trends

Fifteen years is a pretty good life span for many pets. Tamagotchi is celebrating the birth of its digital critters with a limited-edition anniversary model.

In case you missed the Tamagotchi craze, they are little egg-shaped gadgets with small screens that house electronic pets. Each one starts from an egg, and has to be fed, cleaned up after, and disciplined as it goes through its virtual lifecycle.

Bandai's Tamagotchi spawned the sale of 78 million units and taught a lot of kids about the virtual joys, tribulations, and sorrows of digital parenthood.

Tamagotchi may be 105 in dog years, but it has learned a few new tricks along the way. The Tamagotchi iD L 15th Anniversary Model features a full-color screen with new characters and games.… Read more

The iPhone topped every celebrity, every natural disaster, every political upheaval to earn the top spot at the most searched term on Yahoo in 2011.

The Yahoo Year In Review list, now in its 10th year, has only once before had a tech gadget come in at No. 1. And that happened in the first year of the review, when Sony's PlayStation 2 topped the chart.

Subsequent years have seen Britney Spears come in first. She actually landed the top spot every year from 2005 to 2008. Michael Jackson took the top spot in 2009. And last year, the … Read more

More proof that Americans are a celebrity-obsessed culture: the Casey Anthony trial beat out Osama Bin Laden's death as the most searched news story of 2011 on Bing.

With a full month left in 2011, Microsoft's Bing released its annual top searches of the year list. As ever, it illustrates how much Americans can't get enough of the our celebs.

Some might take solace in the fact that Kim Kardashian dropped from No. 1 in 2010 to No. 2 in 2011 as the most searched person on Bing. Then again, her replacement at the top of the … Read more

Google has added a new Trends feature to its Google+ search.

Now when Google+ users input a search, the results page's right sidebar displays the top 10 most-popular topics on the social network. Upon clicking one of the trending topics, users will be brought to a page showing all the most recent user updates on the topic. A "best of" option is also available to let users see some of the top posts related to the given topic.

Mashable, which first reported on the update, claims the Trends feature went live last night.

If the feature sounds … Read more

Unless you've been living under a rock (or maybe just don't read tech news) you probably already know that next Tuesday, October 4, is when Apple makes its next major announcement. While the company is tight-lipped as usual, we know that it will probably announce at least one new iPhone and when it plans to launch iOS 5, the operating system that powers the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad.

One of the big known features of the new iOS is Twitter integration. Apple generally does a great job of creating intuitive interfaces for just about everything and what we've learned of Twitter on the iPhone sounds great, as you'll be able to tweet directly from Safari, Photos, YouTube, and Camera. But if you're a serious Twitter user, you're still going to need a third-party app to get all that Twitter has to offer.… Read more

Trend Micro overhauled its security suites last year to great success. The company changed everything about the programs, from introducing a cloud-based detection engine on up through an interface with fast transitions and even the name, rebranding the suites as Trend Micro Titanium. Available exclusively today from CNET Download.com, this year's Titanium Maximum Security 2012 (download), Titanium Internet Security 2012 (download), and Titanium AntiVirus Plus 2012 (download) offer far fewer and far less dramatic changes, but they do include some improvements that ought to keep the suite competitive.

In addition to last year's Smart Protection Network, which … Read more

A new flavor of Android malware is disguising itself as a Google+ app in an attempt to capture instant messages, GPS, location, call logs, and other sensitive data.

Uncovered by the team at Trend Micro, the new malware known as ANDROIDOS_NICKISPY.C can also automatically answer and record phone calls. To capture data, the app loads at boot-up and runs certain services that can monitor messages, phone calls, and the user's location, thereby stealing e-mail and other content.

Detailing its findings in a blog Friday, Trend Micro said it discovered that the malicious app tries to trick people by installing itself under the name Google++.

But instead of providing access to Google's new social network, the app sends its stolen user data to a remote site where presumably cybercriminals can grab it. Unlike some malware in the past that masqueraded as legitimate apps through Google's Android Market, this particular one must be downloaded by an unsuspecting user from a malicious Web site and then manually installed.

And even if installed, the app can be uninstalled from an Android device by selecting Settings > Application > Manage applications, choosing Google++ and then clicking Uninstall, according to Trend Micro.

Trend Micro gives the app a low-risk rating, but it's still something that Android owners should be sure to avoid.

Android users concerned about security can learn how to better protect themselves through Trend Micro's online guide "5 Simple Steps to Secure Your Android-Based Smartphones."… Read more

The explosion of social media has given researchers a lot of data to mine and trends to identify, but two computer scientists at Johns Hopkins University say they've developed sophisticated filtering software that is attracting particular attention from public health officials.

Twitter, which launched five years ago, has already been used by computer scientists to try to track the flu.

But when Johns Hopkins University computer scientists Mark Dredze and Michael Paul devised a method to filter and categorize health-related tweets, they weren't sure what they might find. So they decided to sort the tweets (they filtered 1.… Read more

Yahoo is beefing up its search trending tools to better take on Web giant Google.

The Web pioneer yesterday relaunched Yahoo Clues, a trending service that allows users to see what other people are searching for on the Web. Originally launched last November, the new page has been expanded beyond the previous single-page version to include information on searches executed not only in the U.S. but globally. Also, a new map shows where the searches are originating from on both a global and local scale.

The company has added a new feature called Top Trends that allows people to … Read more