John Lister

Experts say toddlers should be allowed limited access to tablets and other gadgets. It reverses previous advice that kids under two be kept away from small screens altogether. The advice comes from the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP). It now ... recommends 18 months as the minimum age to "use" screen devices, but says children aged five and under should spend a maximum of one hour a day in front of screens. It's not a case of 'anything goes', however. The AAP says young kids should only use screens for specific purposes. These include watching "high quality" ... (view more)

Microsoft has warned that scammers are trying to trick users with a fake "Blue Screen of Death" error message. The idea is to fool users into calling a bogus 1-800 tech support hotline. The Blue Screen of Death is an unofficial name given to a ... particular type of error message which appears when a Windows computer suffers a serious malfunction. In most cases, once the screen appears the only option is to reboot the computer, usually by switching it off with a physical power button or by resetting the machine with a reset button (if it is available). The idea of the screen is to give ... (view more)

T-Mobile has agreed to pay nearly $50 million after misleading customers about a supposed unlimited data plan. Unlike rival AT&T, it chose to settle with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) rather than risk a court case. The agreement ... came after complaints from a customer who had signed up to an unlimited plan for mobile data use. It turned out that at times when the service was most heavily used T-Mobile "de-prioritized" -- in other words, slowed down -- data speeds for customers who used the most data. It's believed the threshold, which was never made public, was ... (view more)

The Department of Justice has argued that police have the right to force anyone in a searched property to unlock phones with a fingerprint lock. Lawyers disputing the argument say that would go beyond the reasonable scope of a search warrant. It's ... the latest development in the ongoing development of privacy and search laws as technology evolves . For example, previous cases have concluded that police can't force somebody to provide a passcode or password to unlock a phone, because it would breach the Fifth Amendment's measures on self-incrimination. However, law enforcement ... (view more)

Google is to start warning users when flight ticket prices are likely to rise. It adds forecasts to a current system that works with actual price changes. The feature is coming to Google Flights, a dedicated search tool which lets users look for ... flight prices. While several travel sites offer similar tools, Google argues that its is easier to use. It's no secret that ticket prices change over time. While there's an element of last-minute drops as airlines try to avoid empty seats, there's also a broader trend of prices increasing as the weeks count down to a flight, the theory ... (view more)

A company accused of selling social media data to the police has been blocked from accessing some or all content from three major sites. Facebook, Instagram and Twitter made the move after complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU.) ... According to the ACLU, Geofeedia markets its social media monitoring product to police forces as a way to monitor people who may be involved in protests. In one marketing message, a company representative specifically cited the use of the service during the high-profile unrest that followed the shooting of a man by police officers in Ferguson, ... (view more)

Yahoo has blocked users from automatically forwarding incoming emails to an account with a rival provider. Many are interpreting it as an attempt to stop users jumping ship after revelations of a major security breach. The forwarding feature is ... pretty much a standard feature across the webmail industry, and means users can change from one account to another without having to worry about missing out on an important message during the switchover. Officially Yahoo says the feature is only temporarily disabled. It says the move was planned in advance and is to allow it to work on a range of ... (view more)

What's worse than a bunch of smartphones catching fire? A company that recalls them, reissues them, and the reissued ones also going up in flames. That's what's happened to Samsung with its Galaxy Note 7 handset, which ultimately led the company to ... permanently discontinue and abandon the model altogether. Launched in August, 2016, the Samsung Note 7 originally received great reviews and was listed by some as not only among the best Samsung phones, but also the best of any phones running the Android operating system. Like previous Samsung Note models, it has a huge screen that ... (view more)

With smartphones and tablets gaining extreme popularity thanks to low-cost production and ever-increasing CPU speeds, many users are looking at alternatives to Windows when it comes to being able to compute on the go. One system in particular is the ... ChromeBook (laptop) which is based on Google's Chrome operating system. Many major manufacturers produce Chromebooks, including Acer, ASUS, Dell, HP, Lenovo and Samsung. As of September 2016 there were at least three dozen Chromebook models on the market. What is Chrome OS? Chrome OS is a somewhat similar, but separate operating system to Android ... (view more)

Lately we've been posting a lot of articles about websites and services that have been hacked . One of the primary recommendations we have also repeated is that users should use unique and hard-to-guess passwords for each site, as this will help to ... prevent any further breaches. The reasoning is that if user account data is stolen on one site ( Yahoo is a good example ), the same username and passwords may also be valid on other sites - but only if users are using the same account names, passwords or password hints. Unfortunately this is often the case, because using the same passwords on ... (view more)