Privacy spat puts Google in the crosshairs

Privacy advocates, lawyers and powerful rival Microsoft are piling on Google on for sidestepping web browsing software to tailor ads for people signed into its online services.The California-based Internet giant continued to staunchly…

Goodbye to all Mac. Maybe.

One of the great things about Apple – and like many other great things about Apple, it's a simple thing – is names.I mean, you might be happy shopping for a Dell Inspiron 15R, XPS 14z, Vostro 3550 or 620 Mini Tower, or for an…

Apple settles iPhone 4 antenna lawsuit

Best time for coffee? There’s an app for that

Scientists have developed a free app that tells you the ideal time to take a coffee break to keep you in the “optimal mental alertness zone”.

Is our broadband really fried?

Watching the reaction after Stephen Fry’s Twitter broadband bashing yesterday was pretty interesting.

Website to revolutionise study

Apple settles iPhone 4 antenna lawsuit

Apple has reached a settlement over a class-action lawsuit filed over the antenna problem which dogged the 2010 launch of its iPhone 4, according to a statement published yesterday.Apple promises to pay US$15 or give a free…

Twitter data collection a ‘big issue’ for privacy-keen Kiwis

Twitter’s admission that its iPhone app has been gathering address book data without telling users is a big issue for New Zealanders who are used to good privacy protections, a tech expert says.The social media service has promised…

Are you a nomophobe? Hold on to your phone

New chairwoman for $53m Marsden Fund

Professor Juliet Gerrard has been appointed the new chairwoman of the Marsden Fund Council.
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“Stephen Hawking: An Unfettered Mind”: Portrait of a genius

Stephen Hawking is the world’s most famous living scientist for two reasons that (despite his own wishes in the matter) are impossible to disentangle. The first is his disability, a motor neuron disease related to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, often referred to as Lou Gehrig’s disease) that, beginning in his late teens, has rendered him severely disabled. Most people, when diagnosed with ALS, live only a few more years; Hawking has survived for 49, turning 70 on Jan. 8. The second source of renown is his work as a theoretical physicist and cosmologist, particularly on the nature of black holes and the origin of the universe.

Even people with no inclination to tackle the brain-bending concepts Hawking outlines in his bestselling 1988 book, “A Brief History of Time,” find his personal story inspiring. In that light, scientific preoccupations they might dismiss as arcane and impractical in an able-bodied person become a metaphor for the human ability to transcend limits. As Hawking himself says in the three-part documentary series “Into the Universe With Stephen Hawking” (you can stream it on Netflix), “Although I cannot move, and have to speak through a computer, in my mind I am free.”

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Ernest Rutherford

Microsoft pooh-poohs latest Office for iPad report

Microsoft says a report that it’s nearly finished with a version of Office fo…

The least sexy iPad 3 part emerges…maybe

The glass front that will grace the front of Apple’s next iPad has possibly t…

Is this the iPad 3′s Retina Display?