Brandon Bailey

It sounds like a great idea: Forget passwords, and instead lock your phone or computer with your fingerprint. It’s a convenient form of security — though it’s also perhaps not as safe as you’d think. In their rush to do away with problematic passwords, Apple, Microsoft and other tech companies are nudging consumers to use their own fingerprints, faces and eyes as digital keys. Smartphones and other devices increasingly feature scanners that can verify your identity via these “biometric” signatures in order to unlock a gadget, sign into web accounts and authorize electronic payments. But there are drawbacks: Hackers...

Taking a cue from competing online services like Slack, which let workers chat and share information on the job, Microsoft is adding a new program called “Teams” to its Office 365 suite of internet productivity software. Analysts say Microsoft is catching up to a trend in which a host of tech companies – even Facebook – are competing to offer specialized online networks for organizations, as workers increasingly find email and simple document-sharing services are too limited for communicating and collaborating. Like competing services, Microsoft’s new “Teams” product provides a central place online for workplace groups to chat, share...

” Apple wants to push consumers further into a wireless world. Its tactics: Eliminate the standard headphone jack in its newest iPhones and market new “AirPods” tiny wireless earbuds that the company claims greatly improve on standard Bluetooth technology. But that strategy has some risks. AIRPOD ANGST Start with the AirPods themselves. These are a pair of earbuds, each with an inch or so of protruding plastic, and nothing else — no wires to hold them together, no dangling cords. If they live up to Apple’s claims, they’re a technological marvel, tiny and expensive. And, perhaps, also easily dislodged or misplaced. Analysts at...

In the latest clash over privacy rights in the digital age,Microsoft is suing the U.S. government over a federal law that allows authorities to examine customer emails or online files without the individual’s knowledge. The lawsuit comes as the tech industry is increasingly butting heads with U.S. officialsover the right to view a wide range of information — including emails, photos and financial records — that customers are storing on smartphones and in so-called “cloud” computing centers. Microsoft says the U.S. Justice Department is abusing a decades-old law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, to obtain court orders requiring it to turn over customerfiles stored on its servers, while...

The robots are coming — to help run your life or sell you stuff — at an online texting service near you. In coming months, users of Facebook’s Messenger app, Microsoft’s Skype and Canada’s Kik can expect to find new automated assistants offering information and services at a variety of businesses. These messaging “chatbots” are basically software that can conduct human-like conversation and do simple jobs once reserved for people. Google and other companies are reportedly working on similar ideas. In Asia, software butlers are already part of the landscape. When Washington, D.C., attorney Samantha Guo visited China recently,...

​Cortana’s learning the neighborhood. Google’s digital assistant can’t tell a joke. And Siri apparently has a thing for the metric system. Those are just a few of the things I learned after staging a face-off between the three leading digital assistants. Apple’s Siri and “OK Google” — they’re not big on personification at Google — are now standard on smartphones; Microsoft recently added its Cortana service to Windows 10, so it works on PCs, too. Now that just about anyone can talk to their phone or computer, we wanted to see what happens when you try. Though none of...

Facebook says it will begin test flights later this year for a solar-powered drone with a wingspan as big as a Boeing 737, in the next stage of its campaign to deliver Internet connectivity to remote parts of the world. Engineers at the giant social network say they’ve built a drone with a 140-foot wingspan that weighs less than 1,000 pounds. Designed to fly at high altitudes for up to three months, it will use lasers to send Internet signals to stations on the ground. Though Facebook is better known for online software that lets people share news with...

Tired of trying to remember a different password for each of your online accounts? Or worried about re-using the same password too many times? You’re not alone. Tech experts agree that traditional passwords are annoying, outmoded and too easily hacked. Last week, Yahoo and Microsoft offered up some alternatives: Yahoo says it can text temporary passwords to users’ phones each time they want to sign into their Yahoo accounts. Microsoft says it is building facial-recognition and fingerprint-identification technology into Windows 10, the new computer operating system coming this summer, so users can log on with their fingertip or face....

Look out, Internet Explorer. After 20 years of competing against rival web browsers, Microsoft is gearing up to launch its own alternative to its once-dominant Internet surfing program. Microsoft has built a new web browser designed for the modern web and mobile devices to go with its new Windows 10 operating system that’s coming later this year. Explorer will still be available, but Microsoft hinted this week that its new – and as-yet unnamed – browser will get top billing in the future. “They want to be associated with something sexy and new,” said tech analyst Al Hilwa, who...