Facebook is getting closer to territory occupied by Yelp and Foursquare by testing a new service that will provide users with recommendations about places they are at.

Starting Thursday, some users of Facebook on iPhone in New York will find a new feature, called ?Place Tips,? at the top of their news feed, which will surface information on the location they are at, as well as posts and photos of the place that friends have shared.

?You can also see information about the place, including posts from its Page, popular menu items and upcoming events,? wrote Mike LeBeau, Facebook product manager in a blog post.

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Important update 1/29/15: The Nvidia employee who said the company was looking into a GTX 970 driver that would "tune what's allocated where to further improve performance" has updated his post to remove the claim after it was covered by several publications, including PCWorld, PC Gamer, and PC Perspective. As that changes the entire thrust of this article, its headline has been updated to reflect that. We still stand by our recommendation of the GTX 970 and you can read a summary of the memory allocation firestorm here.

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Just three small clues?receipts for a pizza, a coffee and a pair of jeans?are enough information to identify a person?s credit card transactions from among those of a million people, according to a new study.

The findings, published in the journal Science, add to other research showing that seemingly anonymous data sets may not protect people?s privacy under rigorous analysis.

?The fact that a few data points are enough to uniquely identify an individual was true in credit card metadata,? said Yves-Alexandre de Montjoye, an MIT graduate student and one of the study?s authors.

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Flappy Bird Mania may be so last year, but that shouldn?t stop you from wasting perfectly good time on it! If you own a phone running Android Lollipop, you don?t need to download anything?you already have a Flappy Bird clone tucked away on your device. Here?s how to get to it.

Unlock your device and hop on over to the Settings app, then scroll all the way down and tap About phone. Next, tap the Android version listing...and keep tapping. Eventually, the Settings app will slide out of the way and will be replaced by an onscreen lollipop (because it?s Android Lollipop. Get it?). 

Tap and hold the lollipop a few times, and eventually, a Flappy Bird-like game appears

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Citrix Systems announced better than expected financial results for the last quarter but also a restructuring plan that will see 900 jobs being cut.

The restructuring, which includes the elimination of 700 full-time and 200 contractor positions, is expected to deliver savings of $90 million to $100 million per year, Citrix said.

Investors seemed to cheer the news, which came out late Wednesday. Citrix?s stock rose as high as $63.27 per share on Thursday, or 7 percent over the previous day?s close.

?I think Citrix?s plans qualify as what might be called defensive layoffs,? said Charles King, principal analyst with Pund-IT.

The results beat analyst expectations, ?but only barely,? King noted.

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There's something refreshing about not being asked to save the world.

I mean, don't worry. Life is Strange, the new adventure game from Dontnod Entertainment (Remember Me), gets around to the whole "save the world" thing eventually. Well, "save the town," at least. There's a storm coming. Literally.

But much of what makes the first episode of Life is Strange so endearing is that the stakes are low. You play as Maxine "Max" Caulfield, a teenage girl living in the Pacific Northwest. As such, your problems are, well, teenage girl problems for the most part.

Will I retain my scholarship to the elite photography academy I'm attending? Will my teacher find out I kind of have a crush on him? Will I submit something to this photo contest he wants me to enter? Will I get caught smoking pot?

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The continuing NatWest debacle has highlighted the IT systems risks faced by British banks, springing from a lack of investment in back-office staff and a reluctance to abandon legacy systems

(ZDNet UK - IT Strategy)

The Nexus 7 is the first tablet that Google will sell directly to the public, starting at £159 for the quad-core device running the next version of Android, Jelly Bean

(ZDNet UK - Mobile Devices)

During Amazon?s fourth quarter earnings announcement today, the company revealed that Amazon Web Services (AWS)?essentially its cloud computing infrastructure?has over one million active customers.

The post Amazon Says One Million Customers Actively Use Its Cloud Services appeared first on WIRED.

The Federal Trade Commission has barred a man from posting nude images on women to his website without their express written consent.

The post Feds Bar Man From Posting Revenge Porn appeared first on WIRED.

Microsoft will be investing $70 million in Cyanogen, the startup that makes a popular Android ROM, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal. The investment would make Microsoft a minority investor in a round of funding that puts Cyanogen?s value in the high hundreds of millions.

The post Microsoft to Invest in Android Startup Cyanogen, Says Report appeared first on WIRED.

Technology companies that want to sell equipment to Chinese banks have to submit to extensive audits, turn over source code, and build ?back doors? into their hardware and software---presumably so that the Chinese government have the ability peek into computer banking systems.

The post China’s New Rules for Selling Tech to Banks Have US Companies Spooked appeared first on WIRED.

It?s been over 20 years since Larry Ellison made the case for cloud computing. Some speculate he only invented the idea to get at Bill Gates, the dominance of the PC and the then-newly released Windows 95. Even if the motivation had a personal edge, the point is that he had a strong case. As […]

The post When Robots Beam Down From the Cloud appeared first on WIRED.

If anyone still believes that bitcoin is magically anonymous internet money, the U.S. government just offered what may be the clearest demonstration yet that it?s not. A courtroom powerpoint presentation traced hundreds of thousands of bitcoins from the Silk Road anonymous marketplace for drugs directly to the personal computer of Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old accused of running that contraband bazaar.

The post Prosecutors Trace $13.4M in Bitcoins From the Silk Road to Ulbricht’s Laptop appeared first on WIRED.