Government

Concern over government surveillance has been so heightened by confidential information leaked by former intelligence hand Edward Snowden that writers in free countries are as worried as those in autocratic nations, according to a report released Monday. Three-quarters of writers in countries classi...

Malware is running rampant on the Internet, affecting smartphones, tablets and personal computers. Relatively new malware allows bad guys to encrypt devices until a ransom is paid. Usually the ransom is required in bitcoin, rather than U.S. currency, as it cannot be traced. What are the legal and ...

China last week apparently began blocking Gmail, and the outage was still in effect on Tuesday, although to a lesser degree, according to reports. A sharp drop in traffic from China to Google services began last Friday, according to its Transparency Report, and the company could find no explanation ...

The political spotlight in Washington was on congressional approval of the 2015 budget before legislators broke for the holidays, but a less volatile proposal also was passed in the closing days of the session -- one of considerable importance to the information technology sector. In addition to the...

Boeing has enlisted BlackBerry to help bolster the security of its Black smartphone, BlackBerry CEO John Chen said Friday during the company's earnings call. "Boeing is collaborating with BlackBerry to provide secure mobile solutions for Android devices utilizing their BES-12 platform," confirmed Bo...

It is time to look back at 2014, so I'll focus here on a series of stories I thought were interesting but didn't seem to catch much or any real air. Some, like what is really behind Sony's decision to pull The Interview still might take off. Hadoop analytics is one of the most powerful platforms to ...

The U.S. government will remain a steady and significant customer for information technology providers over the next several years. That's the good news. For the foreseeable future, though, the days of ever-growing federal spending for IT are over. Vendors will have to work harder to obtain governme...

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson on Thursday said the United States "is actively considering a range of options" to take in response to the Sony hack. The hack is "very serious," Johnson said, though he refused to label it as a terrorist attack. Although there has been widesprea...

Privacy's future appears muddy at best, judging from a survey released Thursday by the Pew Research Center and Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center. More than 2,500 Internet experts and analysts were narrowly divided on whether policy makers and technology innovators would create a secure...

Apple, Amazon, AT&T, CNN, National Public Radio and The Washington Post were among numerous companies to support Microsoft this week, as it battled U.S. efforts to seize a customer's emails. A coalition of supporting organizations filed 10 amicus briefs with the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appe...