Tech News

For those who study earthquakes, one major challenge has been trying to understand all the physics of a fault -- both during an earthquake and at times of "rest" -- in order to know more about how a particular region may behave in the future. Now, researchers have developed the first computer model of an earthquake-producing fault segment that reproduces the available observations of both the fault's seismic and aseismic behavior.

Just as a terrestrial globe cannot be flattened without distorting the distances, it seemed impossible to visualize abstract mathematical objects called flat tori in ordinary three-dimensional space. However, a team of mathematicians and computer scientists has succeeded in constructing and visually representing an image of a flat torus in three-dimensional space. This is a smooth fractal, halfway between fractals and ordinary surfaces.

Facebook's rules state if there are 7,000 comments on a new privacy policy, the company has to take it to a worldwide vote. Activists made sure that threshold was broken. Are you ready to vote?

London's police service will soon be allowed to 'hack' into phones of suspected criminals. This criminologist examines how dangerous this move is for ordinary citizens.

Google revamps its search engine in an attempt to offer instant answers to search questions with a new function, the Knowledge Graph.

LJ Rich takes a look at the low-cost tablets battling Apple's dominance in India.

Programming without an overall architecture or design in mind is like exploring a cave with only a flashlight: You don’t know where you’ve been, you don’t know where you’re going, and you don’t know quite where you are. - Danny Thorpe

Java is the most distressing thing to hit computing since MS-DOS. - Alan Kay