News

• 3-D printer maker Stratasys to acquire desktop rival MakerBot

  3-D printer company Stratasys is acquiring desktop 3-D printer maker MakerBot for over US$400 million in an all-stock deal, to shore up its consumer presence.

• Dashcams going high-def, high-tech

  The next time a bear hits a car on a Russian highway, the video might be in high definition.

• Nvidia says Tegra 4 can power a better, cheaper stylus

  Nvidia is usually trumpeting the graphics performance of its Tegra 4 chip, but at the Computex trade show on Tuesday CEO Jen-Hsun Huang showed how its newest processor can be used to create a precise, affordable stylus for tablets.

• At Google I/O, Glass wearers say 'trust us'

  Google is facing some tough questions from Congress over the privacy concerns raised by Glass, its fledgling augmented reality system for recording and receiving information on the fly. But on the ground at the company's I/O conference for developers, attendees are largely enthusiastic about the technology.

• Feds looking to make health data more user-friendly to tech developers

  The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services wants health tech developers in Silicon Valley to make greater use of its data to help make advances in the field and aid entrepreneurs in the region.

• Obama plays up 3D printing's military applications under new manufacturing plans

  3D printing has been attracting more attention in recent months as a tool to create gadgets, toys and miniature works of art. Now President Barack Obama thinks it can also play a role in strengthening the military and America's sagging manufacturing industry.

• Oracle takes stake in ingestible health sensor maker

  Aiming at health care as a key vertical market, Oracle has taken a minority stake in medical device maker Proteus Digital Health, which sells ingestible and wearable sensors for tracking health-related information.

• Toshiba USB portable hard drive is also online file server

  Toshiba is set to launch a portable USB hard drive that comes with PC or Mac software that can turn it into an Internet-accessible file server.

• Intel doubles speed of Thunderbolt interconnect

  Intel has doubled the speed of the Thunderbolt data transfer technology, which will soon shuttle data between host computers like Macs and peripherals at a rate of 20G bps (bits per second).

• Three biggest misconceptions about 3D printing

  If your business isn't already investing in 3D printing, it should be. And if you have a 3D printer, you should buy another one, recommends Gartner research director Pete Basiliere.

• Would a 3D-printed gun really be legal?

  Defense Distributed, the pro-gun nonprofit working to make 3D-printable gun designs freely available to everyone on the Internet, recently inched one step closer toward achieving that goal. The Austin, Texas-based group last week was granted a federal firearms license from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

• Researcher hijacks insecure embedded devices en masse for Internet scanning project

  An anonymous researcher created a massive botnet by hijacking about 420,000 Internet-accessible embedded devices with default or no login passwords and used it to map the entire Internet.

• 3G and 4G USB modems are a security threat, researcher says

  The vast majority of 3G and 4G USB modems handed out by mobile operators to their customers are manufactured by a handful of companies and run insecure software, according to two security researchers from Russia.

• SXSW 2013: No new Twitter, but marketing and hardware stand out

  South by Southwest Interactive is best known as the technology festival that put such social networking mainstays as Twitter and Foursquare on the map. But if there was a "next big thing" at this year's event, finding it would be pretty hard.

• A giant, tethered tablet: Acer shows its Android Display

  Acer's DA220HQL looks like a giant Android tablet, with its 1920 x 1080 pixel, 21.5-inch touch screen -- but you wouldn't want to carry it around.