'Tis the Season for Online Predators

While visions of holiday shoppers dance in retailers' heads, those visions are also on the minds of online marauders. Net predators are sticking to scams that have made them money throughout the year. "Over the last 12 months, we've seen a return to attachments with innocuous macros in them," said Kevin Epstein, vice president of advanced security and governance at Proofpoint. "Macro attacks are a sort of Back to the Future moment." Unlike macro attacks in the past, though, these are sophisticated, multistage sorties.

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Losing Headphone Jack Would Allow Thinner, More Functional iPhone 7

Apple intends to peel the 3.5-millimeter headphone jack from the next version of the iPhone, according to a new rumor. Dumping the jack reportedly would allow Apple to shave a millimeter off the thickness of the unit. Without it, headphones would have to be connected to the phone through Bluetooth or Apple's proprietary Lightning connector. Apple introduced Lightning headphone specs last year, but few headphones have entered the market. When the iPhone 7 goes on sale, Apple may include earbuds with a special Lightning connector.

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Top 10 Open Source Developments of 2015

Open source is driving an ever-expanding market. The notion of community-driven development is a growing disruption to proprietary software controlled by commercial vendors, and the free open source software concept has become a major disruption in industry and technology. Open source is so pervasive that people tend to overlook how it's the glue of modern communication and enterprise business models. "Some essential open source projects are used everywhere but rarely get much of the glamour treatment," said Markus Rex, CEO of ownCloud.

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Tech Titans Launch Breakthrough Energy Coalition

High-tech honchos and venture capitalists from around the world -- and one university -- on Monday officially announced their participation in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, a new fund to support companies doing clean energy research. The coalition will invest in electricity generation and storage, transportation, industrial and agricultural energy use, and energy system efficiency. The goal is to help achieve a global near zero-emission energy future by helping companies profit from the acceleration of clean energy development, said Gates.

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Court Lifts NSL-Imposed Gag Order on Warrantless FBI Probing

Calyx founder Nicholas Merrill -- who made history in 2004 when he sued to lift a nondisclosure order imposed by an FBI National Security Letter -- has won his 11-year battle. The ruling, handed down this summer by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, was stayed for 90 days to give the government time to file an appeal. It became public when the stay expired on Monday. The FBI had sought to suppress disclosure of the broad range of information it requested from Calyx, an Internet service provider.

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Android Studio 2.0 Aims to Rev App Development

Google last week released a preview of Android Studio 2.0 at the inaugural Android Dev Summit in Mountain View, California. The preview offers several updates, including Instant Run and a new GPU Profiler. It's available in the Canary release channel for the Linux, Mac and Windows platforms. Instant Run lets developers see changes to code running on their devices or emulators, while the GPU Profiler lets users profile their OpenGL ES Android code.

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Vintage Video Games Reloaded

The movie and music industries over the past three decades have reaped profits from their vaults. Technological advances in hardware provided new revenue streams for old media. The electronic entertainment industry largely has failed to reap the same rewards, even as it continually has released new hardware platforms. Many older video games essentially are left behind and unplayable unless the gamer has an old console or PC sitting around. Many classic titles are all but forgotten as a result.

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