Apple plans to launch a subscription news service at an event next month. Described as "Netflix for news," it would let customers access an unlimited amount of content from publishers for a single monthly fee. It will be based on a reworked version of Texture, the media subscription service Apple purchased last year. The monthly fee for the service is expected to be about $10. [More...]

Amazon has scooped up mesh WiFi network maker Eero, the home network company known for making an easy-to-set-up product that can blanket a home with high-quality WiFi. "We are incredibly impressed with the Eero team and how quickly they invented a WiFi solution that makes connected devices just work," said Dave Limp, Amazon's senior vice president for devices and services. [More...]

President Donald Trump has signed an executive order aimed at boosting artificial intelligence R&D in the U.S. The order sets up the American AI Initiative, which instructs federal agencies to move projects involving artificial intelligence to the top of their priority lists. No funding is proposed in the order, but the initiative directs federal agencies to focus on five areas. [More...]

Last week, like a lot of you, I imagine, I watched the State of the Union and tried to figure out what was true and what was fiction. Tied into several of the live-streamed press fact-checking streams, I found that the comments validating or invalidating what the president said came in so far after the comment was made that it would have been better to wait until the next day. [More...]

AT&T, T-Mobile and Sprint have sold access to subscribers' real-time location data to aggregators, which in turn have sold it to about 250 bounty hunters and related businesses, according to a report. In some cases, the data allowed users to track individuals to their specific locations inside a building. Some companies made thousands of location requests to data brokers. [More...]

The e-ticketing systems of eight airlines, including Southwest Airlines and Dutch carrier KLM, have a vulnerability that can expose passengers' personal data, mobile security vendor Wandera has reported. They use unencrypted links that hackers can intercept easily. The hackers then can view and, in some cases, even change the victim's flight booking details, or print their boarding passes. [More...]

If you need a task manager application to run on your Linux operating system, tap into a software category filled with options that go far beyond the to-do list app you have stuffed into your smartphone. Keeping up to date with multiple daily activity calendars, tons of information, and never-ending must-do lists can become a never-ending challenge. [More...]

The next upgrade of Apple's mobile operating system will come with an annoying surprise for VR and AR developers. It reportedly will block Web access to the accelerometer and gyroscope in Apple mobile devices by default. That means users will have to grant permission to any Web apps or sites that need those components to function, including those with VR and AR components. [More...]

Google has announced two new Android applications designed to make life easier for deaf and hard-of-hearing people. One of the apps, Live Transcribe, turns live speech into real-time captions by using a phone's microphone; the other, Sound Amplifier, improves a phone's sound output. Live Transcribe, which works on Android 5.0 Lollipop and up, will be available in 70 languages and dialects. [More...]

I've been watching antitrust cases actively since the 1980s. I had to study historical antitrust cases going back to Standard Oil and RCA, in order to ensure compliance with a related consent decree When I worked at IBM. Each of the other cases had one thing in common: Both of the companies being charged were massively and obviously monopolies. There were many questions. [More...]

Do you take your online privacy seriously? Most people don't. They have an ideal scenario of just how private their online activities should be, but they rarely do anything to actually achieve it. The problem is that bad actors know and rely on this fact, and that's why there's been a steady rise in identity theft cases from 2013 to 2017, often resulting in loss of reputation or financial woes. [More...]

Apple has blocked a Facebook app that paid users for total access to all network data. The controversy over use of the Facebook Research app erupted earlier this week, with a report that revealed Facebook was paying users $20 a month for root network access to their phones. Facebook was on-boarding users of the program, which included teenagers, through Apple's Enterprise system. [More...]

Apple has suspended its Group FaceTime application following reports that a bug in the software allowed callers to eavesdrop on the people they were calling. The flaw let a person making a FaceTime call listen through the phone of the person called before the call was accepted or rejected. It reportedly also allowed access to the front-facing camera in an iPhone. [More...]

A "Netflix for Games" type of service may be in Apple's future. Apple has been developing a subscription service that will function for games much like Netflix does for movies and TV series, according to a report. It's still unclear what the subscription fee would be or what kinds of games would be offered on the service. Whatever the fee for the offering, it could be tough for Apple to find an audience for a streaming service. [More...]

Intel released earnings last week. It beat expectations on the bottom line, but it missed big on the top line and the outlook was dismal. Looking under the covers, the company is a mess. The expected CEO announcement didn't occur. AMD's earnings are expected to be very strong, and AMD just made some organizational changes that suggest an increase in its competitive attack. [More...]

A new Linux OS gets to the core of Linux computing with a revamped desktop environment and a new way to have fun with your daily computing tasks. Developer Jacque Montague Raymer has debuted the MakuluLinux Core OS, and hopes it becomes the crown jewel of the Series 15 release family. MakuluLinux released the latest versions of family members LinDoz and Flash several months ago. [More...]

YouTube TV will be rolling out to an additional 95 markets in the U.S., almost doubling its coverage. The streaming video service already covers the top 100 markets in the country, and the expansion will enable it to reach more than 98 percent of households in the U.S., YouTube said. There are roughly 120 million TV households in the U.S., but only about 108 million households have broadband. [More...]

Google must remove search results about medical regulators' conditional suspension of a Dutch physician in the first "right to be forgotten" case of its kind in the European Union. After Google and Dutch data privacy watchdog Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens rebuffed the doctor's initial attempts to get disciplinary actions purged from online search results, a district court in Amsterdam sided with the surgeon. [More...]

Facebook has begun rolling out a new feature that's bound to charm political activists. Community Actions lets Facebook members create a page where they can describe what they'd like done, and set up a button that like-minded members can click to show their support. The page will show the government agencies and officials notified about the action, as well as the number of its supporters. [More...]

To suggest that electric cars are having a painful birth would be a colossal understatement. Tesla clearly plowed this field and quickly recognized that the lack of a charging infrastructure was going to be a problem and, with reasonable effectiveness, dealt with it tactically. However, those "tactical" chickens are about to come home to roost and it probably won't be pretty. [More...]

Independent software vendors, along with Internet of Things and cloud vendors, are involved in a market transformation that is making them look more alike. The similarities are evident in the way they approach software security initiatives, according to a report from Synopsys. Synopsys has released its ninth annual Building Security in Maturity Model, or BSIMM9. [More...]