Alaska Airlines, Flying Above an Industry’s Troubles

Damon Winter/The New York TimesFor decades, flights over spectacular Alaskan landscapes could end with devilishly difficult landings. More Photos »FLYING over Alaska in the wintertime is a spectacular experience. At 35,000 feet, the state’s rugged beauty unfolds, a succession of white mountain peaks against steel-blue skies, icy lakes and frozen rivers that snake as far as the eye can see. It’s an...

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Bits Blog: Judge Slashes Jury Award in Apple-Samsung Case

8:45 p.m. | Updated A federal judge on Friday weakened the blow from Apple’s legal victory in a patent case against Samsung, lopping more than 40 percent off the damages a jury awarded Apple last year.The ruling did not shift the case — one of the most closely watched in the high-tech industry — in Samsung’s favor. While Apple has lost other skirmishes against Samsung in courts around the world,...

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Bits Blog: Senator John D. Rockefeller IV Introduces 'Do Not Track' Bill

Before his planned retirement from Congress at the end of next year, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat, intends to give American consumers more meaningful control over personal data collected about them online.To that end, Mr. Rockefeller on Thursday introduced a bill called the “Do-Not-Track Online Act of 2013.”The bill would require the Federal Trade Commission to establish...

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Groupon Shares Fall 25% in Late Trading

CHICAGO (AP) — Groupon, the online deals company, posted a larger-than-expected fourth-quarter loss on Wednesday and a weaker-than-expected revenue outlook, sending its shares down more than 25 percent in after-hours trading. The forecast fed investor worry that people were tiring of the many online restaurant, spa and Botox deals that Groupon built its business on, and that the company’s...

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: More Slide Show Apps

Last week in App Smart I talked about the many apps that promise to turn photos from your smartphone or tablet’s digital photo album into an attractive photo slide show. These apps make looking at digital photos of a vacation, or perhaps an event like a wedding, into the modern equivalent of flipping through a photo album.On iOS, one powerful app for creating dynamic photo slide shows is ProShow...

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HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON — More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday. The Federal Trade Commission charged...

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French Tax Proposal Tackles Data Harvest by Google and Facebook

PARIS — Only a few weeks after the French Constitutional Council rejected one new tax idea — a 75 percent levy on annual incomes of more than 1 million euros ($1.3 million) — another began percolating through the halls of the finance ministry here: a proposal to tax the collection of personal data on the Internet. Google and Facebook know that John Doe “likes” wine, is shopping for a...

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Major Banks Aid in Payday Loans Banned by States

Major banks have quickly become behind-the-scenes allies of Internet-based payday lenders that offer short-term loans with interest rates sometimes exceeding 500 percent. With 15 states banning payday loans, a growing number of the lenders have set up online operations in more hospitable states or far-flung locales like Belize, Malta and the West Indies to more easily evade statewide...

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HTC Settles F.T.C. Charges Over Security Flaws in Devices

WASHINGTON — More than 18 million smartphones and other mobile devices made by HTC, a Taiwanese company that is one of the largest sellers of smartphones in the United States, had security flaws that could allow location tracking of users against their will and the theft of personal information stored on their phones, federal officials said Friday. The Federal Trade Commission charged HTC...

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H.P. Reports Decline in First-Quarter Revenue and Profit

SAN FRANCISCO — Hewlett-Packard may have gained running room, but it remains unclear if it can leap successfully to technology’s new post-PC world. The world’s largest maker of personal computers, printers, and computer servers has struggled for growth in a world increasingly full of smartphones, tablets and cloud computing services. Anchored in the traditional hardware, H.P. is challenged...

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F.C.C. Moves to Ease Wireless Congestion

WASHINGTON — The Federal Communications Commission took a step on Wednesday to relieve growing congestion on Wi-Fi networks in hotels, airports and homes, where Americans increasingly use multiple data-hungry tablets, smartphones and other devices for wireless communications. The commission proposed making a large portion of high-frequency airwaves, or spectrum, available for unlicensed...

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Disruptions: Disruptions: 3-D Printing Is on the Fast Track

Will the future be printed in 3-D?At first glance, looking at past predictions about the future of technology, prognosticators got a whole lot wrong. The Web is a garbage dump of inaccurate guesses about the year 2000, 2010 and beyond. Flying cars, robotic maids and jet packs still are nowhere near a reality.Yet the prediction that 3-D printers will become a part of our daily lives is happening much...

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Rise of Drones in U.S. Spurs Efforts to Limit Uses

Colin Diltz/The Seattle Times, via Associated PressA Seattle police officer, Jim Britt, with a drone in October. Seattle later banned use of the devices. They can record video images and produce heat maps. They can be used to track fleeing criminals, stranded hikers — or just as easily, political protesters. And for strapped police departments, they are more affordable than helicopters. Drones...

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Tech Industry Sets Its Sights on Gambling

Jim Wilson/The New York TimesCesar Miranda, left, and his brother, Edgar, working on their claw crane game in San Jose, Calif. SAN FRANCISCO — Look out Las Vegas, here comes FarmVille. Silicon Valley is betting that online gambling is its next billion-dollar business, with developers across the industry turning casual games into occasions for adults to wager. At the moment these games...

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Slipstream: If You’re Collecting Our Data, You Ought to Protect It

LAST summer, employees at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration received an in-house newsletter illustrated with mock front pages of USA Today and The Washington Post and seemingly hyperbolic headlines like: “NASA Laptop Stolen, Potential Compromise of 10,000 Employees’ Private Information!” The catastrophizing turned out to be prescient. On Halloween, just a few months...

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting...

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Media Decoder Blog: Indian Music Service, Taking Page From Spotify, Goes Pro

Western music fans have no shortage of digital music services to choose from, and that abundance is spreading around the world. Apple’s iTunes is now in 119 countries, and others are racing to plant their digital flags everywhere. This week, for example, Spotify opened in Italy, Poland and Portugal, bringing its reach to 23 countries.But just as interesting, and in the long run perhaps as significant...

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In Japan, the Fax Machine Is Anything but a Relic

Kosuke Okahara for The New York TimesYuichiro Sugahara, whose company delivers bento lunchboxes, mostly through fax orders. TOKYO — Japan is renowned for its robots and bullet trains, and has some of the world’s fastest broadband networks. But it also remains firmly wedded to a pre-Internet technology — the fax machine — that in most other developed nations has joined answering machines, eight-tracks...

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