Year: 2018

Apple will build a $1 billion campus in Austin, Texas, break ground on smaller locations in Seattle, San Diego and Culver City, California, and over the next three years expand in Pittsburgh, New York and Colorado. The tech giant said Thursday that the new campus in Austin, less than a mile from existing Apple facilities, will open with 5,000 positions in engineering, research and development, operations, finance, sales and customer support. The site, according to Apple, will have the capacity to eventually accommodate 15,000 employees. The three other new locations will have more than 1,000 employees each. Early this year, Apple said that it would make more than $30 billion in capital expenditures in the U.S. over the next five years. That, the company said in January, would create more…

Virgin Galactic is preparing for a new flight test Thursday that aims to fly higher and faster than before toward the edge of space. The U.S. company run by British tycoon Richard Branson is aiming to be the first to take tourists on brief trips into microgravity. Virgin Galactic's fourth flight test on the VSS Unity is scheduled for Thursday, weather permitting. The flight will take off from a spaceport in Mojave, California. The vessel does not launch from Earth but is carried to a higher altitude — about nine miles (15 kilometers) high — attached to an airplane. Then, two pilots on the VSS Unity fire the engines toward the frontier of space, typically defined as an altitude of 62 miles (100 kilometers). In July, after burning the rocket…

California regulators are considering a plan to charge a fee for text messaging on mobile phones to help support programs that make phone service accessible to the poor. The Mercury News reports Wednesday that the proposal is scheduled for a vote next month by the state Public Utilities Commission. The wireless industry and business groups have been working to defeat the plan. Jim Wunderman of the Bay Area Council, a business-sponsored advocacy group, says it would essentially put a tax on conversations. The newspaper says it's unclear how much money individual consumers would be asked to pay their wireless carrier for texting services under the proposal. But it likely would be billed as a flat surcharge — not a fee per text. ...

Sports, disaster and death were among the top searches on Google last year. Each December, the technology company releases it's top trending searches of the year. Topics that drew the interest of Americans included the World Cup, Hurricane Florence and three people who died in 2018 — rapper Mac Miller, designer Kate Spade and TV host and author Anthony Bourdain. Google does not come up with its lists based on the number of total searches. Instead, the company looks at the search terms that enjoyed the highest spike compared to the previous year. "Black Panther" topped the list of most searched movies, while rising stars in the Democratic party dominated the list of most searched politicians. Here are the Top 10: World Cup Hurricane Florence Mac Miller Kate Spade Anthony…

A senior U.S. intelligence official said on Tuesday that Chinese cyber activity in the United States had risen in recent months, targeting critical infrastructure in what may be attempts to lay the groundwork for future disruptive attacks. "You worry they are prepositioning against critical infrastructure and trying to be able to do the types of disruptive operations that would be the most concern," National Security Agency official Rob Joyce said at a Wall Street Journal cybersecurity conference. Joyce, a former White House cyber adviser for President Donald Trump, did not elaborate. A spokeswoman for the NSA said Joyce was referring to digital attacks against the U.S. energy, financial, transportation and healthcare sectors. The comments are notable because U.S. complaints about Chinese hacking have to date focused on espionage and intellectual…

Protesters disturbed a U.S.-sponsored event promoting fossil fuels on the sidelines of U.N. climate change talks on Monday. The event called "U.S. innovative technologies spur economic dynamism," touting the benefits of burning fossil fuels more efficiently, infuriated campaigners and many government delegations who want the talks to focus on moving away from coal, oil and gas. Some 100 protestors in the audience at the event seized a microphone and interrupted opening remarks by Wells Griffith, the man President Donald Trump appointed as senior director for energy at the National Security Council. They waved banners and chanted: "keep it in the ground." "I'm 19 years old and I'm pissed," shouted Vic Barrett, a plaintiff in the "Juliana vs U.S." lawsuit filed in 2015 by 21 young people against the government for…

Google CEO Sundar Pichai insisted Tuesday before the House Judiciary Committee that he runs the U.S. technology giant without political preference. "We find that we have a wide variety of sources, including sources from the left and sources from the right. And we are committed to making sure there are diverse perspectives," Pichai told the panel. Pichai defended the company after accusations from Republican lawmakers that Google has developed online search algorithms to suppress conservative voices. "There are numerous allegations in the news that Google employees have thought about doing this, talked about doing this and have done it," Republican committee chairman Robert Goodlatte said. Republican Congressman Lamar Smith cited a study by P.J. Media that concluded 96 percent of Google's search results for President Donald Trump were from "liberal…

A Chinese court has ordered a ban in the country on most iPhone sales  because of a patent dispute between iPhone maker Apple and U.S. chipmaker Qualcomm. The Fuzhou Intermediate People's Court granted Qualcomm's request for preliminary injunctions against four subsidiaries of Apple, ordering them to immediately stop selling the iPhone 6S through the iPhone X that use older versions of Apple's iOS operating system, according to a statement from Qualcomm Monday. Apple said in a statement Monday its iPhones using newer operating systems remain on sale in China. The Chinese court found Apple violated two of Qualcomm's software patents involving resizing photographs and managing applications on a touch screen. Apple shares fell Monday on the news. "Qualcomm's effort to ban our products is another desperate move by a company…

Tesla CEO Elon Musk dismissed the idea that the company's new chairwoman can exert control over his behavior. Robyn Denholm, an Australian telecommunications executive, was appointed chairwoman of Tesla's board last month, replacing Musk as part of a securities fraud settlement with U.S. government regulators. But Musk said "it's not realistic" to expect Denholm to watch over his actions because he remains the electric car company's largest shareholder. "It's not realistic in the sense that I am the largest shareholder in the company," Musk said in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," broadcast Sunday evening, adding that a large percentage of shareholders support him and all he needs is about one-third of them. "I can just call for a shareholder vote and get anything done that I want," he said.…

NASA's Voyager 2 has become only the second human-made object to reach the space between stars. NASA said Monday that Voyager 2 exited the region of the sun's influence last month. The spacecraft is now beyond the outer boundary of the heliosphere, some 11 billion miles from Earth. It's trailing Voyager 1, which reached interstellar space in 2012. Interstellar space is the vast mostly emptiness between star systems.   According to NASA, the Voyagers are still technically in our solar system. Scientists maintain the solar system stretches to the outer edge of the so-called Oort Cloud. It will take thousands of years for the spacecraft to get that far.   Despite the great distance, flight controllers are still in contact with Voyager 2.   The Voyagers launched from Cape Canaveral,…

The International Telecommunication Union reports that for the first time in history, half of the global population is using the internet. A new report finds by the end of the year, 3.9 billion people worldwide will be online. The report finds access to and use of information and communication technologies around the world is trending upwards. It notes most internet users are in developed countries, with more than 80 percent of their populations online. But it says internet use is steadily growing in developing countries, increasing from 7.7 percent in 2005 to 45.3 percent this year. The International Telecommunication Union says Africa is the region with the strongest growth, where the percentage of people using the internet has increased from just over two percent in 2005 to nearly 25 percent…

The International Telecommunication Union reports that for the first time in history, half of the global population is using the internet. A new report finds by the end of the year, 3.9 billion people worldwide will be online. The report finds access to and use of information and communication technologies around the world is trending upwards. It notes most internet users are in developed countries, with more than 80 percent of their populations online. But it says internet use is steadily growing in developing countries, increasing from 7.7 percent in 2005 to 45.3 percent this year. The International Telecommunication Union says Africa is the region with the strongest growth, where the percentage of people using the internet has increased from just over two percent in 2005 to nearly 25 percent…

The role drones play in our lives today is becoming greater and greater, as are the capabilities of these autonomous flying robots. Genia Dulot visited CalTech, the California Institute of Technology, where the potential for drones is being explored for surprising new uses. ...

Security agencies will gain greater access to encrypted messages under new laws in Australia. The legislation will force technology companies such as Apple, Facebook and Google to disable encryption protections to allow investigators to track the communications of terrorists and other criminals. It is, however, a controversial measure. Australian law enforcement officials say the growth of end-to-end encryption in applications such as Signal, Facebook’s WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage hamper their efforts to track the activities of criminals and extremists. End-to-end encryption is a code that allows a message to stay secret between the person who wrote it and the recipient.  PM: Law urgently needed But a new law passed Thursday in Australia compels technology companies, device manufacturers and service providers to build in features needed for police to crack those…