GLOBAL TECHNOLOGY XYZ

HPE is doubling down on the supercomputing game, announcing plans Friday to acquire Seattle’s Cray for $1.3 billion in a deal that links two iconic brands in computing history. The all-cash transaction, at $35 a share, is a 17 percent premium over Thursday’s closing price of $29.81 for Cray’s stock.

With its Windows 10 May 2019 update, Microsoft is getting one step closer to eliminating passwords. The company's Windows Hello has earned its FIDO

Statistics like this throw into sharp relief the challenge for Silicon Valley and its leaders in 2019.

Would you let a stranger eavesdrop in your home and keep the recordings? For most people, the answer is, "Are you crazy?"
Yet that's essentially what Amazon has been doing to millions of us with its assistant Alexa in microphone-equipped Echo speakers. And it's hardly alone: Bugging our homes is Silicon Valley's next frontier.
Many smart-speaker owners don't realize it, but Amazon keeps a copy of everything Alexa records after it hears its name. Apple's Siri, and until recently Google's Assistant, by default also keep recordings to help train their artificial intelligences.
So come with me on an unwelcome walk down memory lane. I listened to four years of my Alexa archive and found thousands of fragments of my life: spaghetti-timer requests, joking houseguests and random snippets of "Downton Abbey." There were even sensitive conversations that somehow triggered Alexa's "wake word" to start recording, including my family discussing medication and a friend conducting a business deal.
You can listen to your own Alexa archive here. Let me know what you unearth.
For as much as we fret about snooping apps on our computers and phones, our homes are where the rubber really hits the road for privacy. It's easy to rationalize away concerns by thinking a single smart speaker or appliance couldn't know enough to matter. But across the increasingly connected home, there's a brazen data grab going on, and there are few regulations, watchdogs or common-sense practices to keep it in check.
Let's not repeat the mistakes of Facebook in our smart homes. Any personal data that's collected can and will be used against us. An obvious place to begin: Alexa, stop recording us.
- - -
"Eavesdropping" is a sensitive word for Amazon, which has battled lots of consumer confusion about when

Docker Hub lost keys and tokens for around 190,000 accounts, which could have downstream effects if hackers used them to access source code at big companies.

If you use Google apps on your phone, Google keeps a log of everywhere you go with stunning detail. Here's how to stop Google from tracking your location and delete its log of where you've been.

A slew of experimental phones, like Samsung’s Galaxy Fold, are due to hit the market this year. But radical new design brings radical new engineering challenges.

Free apps marketed to people with depression or who want to quit smoking are hemorrhaging user data to third parties like Facebook and Google — but often don’t admit it in their privacy policies, new research says. The study is the latest to highlight the potential risks of entrusting sensitive health information to our phones.

No, it isn’t just for spies and whistle-blowers.

The factory, which currently makes battery packs and electric motors for the Model 3, will eventually be the biggest building in the world–with the world’s largest rooftop solar array.

A 'spaceplane' that flies 25 times faster than the speed of sound has successfully passed a crucial testing milestone.

After arriving at their Airbnb in Cork, Ireland, a family from New Zealand made an unsettling discovery: a hidden camera, livestreaming from the living room.

Investor proposals limiting Amazon’s face recognition sales can now proceed after the company argued they concerned “an insignificant public policy issue.”

On the first episode of season 4 of Why’d You Push That Button?, co-hosts Ashley Carman and Kaitlyn Tiffany discuss why iPhone users judge people who have green bubbles in iMessage.

With some four months to go until Apple unveils the 2019 iPhone series, we’re getting more and more leaks teasing specific design changes for this year’s iPhone generation. Before you get too excit…

To give an idea of the scale of this sort of machine, AMD says Frontier will have as much processing power as the next 160 fastest supercomputers combined. It’ll be able to handle an astonishing amount of data, with a bandwidth 24,000,000 times greater than the average home internet connection, capable of processing 100,000 HD movies in a second. It’ll also have a correspondingly huge footprint, taking up 7,300 square feet of space (roughly equivalent to two basketball courts) and containing 90 miles of cabling.

As we contend climate change, a landmark new report issues a wake-up call around another related crisis: the rapid loss of biodiversity and the threat it poses to ecosystems and human life.

The smartphone started as a better phone, and ultimately became the basis of a new, era-defining wave of computing. Could AirPods be the same? Could they be Apple’s dark horse strategy to own the future of technology, masquerading simply as “better headphones”?

UCSF researchers have created a veritable mind-reading implant capable of translating your brain activity into synthetic speech, and it's surprisingly accurate.

Your home cleaning products have a major carbon footprint. Several startups want to popularize a clever solution: remove the water.

Facebook won't let users opt out of a feature that allows them to be searched by phone numbers provided for two-factor authentication.

At just 80 square feet, The Kugelschiff is a renovated Airstream Bambi II that now serves as a tech entrepreneur’s tiny home and office.

Alexa users can disable use of their voice recordings for "the development of new features," but Amazon says their employees may still listen and analyze recordings of people who opt out.

Security researchers have discovered a powerful surveillance app first designed for Android devices can now target victims with iPhones. The spy app, found by researchers at mobile security firm Lookout, said its developer abused their Apple-issued enterprise certificates to bypass the tech giant&#…

Scientists in China and Japan are working to create a space elevator, and an experiment aboard the International Space Station could help point the way.