Virtual reality uptake has hit a new milestone with the Facebook, Inc.-owned Oculus announcing Wednesday that the Oculus-powered Samsung Gear VR had 1 million active users in the month of April. The number doesn’t indicate how many of the virtual reality headsets, which require a high-end Samsung smartphone to use, have been sold, but it ...

Apple, Inc. has denied a report that it is planning to stop selling music via its iTunes store at some point in the coming four years. The claim came via sources quoted by Digital Music News, reporting that Apple was considering a number of options for the service, including an “aggressive, two-year termination timetable” for the ...

Facebook-owned photo sharing app Instagram has had a makeover that includes a new logo and changes to the design of the app itself. The changes include the once iconic Instagram brown camera logo being abandoned in favor of a colorful, fresher design that includes hues of purple, pink, red, orange and yellow,  paying homage to the ...

Google, Inc.’s planned competitor to Amazon.com, Inc.’s Alexa smart home assistant may be teased at next week’s Google I/O conference, according to a report Wednesday. Recode claims the new device has an internal project name of “Chirp” and will resemble Google’s OnHub wireless router. News that Google was working on an Alexa competitor first emerged ...

IBM Security has announced Watson for Cyber Security, a new cloud-based spinoff from its Watson cognitive technology platform that will be trained in the language of security. The new service will begin with one year of research in partnership with eight universities in the United States to train Watson on the finer points of security research findings, ...

The United States Senate Commerce Committee has issued a please explain demand to Facebook, Inc. after it was alleged that the company censored conservative news in its trending news list. A letter from the Chairman of the committee, Senator John Thune, asked Facebook to detail the steps it was taking to investigate the allegation, and ...

Enterprise flash NVMe storage startup E8 Storage, Inc. has raised $12 million Series B in a round led by Accel that included existing investors Magma Venture Partners and Vertex Ventures. Founded in 2014, E8 Storage offers next generation flash storage with a rack-scale architecture for the enterprise and software-defined cloud. The company claims it can ...

Google is said to be investigating the adoption of an acceptable ads policy as a counter to the growing popularity of ad blockers, according to a report Monday. Digiday claims the policy would require ads served on its Adwords and Doubleclick networks are not obtrusive or annoying, enabling ad-blocking companies with what it calls “acceptable ad” ...

Arthur Budovsky, the founder of the now defunct notorious cryptocurrency service Liberty Reserve, has been sentenced to 20 years in jail and fined $500,000 for his involvement in the site. Budovsky, aged 42, pleaded guilty in January to one charge of conspiring to run a money laundering service. At its peak Liberty Reserve was a ...

The United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) have launched a parallel inquiry into mobile device security updates. As part of the investigation, the FTC has sent please explain requests to eight mobile device manufacturers asking them to provide the agency with information about how they issue security updates to ...