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Falcon Pro (for Twitter) pitches itself as "the ultimate Twitter experience on Android," and while one can usually take these app-store hyperbole laden statements with an idiom-laden statement -- in this case a grain of salt -- there is one thing that I'm looking for in a Twitter client that Falcon ...

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argu...

With its brand-new, tablet-friendly version, Flipboard takes online news reading to a sybaritic new level -- the bigger screen, along with Flipboard's elegance, surpasses poky smartphone screen real estate, and anything that has come before. Flipboard pulls together social media, news, and website ...

A substantial number of apps available from Google Play had serious flaws in their Secure Sockets Layer implementations and thus were vulnerable to hack attacks, European researchers found. The team downloaded 13,500 popular free apps to study their use of the SSL or Transport Layer Security protoco...

Sandia National Laboratories announced on Tuesday that it has set up a network of 300,000 Android virtual handheld computing devices to study large networks of smartphones. The project, called "MegaDroid," is expected to result in a software tool that will let other cyber-researchers model similar e...

Twitter on Tuesday joined the Linux Foundation. However, the move comes just days after Twitter removed its find-friends feature from blogging service Tumblr. Twitter had earlier done the same to Instagram, and has imposed new restrictions on developers. "These moves are contrary to what Linux stand...

Mention big data and the first thing that might come to mind is Hadoop. The open source software framework has recently enjoyed a great deal of popularity among vendors and enterprise users. However, if it is to really be useful to the enterprise, Hadoop may need to be taken out of open source, argu...

"Bug #1 - Microsoft has a majority market share." - Ubuntu bug tracker. Much has changed since Canonical started on its quirky quest to "fix bug #1." Seven years ago Microsoft was seen as stagnant, ripe for plucking. Longhorn was still MIA, and Microsoft users were busy patching XP against the lat...

I have to confess to being a little unfair on the Shazam Encore app for its first LinuxInsider test. It is supposed to identify songs you're listening to, but I think I may have asked it the impossible. I had downloaded the app just before a planned lunch that included a sojourn to my neighborhood c...

Instagram, the popular photography and social networking app for the iPhone, with a whopping 27 million iOS users, recently became available for Android. Around 5 million Android users reportedly signed up for the app in the first few days of the Android release. Then social network Facebook offered...

"Bug #1 - Microsoft has a majority market share." - Ubuntu bug tracker. Much has changed since Canonical started on its quirky quest to "fix bug #1." Seven years ago Microsoft was seen as stagnant, ripe for plucking. Longhorn was still MIA, and Microsoft users were busy patching XP against the lat...

Last month, I succumbed to a peculiar urge to go out to my local, friendly big-box consumer electronics retailer and drop almost a hundred dollars on a product that had been panned by the critics on launch, had a dubious life expectancy because of that, and had been almost universally rejected by th...

Patents, patents, patents. Such a to-do about software patents! The news this week has focused on little else, thanks in large part, of course, to Google's much-discussed purchase of Motorola Mobility. It's fairly widely agreed that patents were the motivating factor behind that purchase -- not a...

Now that Microsoft wants to be Linux's new best friend, there's bound to be no end of sweet nothings and touching gestures emanating out of Redmond. After all, we're pals now, right? Lo and behold! For all you skeptics who doubted the software behemoth's amorous words, consider a few phrasing change...

Google+ may still be in its invitation-only early days, but with all the wild excitement and skyrocketing numbers of users, it's awfully hard to tell. Quibbles about real-name policies notwithstanding, eager users from virtually every walk of life seem to be flocking to the new social network -- eve...