was associate counsel. Prior to that, Lo was in private practice as an intellectual property lawyer, and he worked for three … Read more

With more than 280 different language editions of Wikipedia often sharing data elements like people's birth dates and definitions, there has never been a single central data repository from which each version could pull such information. Until now.

Today, the German chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation pulled back the wraps on Wikidata, a project that is aiming to be a single common source of structured data that can be used across all versions of Wikipedia. By December, that should allow editors of each individual language version of a Wikipedia article to pull data from that repository rather than adding … Read more

It can't be that easy to call up a bank and pretend to be someone famous. Or can it?

Perhaps it can, if allegations leveled against 28-year-old Brandon Price are proven to be true. For he stands accused of persuading a Citibank customer service representative that he had, indeed, co-founded Microsoft and was now changing his address from Seattle to Pennsylvania.

The way the Associated Press identifies the story, Price allegedly managed to have a debit card sent to a Pittsburgh address. His intention was allegedly to pay loans that were past due, as well as other expenses.

Indeed, … Read more

Google+ has captured more than 62 million users, at least according to one "unofficial" count.

Chiming in with his own Google+ post yesterday, Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen reported the latest numbers as of December 27.

Running queries on different surnames to gauge the number of total users, Allen and his team found a surge in daily signups over the past several weeks. Around 625,000 new users have been hopping aboard the social network each day, which means almost a quarter of all Google+ users joined in December alone.

Assuming that rate continues, … Read more

Billionaire Paul Allen today announced his grand ambition for the next generation of manned space travel: the largest aircraft ever built, which would be capable of orbital missions with quick turnarounds, greater safety, and better cost-effectiveness than anything previously launched.

At a press conference this morning in Seattle, Allen--a co-founder of Microsoft--along with Burt Rutan unveiled their new company, Stratolaunch Systems. Allen and Rutan previously collaborated on the creation of SpaceShipOne, which won the Ansari X Prize for being the first privately funded spacecraft to leave the Earth's atmosphere.

Now, Allen and Rutan are at it again, and at … Read more

After opening its doors to the public last Tuesday, Google+ may now have more than as 43 million users.

So says Ancestry.com co-founder and Google+ unofficial statistician Paul Allen, who's been keeping a running tally of how big the social network is growing.

Compiling his regular series of stats based on surnames used around the world, Allen said last Thursday that Google+ witnessed a 30 percent jump in users in the … Read more

The sun is throwing out magnetic storms that could disrupt your GPS, your cell phone signals, and maybe even cause soda machines to kill you in extremely violent 1980s movie style. Just ... Google it. In other news, the World Wide Web turned 20 this weekend, the kids of today are learning to be hackers at DefCon, and if you buy virtual gold instead of earning it, the terrorists win. No, really, that's actually kind of true.