service

Time is money: Apple pays $21M for clock design, says report

Quality Swiss-made timepieces don't come cheap. Just ask Apple.

The company shelled out a $21 million "lump sum" to license a clock-face design from the Swiss Federal Railway service, French news agency AFP reported, citing a Swiss paper.

In September, the railway service, also known as SBB, objected to the clock-face design in iOS 6, saying it too closely resembled a trademarked design created in 1944 by SBB employee Hans Hilfiker and used in train stations throughout Switzerland.

Hilfiker's design has been honored by both the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the London … Read more

With lights back on, cell service returns for many Sandy victims

The power is back on for some lucky people in regions devastated by superstorm Sandy. And that also means cell-phone service has returned.

As of Saturday morning, Con Edison, the power company providing service in New York City, reported that it had restored power to more than 645,000 customers, or approximately 70 percent of all those who lost power since Sandy slammed through New York. Power restoration to a large part of New York City also means wireless phone service that relies on this commercial power could also get back up and running.

On Saturday morning, AT&T … Read more

Storm surge: Uber just doubled car service pricing in NYC

New Yorkers already are having a tough time getting around in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, but Uber just made it a little harder, at least on the wallet.

The company, which provides an app for locating and booking car service, says today that it has reinstated "Surge Pricing" in the city. Basically what that means is car drivers can charge astronomical fees to shuttle riders around. Yesterday, that would have been about double the normal fare, based on what Uber ended up paying drivers.

In New York, where public transportation has been hobbled by the natural disaster, … Read more

Rumor Has It: Google to send you a couple cold beers?

On this week's show, we investigate the logic behind the rumor of Google's delivery ambitions. We know Google had ventured far afield from its core search functionality in the past (cough, Android, cough, Google Wave, cough driverless cars) but it's hard to see how Google could invade the shopping/delivery sphere. It doesn't have any warehouses, delivery trucks, or even, to be perfectly frank, any products to sell. But those concerns may be missing the point.

We also go over the reports that Apple's now-former iOS chief Scott Forstall lost his job because his mama … Read more

Amazon cloud sales chief sued for going Google

Amazon is suing its former Amazon Web Services sales chief after he moved to Google, a purveyor of rival cloud goodness.

The online retailer turned tablet maker and cloud giant filed suit against Daniel Powers in mid-October, claiming that his move to Google violates a noncompete clause in his employment agreement that prevents him from working for the competition for 18 months after leaving Amazon. Amazon also claims the move to Google violates his severance package of $325,000.

According to Powers' LinkedIn profile and the lawsuit, he worked at IBM for two decades before taking over its cloud computing … Read more

Secret Service urges users to report threatening tweets

With less than two weeks to go before the November 6 presidential election, things are getting heated out there on social-media sites like Twitter and Facebook.

Twitter said that Monday's third presidential debate generated 6.5 million tweets, on top of the 21 million churned out during the previous debates (two presidential and one vice presidential). Most of that activity was harmless -- partisans supporting their candidate or taunting the opponent, remarking on hot memes like Big Bird or binders full of women, noting interesting exchanges, and more.

But according to the Los Angeles Times, some people tweeting during … Read more

GitHub suffers through second day of denial-of-service attacks

GitHub, a leading repository of open-source code, has been hit by two days of denial-of-service attacks.

The attacks, which shut the service down temporarily on Thursday, and which slowed it down today before things returned to normal, were an odd turn of events for a site that's a favorite among coders, and an increasingly popular place to find programming talent.

According to GitHub's Liz Clinkenbeard, the service suffered a "major service interruption" due to a distributed denial-of-service attack yesterday, and a minor interruption on GitHub Pages today due to a denial-of-service attack. The service is back … Read more

MegaUpload rises from the dead as Mega

MegaUpload founder Kim DotCom has proven to be unstoppable. After the U.S. government's major takedown of the cloud-storage service, which came with charges of racketeering, copyright infringement, money laundering, and more, DotCom has escaped extradition to the U.S. for now and was given a formal apology by New Zealand's prime minister.

Emboldened, DotCom has announced that he is building a new file-sharing site called Mega. According to Wired, this new site will work slightly different than MegaUpload but will still let users upload, store, and share data files. DotCom also intends to make it raid-proof.

"… Read more

HSBC hit by broad denial-of-service attack

If you haven't been able to log into your HSBC online banking account today, you're not alone.

The multinational bank based in the U.K. confirmed this afternoon that it has become the target of a denial-of-service attack that overwhelmed its servers.

This denial-of-service attack did not affect any customer data, but did prevent customers using HSBC online services, including Internet banking.

We are taking appropriate action, working hard to restore service. We are pleased to say that some sites are now back up and running.

We are cooperating with the relevant authorities and will cooperate with other … Read more