The U.S. Department of Labor Wednesday sued Oracle America Inc. over accusations that it discriminated in hiring and pay in violation of equal employment laws. The lawsuit, filed by the department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, alleges that Oracle pays Caucasian male workers more than their female, African-American and Asian counterparts. It also alleges ...

A phishing scam targeting Gmail users is running riot by using emails that appear to come from contacts of the person targeted. The scam, which was first spotted last year but has gathered steam in the last few weeks, involves the attacker sending an email to a Gmail account with the address of a known contact ...

In an act of clemency in his final days in office, President Barack Obama has pardoned retired General James “Hoss” Cartwright for lying to investigators over his role in leaking details of the United States’ efforts to cripple Iran’s nuclear program using the Stuxnet internet worm. Cartwright (pictured), who previously held the role of vice ...

Former Microsoft Corp. executive Qi Lu on Monday joined Chinese web services giant Baidu Inc. as group president and chief operating officer. Lu, a noted software engineer and programmer, spent time at IBM Corp. and Yahoo Inc. before taking on the role of president of the Online Services Group at Microsoft in 2008. He headed up ...

The creators of a recently discovered form of ransomware have devised a way to extort customers with hijacked files borrowed from the world of apps: a freemium model. Called Spora after the Russian word for spore, the ransomware offers five levels of decryption to those unfortunate enough to be infected. An initial tier allows a ...

Bitcoin is considered by some to be nothing more than the virtual currency of choice for drug dealers and other nefarious actors. But a strange case out of the U.S. Midwest shows that bitcoin-related crime can occur in the offline world as well. In a complaint filed in the Northern Illinois District Court, bitcoin automatic teller machine ...

Intel Corp. wants to revolutionize the retail environment through a new Internet of Things retail platform that delivers a deeper understanding of how stores and people interact. Called the Responsive Retail Platform or RRP for short, the offering promises to allow retailers to unify every part of their operations to bolster their bottom line and solve longstanding business ...

Google Inc. has rolled out a new imaging technique that cuts down on bandwidth required to view an image by 75 percent. For now, the technique, called Rapid and Accurate Image Super Resolution, or RAISR for short, is being used only on the little-used Google+ social sharing service. But Google signaled that it will be rolled ...

In a twist on the Uber-for-everything trend, a company in Russia is launching a service that allows users to organize a funeral via a smartphone app. Called Umer, apparently the Russian word for “he’s dead” and also an obvious play on the name Uber, the service is designed to make it easier for grief-stricken relatives unfamiliar ...

Blockchain-based distributed ledgers may soon power the future of banking in India after the research arm of the country’s central bank successfully tested the platform across a range of financial institutions. The Reserve Bank of India’s Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology ran the trial in conjunction with regulators, banks, financial institutions and clearing houses. ...