Twitter Just Launched Two-Factor Authentication To Foil Hackers: Turn It On

After a series of nasty hacks of high-profile accounts, Twitter just turned on a feature that’s becoming the new normal in Web application security: two-factor authentication.
As the video above shows, Twitter users can now sign up to have a unique code sent to their phone by text message whenever they log in from a new computer. That ensures that any hacker who tries to steal your password, say with a phishing attack or keylogging spyware, would also have to compromise your phone, too, creating a serious security barrier.

Banks Looking To Cash In By Mining Social Data

Across industries, organizations are collecting and using large sets of data to get a leg up on the competition. One industry that has been particularly aggressive at harnessing the power of data is the banking business.

How Xbox One's New Kinect Could Reinvent TV Navigation

By now you may have heard a little about the new Xbox One’s Kinect, the motion tracking sensor that will ship with every Xbox One later this year.
The companion device, which was introduced yesterday at the Xbox One unveiling at Microsoft ‘s Redmond campus, is a blocky little bar with a small camera and highly-sensitive microphone that looks pretty much like the first-generation Kinect.

Why The New Google-NASA Partnership Marks A New Era In The History Of Computing

It’s easy to become jaded about announcements in the tech world.  Slick, media savvy CEO’s announce “revolutionary” new products with metronomic regularity.  Version 1.0 becomes 1.1 and eventually 2.0 and on and on.  It all seems like a blur.

Google Continues To Play Catch-Up With 'All Access' Music Service As Critics Sound Off

Google CEO Larry Page on stage at Google I/O 2013: "We should be building things that don't exist." (Jonathan Hall/ Forbes)

On Wednesday during the closing segment of a three-and-a-half hour keynote presentation at his company’s developers conference, Google CEO Larry Page chided the media for its interpretation of his company’s relationship with other technology firms. Making one of his first public appearances since missing company events with vocal cord ailments last year, Page made it clear that he was unhappy with the portrayal of Google as a divisive figure in Silicon Valley.
“Every story I read about Google is kind of ‘us versus some other company’ or some stupid thing, and I just don’t find that very interesting,” said Page. “We should be building things that don’t exist.”

Why Facebook Should Buy Waze

By Tomio Geron and Ryan Mac
Mark Zuckerberg in early April held a flashy press conference to launch Facebook FB -2.01% Home, a new app for Android that turns a phone into an always-Facebook device. Its Cover Feed takes over the phone’s home screen with wall updates. Its Chat Heads messaging system has photos of your friends in cute circular icons that can be accessed from other apps.

Not A Billionaire: After Yahoo Deal, Tumblr Founder David Karp Is Worth Just Under $200 Million

David Karp didn’t finish high school. That didn’t stop him from working his way into the 1 percent.
On Monday, when Yahoo YHOO -1.74% announced it would acquire Karp’s Tumblr, rumors swirled across the Web that the 26-year-old entrepreneur had become a billionaire, joining the likes of Facebook FB -2.01% cofounders Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz as the youngest members of the 10-figure fortune club. The Tumblr founder, however, is not a billionaire. But he is still very wealthy.

Tax Increases? Why Facebook's Billion Dollar Income Isn't Taxed (At All) By IRS

Mark Zuckerberg commands attention even if Facebook’s much hyped IPO was lackluster. As a visionary billionaire, when Mr. Zuckerberg speaks, people listen. Having $1.1 billion in profits must feel pretty good. Paying no taxes to the IRS and even to revenue starved California? Priceless. See Facebook Paid No Income Taxes In 2012.

Apple: Think Different. Tax Different

No person or company wants to be accused of skirting tax obligations. Yet despite Joe Biden’s “paying higher taxes is patriotic” gaffe, paying too much could make you a chump. When Mitt Romney tried to stem the tide of negative tax press by forgoing deductions, he was derided for that too. See Romney Paid 14% in Taxes This Year but Could Have Paid Less. All the way around, taxes make a poor spectator sport.
Tax evasion? Bad. Tax avoidance? Less so. Tax planning? Above reproach. Yet sometimes tax planning is so über-creative it is virtually gymnastics. Tax gerrymandering is especially bad if you brag about it like Leona Helmsley. Her “only the little people pay taxes” motto landed her in prison.

Three Essential Components of Successful Social Media Campaigns

When working in the world of social change, it’s easy to get excited about a new campaign when we’re inspired by hope or outraged by injustice. But in the scramble to make change happen, we can forget about the tactics and tools that actually help us implement our visions for a better world. Here are three sometimes-overlooked components of digital campaigns that are essential for success.
1. Tangible goals, and tactics to meet them. (cf. “A Plan.”) Seems obvious, right? But many well-meaning groups often paint their goals with broad strokes, like “get the word out about x,” which can be difficult to measure. Or, their goals are so narrow and out of reach (“tell the president of the universe to enact legislation which…”) that they leave little room for casual bystanders to interact with the campaign.

Vine For Voice: Why Half A Million Millennials Share Sound On Dubbler

You know where to go to spruce up your phone photos so you can share them with friends–Instagram. And for short edited videos, Twitter’s Vine platform can help you channel your inner Jack Dorsey with six-second edited clips. But when you want to impose your voice or a happy birthday song on your friends, social media doesn’t have as clear of an answer for where you should go. That’s where audio-sharing app Dubbler thinks it can become the next big media-sharing app—by betting people like the sounds of their own voices even more when they can share them filtered to sound like a robot or a cat.

Yahoo, Tumblr And Social Media Stuck In Neutral

It’s worth noting that the biggest social media story of the year so far has nothing to do with innovation but rather the sale of an existing platform, Tumblr, to an entrenched tech giant, Yahoo YHOO -1.74%. It may be a sign that the first big social media land grab has come to an end.

The idea that the social media industry is settling in is a strange one. For a while, it seemed like a new massive platform would pop up every few years and the pattern would keep going forever. From 2006 to 2011, Facebook FB -2.01%, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest, and Instagram all hit growth spurts and solidified their status as giants within incredibly short time frames. But the phenomenon seems to have come to a halt. Recently, the most promising attempts to break into social have not been new concepts, like Pinterest was in 2010, but rather purported giant killers like Google GOOG -1.85% Plus. And the giants are still in great shape.

It's Not Just China: Indian Hacker Group Spied On Targets In Pakistan, U.S. And Europe

Part of a decoy PDF found by researchers, meant to infect a target with interest in Indian military capabilities.

Watch The Video: Microsoft Xbox One Event

Microsoft MSFT -0.64% launched its next-generation video game console on May 21st at a special event on their corporate campus in Redmond, Washington called “Xbox: A New Generation Revealed.” The new console, called the Xbox One, will help usher in the next generation of video game hardware, and ramp up the war for gamer dollars between Sony , Nintendo , and Microsoft MSFT -0.64%.

Apple, Called A U.S. Tax Dodger, Says It's Paid 'Every Single Dollar' of Taxes Owed

In brief: Apple CEO Tim Cook, called to testify before a Senate subcommittee that charges it with dodging U.S. taxes, says its paid ‘every single dollar’ of the taxes it owes and that it supports ‘dramatic’ changes to the tax system that will likely mean Apple will pay more in taxes.
A U.S. Senate subcommittee today questioned Apple AAPL -0.74% CEO Tim Cook about the company’s offshore cash, charging the company with exploiting tax loopholes and setting up offshore subsidiaries to shift “large potions” of its profits offshore as part of a plan to “dodge” paying billions of dollars in U.S. taxes.