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How your smartphone distracts you even when you're not using it

How good are you at resisting the pull of the pings emitted by your smartphone on a daily basis? Turns out those alerts can be distracting whether or not we act on them. Academics from Florida State University have found that phone notifications make our minds wander, even if we don’t pick up the handset – we start thinking about what the alerts could be and how we might respond

Running Man of Tech: How to challenge people in Fiji to a cycle race from your garage

I’m going to be sweating forever I’m currently tapping this out in the back of my soon-to-be brother-in-law’s car as he takes me and my (now) fiancée to the airport for a week in New York. I’m sweating buckets because I tried to sneak in a quick interval run before we left, which meant I bolted in through the door with only a few minutes to go to disapproving looks

Explained: 11 tips for owning Twitter

Introduction For a social network with over 230 million users, Twitter can be surprisingly tough to get right. It’s a minefield of what should I tweet? When should I tweet? How often should I tweet? Who should I follow? Who should I unfollow? Who am I allowed to talk to? How does this work? Why am I here? What is the point? Where did I leave my shoe? Has anyone

Windows phones aren't dead yet: six new handsets on the way

Given the sweeping job cuts we’ve seen at Microsoft this week, you could be forgiven for thinking the company is looking at winding down its phone hardware business and focusing on the desktop instead. Nevertheless CEO Satya Nadella has promised he is “committed to our first-party devices including phones”, and it sounds like the firm is going to make good on that promise in the not-too-distant future. Respected Twitter tipster

Here's the ultimate software list for PC fanatics

Introduction For years, before the internet became truly mainstream, beta software was shrouded in a cloak of mystery. Copies of software would often circulate on private servers or on CD-ROMs or DVDs but the advent of cheap, fast connectivity and the prevalence of software-as-a-service has changed that. Now allowing more people to test an application at an earlier stage in its development seems to have become a de-facto step, allowing

Taiwan courts tech start-ups to drive economic growth

By J.R. Wu TAIPEI (Reuters) – Companies such as electric motor scooter firm Gogoro could hold the key to Taiwan’s economic growth. In just three years, the start-up, which counts Japan’s Panasonic Corp as a strategic partner and Cher Wang, the founder of local smartphone maker HTC Corp as a key investor, raised $150 million to develop the smartphone-synched bike, and a charging network for it. Gogoro’s success in creating

Italian cyber-security firm suspects foreign government was behind mass attack

Italian cyber-security firm Hacking Team said a government might have been behind a massive hack of its systems and warned that the subsequent leaking of its computer codes could prove a field day for criminals. Unknown hackers last week downloaded 400GB of data from the firm, which makes surveillance software that allows law enforcement and intelligence agencies to tap into the phones and computers of suspects. “Given its complexity, I