Daily Video: AT&T Halts Mobile Phone Info Tracking 'Experiment'

AT&T has made the decision to completely stop what it called an "experiment" to utilizing phone-tracking tags specific to each user—even if users had opted out.

The codes would have been used to help serve ads to consumers based on their activity. The practice had been criticized by many privacy advocates, saying that such monitoring was unfair if consumers had opted out of the program. It has also been compared to the Unique Identifying Headers information still in use by Verizon.

The U.S. Department of State is the most recent government agency to be the victim of a data breach. The Associated Press reported that the agency's entire unclassified email system was potentially at risk, which led the State Department to shut down the email system late on Nov. 14.

In recent weeks, the White House, United States Postal Service, and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have all been victimized by hacking incidents, some of which were blamed on China or Russia.

Cisco is continuing its overhaul of its collection of collaboration technology with a new TelePresence systems— the Project Squared app.

At Day 1 of the company's Collaboration Summit in Los Angeles on Nov. 17, Cisco officials detailed the apps greater conferencing capabilities, cost efficiencies and a better user experience. Cisco is also partnering with storage vendor Box to make files available from any device.

The title of the world's fastest supercomputer still belongs to China's massive Tianhe-2 system, which topped the Top500 list— which is released twice per year—for the fourth consecutive ranking.

There was actually only one change in the entire Top 10—at the 10th position. Experts say this is reflective of a larger trend, with overall growth in supercomputer performance slowing down. From 1994 to 2008, the annual growth rate was 90 percent. But during the last five years, it's been just 55 percent.