Techno-politics

The Food and Drug Administration said Monday that it would regulate only a small portion of the rapidly expanding universe of mobile health applications, software programs that run on smartphones and tablets and perform the same functions as medical devices. Agency officials said their goal is to oversee apps that function like medical devices, performing Continue Reading →

Members of the U.S. House of Representatives prefer Apple’s iPhone more than competitor Blackberry by over twice as much. According to a survey conducted by Meet the Press, 58 percent of the House uses an iPhone, compared to 23 percent who use a Blackberry. The iPhone also maintains wide bipartisan support and is the runaway Continue Reading →

Microsoft announced on Wednesday that its Windows Phone 8 operating system has received a key government security certification from the US, which would help boost its standing among US and Canadian government customers. Getting the FIPS 140-2 certificate means the government has authorized the cryptographic algorithms used by Windows Phone 8 to protect sensitive data Continue Reading →

“Liking” something on Facebook is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday, reviving a closely watched case over the extent to which the Constitution shields what we do online. In doing so, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with a former deputy sheriff in Hampton, Continue Reading →

Patent trolls are the villain du jour — taking advantage of an arcane and barely-functioning IP system to profit off of other people’s painstaking labors. Most often the strategy relies on a wide-net approach — wherein the troll gathers a portfolio of bafflingly broad patents and issues suits against everyone they can. The hope is Continue Reading →

There used to be a time when observing a top secret military base in one of the world’s biggest and most powerful countries would have required cutting-edge technology, scaling a fence or two-dozen, and more guts than any reasonable (or sane) person should have. Today, all you need is Google. According to Time, an eagle-eyed Continue Reading →

When The Space Shuttle was conceived, its mission was to make space flight “cheap.” (As these things go.) Original estimates had hoped that eventually the program would cost a frugal $50 million per launch. That dream was never realized, and in the end cost a total of $196 billion — an average of $450 million Continue Reading →

A federal appeals court rejected Google Inc’s bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating federal wiretap law when it accidentally collected emails and other personal data while building its popular Street View program. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to exempt Google from liability under the federal Wiretap Act for having Continue Reading →

After a court ruling stating that Apple led a conspiracy to raise e-book prices above those charged by Amazon, the Department of Justice (DOJ) proposed a broad range of punishments that would have impacted Apple’s contracts with book publishers and the company’s ability to control how competitors sell content on its platforms. If the DOJ Continue Reading →

When Apple launched iTunes in 2003 the major record companies missed a trick. They never imagined a computer firm would change the shape of the music business. iTunes is now the largest music retailer in the world with 575 million customers and annual sales of $23bn. It is the main source of income for every Continue Reading →