computers

European data stored in the "cloud" could be acquired and inspected by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies, despite Europe's strong data protection laws, university researchers have suggested.

A research paper written by legal experts at the University of Amsterdam's Institute for Information Law and titled "Cloud Computing in Higher Education and Research Institutions and the USA Patriot Act" supports previous reports that the antiterror Patriot Act could theoretically be used by U.S. law enforcement to bypass strict European privacy laws to acquire citizen data within the European Union.

The Patriot Act, … Read more

Apple CEO Tim Cook has confirmed what rumors have been suggesting in recent days: Apple is moving some Mac production to the U.S.

Speaking to Bloomberg in an interview published today, Cook said that factories in the U.S. will handle "some" of the Mac production currently being handled internationally. The production will ramp up in 2013.

"We've been working on this for a long time, and we were getting closer to it," Cook said of the production. "It will happen in 2013. We're really proud of it. We could have quickly … Read more

iTunes 11 is finally here. I hear that it's a step in the right direction, correcting many of the missteps and redundancies that have crept into the bloated software over the years.

But I can't really give you a full opinion on iTunes 11 because I really haven't spent that much time with it on a personal level.

That's because I don't use my Mac for media.… Read more

Apple's newly redesigned iMacs are now available for order.

Apple has started selling the 21.5-inch model today both online and in its stores. As of this writing, Apple is saying that online buyers will have their 21.5-inch model shipped out in one to three business days. The 27-inch model is a bit of a different story. Although customers can preorder the 27-inch option today, Apple's site currently lists its ship date as two to three weeks.

At the flagship 5th Avenue Apple Store in New York City, the new iMac was an invisible presence at 8:… Read more

While many of us plug away on monotone-colored keyboards, creative folks at Sony continue to push the bar away from the anemic designs that plague our store shelves.

If you regularly observe fashionable computer accessories, you might recall that Sony's U.S. arm sells a wide array of colorful rubber keyboard skins for Vaio computers -- however, in Japan, the company sells something much more stylish. … Read more

With the advent of smaller, thinner, and lighter devices, it now seems crazy to think of a computer as a room-sized mechanism meant mostly for government use. But that's exactly what a computer was 61 years ago.

Now, visitors can see what the first hardware designers were doing when they created what is currently the world's oldest working digital computer -- the Wolverhampton Instrument for Teaching Computing from Harwell, or WITCH. The more than half-a-century old device has been restored and rebooted at its home in The National Museum of Computing in Buckinghamshire, England.

"In 1951 the … Read more

Apple's newly redesigned iMacs might launch on schedule, after all.

Apple plans to launch its new 21.5-inch iMac later this month and the 27-inch model next month, Apple news site 9to5Mac is reporting today, citing sources. The blog's sources say that Apple has already started to ship the smaller models to distribution facilities.

That claim refutes a report that surfaced last week, suggesting Apple would be forced to delay its iMac because of producers' issues with a new friction-stir welding process that melds the two major pieces of the iMac's aluminum body together. That report, which … Read more

I haven't flown United Airlines of late, having heard a rumor or two about a touch of inefficiency in its computing joystick.

These rumors seem to have occasionally been based on fact.

For the third time since June, its computers have today lost their thrust.

As the Associated Press has it, there are currently thousands of passengers all around the world who are wondering if and when their scheduled United Airlines flight will take off.

Indeed, Lewis Franck,a journalist who would like to get from Newark to Miami for a fascinating NASCAR event, tweeted: "Does anyone have … Read more

This weekend and next week in Salt Lake City's Salt Palace Convention Center, there are likely to be more gigabits flying around, and at a faster amount per second, than just about anywhere else on the continent.

That's where a cadre of volunteers from top universities, government labs, and industry have put together a sort of dream network for this year's SC2012 Super Computing conference, beginning today in Utah. Using multiple 10 gigabit per second (Gbps) and 100Gbps circuits, SCinet links the convention center to other powerful networks around the world, including the Department of Energy's ESnet, Internet2, and National LambdaRail.… Read more