John Lister

A UK retailer has installed advertising screens that can scan a customer's face. The screens, which will be installed by Tesco at its many gas stations, then shows an advertisement based on its reading of the person's age and gender. The move has ... prompted criticism from privacy advocates, while others question how accurate the system will be. The screens are the work of Amscreen, a company owned by British businessman Alan Sugar. Sugar made a name for himself with the Amstrad computer back in the 1980s. Now he's made a deal to supply screens to 450 Tesco gas stations across the United Kingdom ... (view more)

Dell has confirmed that, due to a manufacturing fault, an unknown number of laptops shipped with an unpleasant smell. Many users who complained about the odor likened it to cat urine. The problem affected the Latitude E6430. The first complaints ... appeared online this past June, with one person insisting their laptop smelled "as if it was assembled near a tomcat's litter box." (Source: dell.com ) The stink was so bad that one customer who used his laptop for business said he no longer dared switch on the machine for fear of grossing out his clients. At first Dell approached the issue on the ... (view more)

A California driver appears to be the first person ticketed for wearing Google's high-tech spectacles while behind the wheel. It's prompted a legal dispute about whether existing laws actually bar people from using the device while driving. Google ... Glass is currently undergoing national testing with a selected audience before it goes on sale. The gadget is similar to a pair of spectacles, but combines a small projector on the "lens", a microphone, an earpiece and a camera. The device also has an Internet connection. Though billed as a wearable computer, it's effectively a smartphone in ... (view more)

Adobe has admitted that a recent breach of its servers was far more serious than first suspected. It's now believed that the personal information of roughly 38 million users may have been stolen. The high-profile security breach could hinder Adobe's ... plans to sell its software on a subscription basis. Earlier this month, Adobe confirmed that hackers had stolen credit card records for almost three million of its customers. It also said an unknown number of usernames and passwords had been taken. But this past weekend a website posted a file that contained more than 150 million usernames and ... (view more)

Researchers say they can figure out when two Facebook users are in a relationship just by looking at their list of 'friends'. They also say it's possible to predict when a relationship will end. Often, it's easy to tell when Facebook users are in a ... relationship because many people display this information on their profiles. However, new research says relationships can be detected even without those vital details. The research is the work of Cornell University computer scientist Jon Kleinberg and Facebook engineer Lars Backstrom. They analyzed the Facebook accounts of 1.3 million people aged ... (view more)

The US government says it will pay $2 million to the winner of a network security contest. The winning system will have to be so advanced that it can spot and fix problems before any human can even think of exploiting them. The contest is the work ... of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), a government agency that works on technology for military purposes. Previously it has run some outlandish projects, such as exploring the way flying snakes stay airborne and developing a robot that can outrun Olympic champion Usain Bolt. Now, it's unveiled the Cyber Grand Challenge, which ... (view more)

BlackBerry Messenger is now available on Android and iOS phones. So far it's getting some tremendous reviews -- but there's something fishy about a lot of those write-ups. It's led some experts to suggest that someone has devised a campaign to flood ... technology websites with bogus reviews. At the moment it remains unclear who's behind the scam -- or if BlackBerry itself is involved. The BlackBerry Messenger service, also known as BBM, was previously only available on BlackBerry handsets. It's a variation on text messaging that has become very popular because there's no charge to send a message ... (view more)

A federal appeals court has ruled that law enforcement authorities in the United States must get a warrant before hiding a global positioning system (GPS) tracker on a suspect's car. The ruling clarifies an issue left unanswered by a previous ... Supreme Court verdict. The legal confusion followed a high-profile case involving a suspected drug dealer who was tried and convicted after police tracked his movements using a GPS device attached to his Jeep. The man took the case to the Supreme Court, which overturned his conviction because it found that much of the evidence was inadmissible. The ... (view more)

In a hugely controversial move, Facebook says users can once again post extremely violent videos -- including those of people being beheaded. It's a reversal of a five-month ban on such material. The social media site began blocking members from ... posting extremely violent video clips back in May, but has now changed its policies. It didn't make a major announcement of the reversal, but has confirmed the change after a user posted a video of a murder in Mexico. That clip remained online under revised rules that limit the circumstances in which violent videos can be shown. Violent Video Viewing ... (view more)

Google says it will continue offering security fixes for people running the Chrome browser on Windows XP until April 2015. That's a year after Microsoft's termination date for the aging operating system (OS). For its part, Microsoft has warned users ... not to rely on the Chrome protection and says that even with Google's efforts, users of Windows XP will still face a serious risk of malicious software infection. After launching Windows XP in 2001, Microsoft stopped selling the operating system in 2008. The firm no longer offers Windows XP users technical support, but it has continued to offer ... (view more)