Mobile World Congress: Gigabit Wireless and the Anti-iPhone Set

One of the biggest disappointments at this year's Mobile World Congress, which opened Monday, is that the Samsung Galaxy 8 phone won't make it. The phone's official launch is scheduled for March 29.

Rich Content Makes WhatsApp Look a Lot More Like Snapchat

Facebook on Monday rolled out a WhatsApp update that could threaten Snapchat's share of the mobile app messaging market.

The update allows WhatsApp users to share photos and videos through the app's status area. Moreover, like WhatsApp text messages, content shared through status updates is protected by end-to-end encryption.

End-to-end encryption is a key distinction between WhatsApp and its competitors, noted Charles King, principal analyst at Pund-IT.

Could IBM's Watson Fix President Trump?

President Trump offers a good emulation for a future artificial intelligence system, suggests a column I read earlier this month, and his presidency may be an early warning of what could happen if we should fail to think through its training and information sources.

Watson Joins Cybersecurity Warriors' Ranks

IBM this week announced Watson for Cyber Security, a powerful new ally for organizations that want to protect their data from Net marauders.

The new offering bolsters the ability of information security pros to analyze the flood of information from the roughly 200,000 events that pour into their Security Operations Centers, or SOCs, every day.

Samsung's Chromebook Pro Earns Respect

Some early reviewers of the Samsung Chromebook Pro characterized it as a "MacBook killer," but others were more restrained in their enthusiasm. Jointly developed with Google and first demoed at CES 2017, the Chromebook Pro is slated for release next month.

Twitter Steps Up Efforts to Silence Trolls

Twitter on Tuesday announced yet another crackdown on abusers.

With the goal of making Twitter a safer place, it has come up with new ways to

• Prevent the creation of new abusive accounts;
• Make search safer; and
• Collapse potentially abusive or low-quality tweets.

Anonymous Hacker Pulls Plug on Thousands of Dark Net Sites

Twenty percent of the Dark Net was taken offline last week, when a hacker compromised a server hosting some 10,000 websites on the Tor network.

Tor, designed to hide the identities of its users, is widely used on the Dark Web, which isn't indexed by mainstream search engines and serves as a hub for illegal online activities.

Tech Industry Reacts to Trump's Immigration Order

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick on Thursday resigned from President Trump's business advisory council amid fierce blowback against the president's recent executive order on immigration, and in the wake of reports that several major Silicon Valley firms, including Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and Google, have been circulating a draft letter opposing Trump's action.

Facebook Aims to Carve Out a Spot in the Living Room

Facebook is working on a video app for set-top boxes, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. The social network wants to deliver longer-form video content -- and with it video ads -- to the living room TV, the one screen it has been unable to reach.

BlackBerry, Microsoft and the Ever-Smarter Connected Car

In a couple of interesting briefings last week, BlackBerry announced that its turnaround was finished, and Microsoft finally provided some information on its new connected car deliverable.

One strange thing was that after CEO John Chen excitedly pointed out that BlackBerry had displaced Microsoft in Ford, he then announced a strategic initiative to work more closely with Microsoft's Azure platform on BlackBerry's own market-leading QNX car operating system. That showcased not only the massive changes in both companies, but also the really strange way this market is evolving.