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Bank of America cuts off WikiLeaks

Bank of America has added its name to a list of several financial institutions that have refused to process payments for WikiLeaks as the site reportedly readies a document release that targets the banking giant.

"This decision is based upon our reasonable belief that WikiLeaks may be engaged in activities that are, among other things, inconsistent with our internal policies for processing payments," the bank announced late yesterday.

The announcement comes on the heels of similar moves made by MasterCard, Visa, and PayPal earlier this month, which have limited WikiLeaks' ability to raise funds to support its Web … Read more

Patent hints at Apple voice control improvements

In patent documents released this week by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Apple reveals plans to improve voice control on its iOS devices using contextually defined commands selected by users.

Apple purchased the iOS "personal assistant" app maker Siri earlier this year, suggesting it had plans to beef up the voice control functionality in iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touches. The patent seems to take aspects of the Siri interface and apply them to individually selected apps on a user's device.

AppleInsider discovered the patent filing, originally filed last year and titled "Contextual Voice Commands&… Read more

What's SEP?

What's SEP? If you Google the SEP file extension, you might think it's an enhancer for The Sims, the popular game. Or maybe it's a TIFF, or maybe a printer separation page. For our purposes, SEP stands for Sursen e-Paper. It's a proprietary digital document technology that competes with Adobe's PDF format, especially in China, where it holds a substantial market share, according to the developer. So, sooner or later, a lot of people will probably need to open and read SEP files. That's where Sursen's SEP Reader comes in. It's a … Read more

WikiLeaks promising even bigger leak of secret files

WikiLeaks is promising to release its largest cache of classified files yet.

In a post on Twitter late Sunday night, the WikiLeaks organization wrote: "Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months." An hour later, the group followed with: "The coming months will see a new world, where global history is redefined."

The whistleblower Web site released 75,000 confidential files on the war in Afghanistan in July and defied a series of warnings from the Pentagon and other government officials by releasing nearly 400,000 secret … Read more

Mouse over to view

DockView is a desktop customization app that lets you take a neat trick from Windows and mimic it in Snow Leopard: with DockView running, when you mouse over an app's icon in the Dock, you can instantly see live thumbnail images for all the windows open in that app.

You can accomplish something similar without DockView, by clicking and holding a Dock icon for a few seconds, but DockView gives you a much quicker and less intrusive view, while allowing you to quickly flip between different apps in the Dock. Plus, DockView's ability extends to the Mac OS … Read more

How to quickly go to an open file's location in the OS X Finder

When composing or editing documents, one common task may be to locate the document in the Finder so you can copy it to an e-mail, back it up, rename it, give it a label, or otherwise change it around. There are several ways to reveal the document in the Finder, but most are relatively cumbersome.

The most obvious may be to click the Finder icon in the Dock and then navigate to the location of the saved document, and make the desired changes. Though using keyboard shortcuts and other Finder navigation techniques can speed this up, you can easily do … Read more

Make the Dock even better

HyperDock is a System Preferences pane (currently in free beta) that lets you add some time-saving functionality to your Dock that is similar to the Aero Peek feature found in recent versions of Windows.

With HyperDock installed, you can mouse over applications in the Dock and see thumbnail previews of all windows open in that app--which can make switching between different apps and windows faster and easier. You can accomplish a similar effect without using HyperDock (by just clicking and holding an app's Dock icon), but HyperDock shows you the preview much more quickly, and in thumbnail form, just … Read more

BlackBerry maker RIM buys Documents To Go's Data Viz

We heard the rumor on Friday that BlackBerry-maker RIM snapped up Data Viz, makers of the popular productivity app Documents To Go, but it wasn't until Tuesday that RIM confirmed the purchase to CNET with a statement:

RIM has acquired some of the assets of DataViz and hired the majority of its employees to focus on supporting the BlackBerry platform. Terms of the deal were not disclosed but the transaction was not material to RIM in the context of RIM's financial results.

The buyout price may be pocket change to RIM, who isn't telling, but the acquisition … Read more

IBM helping Europe scan historical documents

IBM and the European Union are teaming up to offer a better way to scan the massive collection of Europe's treasured historical documents.

Expanding on an existing collaboration project, Big Blue and the EU will now be working with more than two dozen libraries, research institutes, universities, and companies across Europe to help them digitize their rare books and documents.

The project known as Impact (Improving Access to Text), is using new tools and tapping into crowd sourcing to speed up the mass digitization process and ensure that the scanned documents are as accurate as possible. Impact will also … Read more