Michelle Maisto

You could use a smartwatch to control the music coming from your smartphone, zipped inside the bag on your shoulder. But how much less expensive, and more expressive, might it be to instead tap a temporary tattoo? The intersection of wearable devices and body art is the focus of a collaboration between Microsoft Research and […]

An extensive BuzzFeed profile puts the spotlight on Twitter’s decade-long policy of tolerating abuse and hate speech in the interest of supporting free speech. Some might say Twitter is exhibiting a blind deference to an open-ended definition of free speech. The issue is coming to a head because of recent high-profile incidents and because of […]

The Federal Communications Commission has lost its bid to overrule laws in North Carolina and Tennessee that prevent municipal broadband providers from expanding outside their territories. On Feb. 26, 2015, the FCC granted a petition to preempt the laws, calling them “barriers to broadband deployment, investment and competition” and a “conflict with the FCC’s mandate […]

“People are human,” said Patricia Fletcher, Solution Management with SAP SucessFactors, suggesting that in business, as in life, mistakes—sexist remarks, biased decisions—will be made. Such humanity has repeatedly been on display at the 2016 Rio Games. Viewers took to social media to call out an NBC sportscaster who remarked, after swimmer Katinka Hosszu set a […]

As cyber-defense becomes an increasingly integral part of our national security, military officials have recommended elevating the stature of the Pentagon’s Cyber Command Unit to a so-called “unified command,” putting it at equal ranking with other combat branches of the military and better preparing it to fight cyber-attacks and develop cyber-weapons. According to an Aug. […]

Pay-per-install (PPI) software may be the new bane of the security world. Seventeen Google engineers, along with Damon McCoy, an assistant professor at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering and member of the International Computer Science Institute, studied the issue and have published an 18-page paper that they’ll present at the USENIX Security […]

The revenue model for much of the internet has turned the obligation of news reporting into a competition for readers’ attention—and clicks. The competition has made headlines ever more incendiary, shocking and cliff hanging. In internet parlance: clickbaiting. And now Facebook is doing something about it. “Our goal with News Feed is to show people […]

Microsoft has updated its privacy statement and included, for the first time, a section called “Enterprise Products.” Microsoft explained that the latter refers to all Microsoft products and related offerings designed for or offered to organizations and developers; “subscription cloud services, such as Office 365, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, Microsoft Intune, and Yammer”; […]

Instagram, borrowing from the Snapchat playbook, will soon introduce Instagram Stories, it announced in an Aug. 1 update. Stories will feature an unlimited number of photos, videos and drawn doodles to tell a story, and then will disappear after 24 hours. The Stories won’t appear in a user’s grid or feed. Snapchat has attracted users […]

Back in February, as Apple and the FBI legally and politically wrangled over the locked iPhone of San Bernardino, Calif., terrorist Syed Farook, more than one online commenter suggested using the finger of the deceased Farook to unlock the phone. That wouldn’t have worked because the skin of living people is conductive, and that’s part […]

Microsoft plans to eliminate 2,850 global jobs in its smartphone hardware and global sales divisions, it shared in an Aug. 1 filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The move will effectively wipe out the last traces of the Nokia smartphone team. Microsoft said it periodically evaluates “how to best deploy the company’s resources.” […]

The Information Security Forum, a not-for-profit association that offers research-based security guidance to a global membership of enterprises, on July 27 issued a major update to its Standard of Good Practice, a guide for meeting the objectives set out by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology. The updated guide has been restructured into […]