The price of Samsung’s latest 28-inch 4K monitor has decreased by $100 to just under $600, which could be a precursor to 4K monitor prices further dropping as the technology goes mainstream. The price drop comes just under a month after Samsung announced the monitor — the U28D590D — for $699.99. Major retail sites taking orders for the new monitor at $599.99 include Amazon.com, where the product is currently out of stock, and Newegg, which will start shipping the product later... 

AT&T Inc said on Monday it has plans to expand its ultra-fast fiber network and TV services to up to 21 U.S. cities, including Chicago and Atlanta. AT&T, which is competing against rivals such as Google Inc as well as cable companies with its fiber-based product, is considering providing broadband Internet speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second and its U-verse television service in cities, including Chicago, Los Angeles and Miami. Before the company can enter these markets, it must make agreements... 

Oddworld creator Lorne Lanning has never played well with big corporations. In 2005, following a particularly vicious quarrel with Electronic Arts, his studio Oddworld Inhabitants seemed all but dead, taking the beloved franchise with it. Now it’s back, and barrelling towards a bright new future. At GDC earlier this year, Lanning was keen to explain to GamesIndustry International his new approach to the business – and why he trusts major publishers less than ever. “I don’t... 

Hacking for espionage purposes is drastically rising, with groups or national governments from Eastern Europe playing a growing role, according to one of the most comprehensive annual studies of computer intrusions. Spying intrusions traced back to any country in 2013 were blamed on residents of China and other East Asian nations 49 percent of the time, but Eastern European countries, especially Russian-speaking nations, were the suspected launching site for 21 percent of breaches, Verizon Communications... 

Intel and MediaTek don’t have much in common, but it appears that they are locking horns in China, in the white-box tablet business of all places. Both companies are vying for a slice of the booming white-box tablet space, which are starting to resemble vanilla PCs of the eighties. MediaTek drew first blood last November, when it announced plans for the introduction of several tablet-centric chips. The company is apparently planning to double its tablet SoC shipments this year for a grand total... 

NASA’s planet-hunting Kepler space telescope has just spotted Earth’s cousin. Its next big find may be Earth’s twin. On Thursday (April 17), astronomers announced the discovery of Kepler-186f, the first Earth-size alien planet ever found in its host star’s “habitable zone” — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water, and perhaps life, to exist on a world’s surface. While the discovery is a watershed moment, Kepler-186f still falls... 

Alibaba’s Tmall and Taobao sites already sell everything from clothes and furniture to car tires and medicines. But soon they’ll also be offering 3G data and voice call plans as well, according to the Chinese tech giant. User registration for mobile phone numbers will begin in May. Alibaba is among the Chinese companies that received a mobile virtual network operators license back in December. This allows them to resell wireless services from the nation’s state-controlled mobile... 

The world’s top 1,000 websites have been updated to protect their servers against the “Heartbleed” vulnerability, but up to 2% of the top million remained unprotected as of last week, according to a California security firm. On Thursday, Menifee, Calif.-based Sucuri Security scanned the top 1 million websites as ranked by Alexa Internet, a subsidiary of Amazon that collects Web traffic data. Of the top 1,000 Alexa sites, all were either immune or had been patched with the newest... 

Square Inc has been having discussions with several rivals for a possible sale as the mobile payments startup hopes to stem widening losses and dwindling cash, the Wall Street Journal reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The company spoke to Google Inc earlier this year about a possible sale, the Journal reported, adding that it wasn’t clear whether the talks are continuing. Square, founded in 2009 by Jack Dorsey, co-creator of Twitter Inc, will likely fetch billions of dollars... 

AMD posted some rather encouraging Q1 numbers last night, but slow PC sales are still hurting the company, along with the rest of the sector. When asked about the PC market slump, AMD CEO Rory Read confirmed that the PC market was down sequentially 7 percent. This was a bit better than the company predicted, as the original forecast was that the PC market would decline 7 to 10 percent. Rory pointed out that AMD can grow in the PC market as there is a lot of ground that can be taken from the competition.... 

GlobalFoundries should be rolling out 20nm chips later this year and we hope that some AMD 20nm products might actually launch this year. The foundry failed to conquer the world with its 28nm process, but after some delays it got sorted out the problems and managed to ship some high-volume parts based on this process. GlobalFoundries is manufacturing AMD’s new Kaveri APUs, while TSMC is making the Jaguar-based 28nm parts. We are not sure who is making the new server parts such as Seattle or Berlin,... 

The Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) is a telescope array in Chile that includes 66 receivers scattered across the Atacama Desert. The array is located at the European Southern Observatory and bills itself as “the largest astronomical project in existence.” ALMA is able to peer through the dust that obscures planetary systems under construction, or to look back at stars and galaxies that formed in the early days of the universe and emit their radiation in millimeter... 

The SpaceX cargo spacecraft, which transport equipment needed for astronauts on the International Space Station to test optical laser communications, has big plans to test out the new concept. The SpaceX Dragon cargo craft’s scheduled launch last week was scrubbed because of a helium leak in the Falcon 9 rocket that will carry it aloft. Optical laser communications, also dubbed lasercom, is one of the emerging technologies that NASA is focused on trying out. With lasercom, data is transmitted... 

Advanced Micro Devices doesn’t want its processors in low-end tablets, and is eager to avoid a battle with Intel or ARM, whose chips have driven tablet prices down to under $100. Growth in the tablet market is driven by low-end devices and Android, but AMD’s tablet strategy is driven by Windows and high-performance machines. So AMD’s avoidance of the low end of the market narrows options for people looking for name-brand chips in low-price machines. AMD chips are in just a handful... 

Can plastic materials morph into computers? A research breakthrough recently published brings such a possibility closer to reality. Researchers are looking at the possibility of making low-power, flexible and inexpensive computers out of plastic materials. Plastic is not normally a good conductive material. However, researchers said this week that they have solved a problem related to reading data. The research, which involved converting electricity from magnetic film to optics so data could be read...