Apple, HTC settle patent suits worldwide

Apple and Taiwanese smartphone maker HTC have settled all of their outstanding patent disputes, they said late Saturday. The settlement includes a 10-year agreement under which the companies will license current and future patents from each other, they said in a brief statement. The terms of the settlement are confidential and were not disclosed. The patent dispute between the companies, one of many being fought in the mobile...

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Most memorable tech industry apologies of 2012: From Apple to Google to Microsoft

Tech vendors have been as bombastic as ever promoting the magical and amazing things their latestsmartphones, cloud computing wares and network gear can do. When things go wrong, they're naturally a little less visible, but plenty of companies have sucked it up and done the right thing this year (perhaps with a little legal prodding here and there) and publicly apologized for minor and major customers inconveniences. Here's...

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AT&T reverses FaceTime blocking decision

AT&T has reversed its decision to allow Apple iPhone and iPad owners to use Apple's FaceTime videoconferencing application only on the carrier's most expensive data plans or if they are connected to Wi-Fi. AT&T on Thursday announced it would allow customers with Apple devices to use FaceTime on other LTE plans in addition to its Mobile Share data plan. The carrier's decision comes after three advocacy groups said...

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Facebook boosts Hadoop with scheduling muscle

Facebook has beaten some of the limitations of the Apache Hadoop data processing platform, its engineers assert. Facebook has released source code for scheduling workloads on the Apache Hadoop data processing platform. Engineers at the social networking company claim this program, called Corona, is superior to Hadoop's own scheduler in MapReduce. In tests, the Corona scheduler was able to put more than 95 percent...

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How to Secure Big Data in Hadoop

The potential is enormous-as businesses transform into data-driven machines, the data held by your enterprise is likely to become the key to your competitive advantage. As a result, security for both your data and your infrastructure becomes more important than ever before. Big Data Could Be Toxic Data If Lost In many cases, organizations will wind up with what Forrester Research calls "toxic data." For instance, imagine...

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Priceline to buy travel research site Kayak for $1.8 billion

Online hotel-booking giant Priceline.com plans to acquire Kayak, another Internet-based travel company, for US$1.8 billion in cash and stock, the companies announced on Thursday. Priceline will pay about $500 million in cash and $1.3 billion in stock and stock options for Kayak. The deal has been approved by both companies' boards of directors but still needs approval by regulators and Kayak shareholders. It should close late...

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