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    Bianca Bosker

    Bianca Bosker

    Executive Tech Editor, The Huffington Post

  • Going Wild On The World's Most Expensive Instrument

    Stradivari's "MacDonald" viola, poised to make history as the most expensive instrument in the world, has three bodyguards and its own white-gloved handler. For an informal recital Monday at the Manhattan headquarters of Sotheby's, which is handling the viola's multi-million-dollar auction later this spring, Carpenter, an acclaimed violist, had chosen to play Isaac Albéniz's 1892 "Asturias." The piece is fast and intense, with passages that sound like nothing so much as heavy-metal shredding.

  • Facebook Is Making It Impossible To Hide In Search

    It might be hard to believe now, in the age where every social connection and Facebook comment can be surfaced instantly, but it's true: Once upon a time, Facebook members could be invisible when people searched for their name. The social network had previously announced that it would be phasing out the tool, and, in December of last year, removed the search setting for members who weren't using it. The "small percentage" of users who've held on to the privacy option will see it disappear soon, Facebook wrote in a blog post.

  • Tumblr Just Pissed Off A Lot Of People

    Tumblr introduced a new form of advertising to the site on Thursday, setting off a chorus of criticism from users surprised and miffed to see brands' messages in their feeds. The changes appear to have been in the works well before Yahoo's splashy $1.1 billion acquisition, announced earlier this month. Tumblr  rolled out sponsored posts to its once ad-free site last year and had plans to increase advertising on the site even before the acquisition.

  • Facebook Phone Speculation Builds To Frenzy

    Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly insisted Facebook is not working on a phone. "[A] Facebook phone doesn’t make sense," Zuckerberg said in an interview last fall. Facebook might not be building a phone -- designing hardware from scratch, manufacturing handsets and putting them on shelves.

  • Google's Already Kicking Out Glass Explorers--Who Didn't Want To Be One Anyway

    Google has been "woohoo-ing" its way through the week as it notifies 8,000 people they'll be getting the first shot at buying Google Glass. Last month, Google announced it was seeking more early adopters to join its Glass Explorer program and asked people interested in trying the company's forthcoming Glass device to "apply" by sharing on Google+ or Twitter what they'd do "#ifihadglass." Those selected for the program, based on their reply to the prompt, will be eligible to buy the $1,500 high-tech headwear before its official release sometime next year. Only it turns out some of those invitations went to people they shouldn't have -- and to people who didn't even mean to apply for the Glass program to begin with -- sparking some speculation that Google's selection process was more random, and less selective, than the company had implied.

  • Netflix Announces Big Change

    Today, we can just see what they're watching through Facebook. Netflix announced Wednesday that it will integrate with Facebook to allow U.S. subscribers to track the viewing history of their Netflix-watching friends. The social feature, first teased at Facebook's f8 conference in 2011, has been available to users internationally for more than a year, but was unavailable to Netflix subscribers in the U.S. because of a little-known 1988 law prohibiting the publication of a person's video rental history.

  • You'll Want To See This Before You Start Searching On Facebook

    Here's a PSA for anyone on Facebook: go have a look-see at what you've been searching. Before users get too excited about Facebook's new search engine and start tracking down fellow "Girls" fans or single coworkers, they'd be advised to check out an oft-overlooked section of their profiles that documents every search performed on Facebook since September 2012. This search data isn't public, but at least a few Facebook users were shocked to see an unadulturated list of all the people they'd been stalking.

  • Finally, It's Facebook's Turn To Pay You

    After Facebook's IPO turned early employees into overnight billionaires, many users demanded to know when they would get paid for all the sharing that had made the social network a success. Wait no more: Facebook has started notifying some users that they could get up to $10 from the company. This isn't Facebook's way of saying "Thanks for all the vacation photos from Cancun," but rather a payout in a class action lawsuit concerning Facebook's "Sponsored Stories" ads that reached a preliminary settlement late last year.

  • Quitting Facebook Is The New 'I Quit TV' (You Hipster, You)

    Would you like a side of Bergman and vinyl records with your "screw you" to Facebook? Ditching Facebook has become a new, elitist form of "conspicuous non-consumption," on par with refusing television, argues New York University assistant professor Laura Portwood-Stacer in a recent article published in the Journal of New Media and Society. Once upon a time, being on Facebook meant you were hip.

  • Zuck Makes His Biggest Donation Yet

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced -- via Facebook, of course -- that he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have donated 18 million Facebook shares to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, a non-profit organization that works with philanthropists to manage their donations. With Facebook stock worth around $27 a share at the time of this post, Zuckerberg and Chan's donation is worth just south of $500 million, making it his largest charitable donation yet.

  • Is There Anything Apple Maps Does Better Than Google Maps?

    With Google Maps back on the iPhone following its two-month hiatus, we have to wonder: Is there any reason at all for iPhone owners to keep using Apple Maps? Is there anything Apple's mapping app does better than Google's more mature (and reliable) counterpart? "Nothing I can think of," said Telemapics president Mike Dobson.

  • Facebook Goes Down -- Hours After Gmail Outage -- Sets Off Panic, Delight (12/10/12)

    First Gmail was down for around 18 minutes and Google Drive experienced a short outage, and now Facebook is down for many users. While some of us here at HuffPostTech are able to log on to Facebook just fine, others are reporting an error message when they try to stalk their exes/procrastinate/post selfies. Become a founding member of HuffPost Plus today.

  • What The Huge Tim Cook Interview Tells Us About The Future Of Apple (Bad News For Those Hoping For An Apple ICar)

    Apple CEO Tim Cook sat down with Bloomberg Businessweek for a two-hour, nearly 9,000 word interview that offers a detailed look at what it's like to run Apple, how Cook views Apple's legal battles ("it's awkward") and how Apple innovates. With Apple senior vice president of iOS software Scott Forstall out of the company, Ive, Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, will now have his hands on both Apple hardware and software.

  • WATCH: The Rise Of The Sex Machines

    Douglas Hines, founder of TrueCompanion, joined HuffPost Live on Wednesday to discuss the next frontier of sex: human-on-robot love. "Sex only goes so far – then you want to be able to talk to the person," Hines said at a 2010 demonstration of the Roxxxy bot. Hines, an artificial intelligence engineer, told HuffPost Live that he got the idea for the creating a humanoid companion after he lost a friend in the September 11 attacks.

  • 9 Quirkiest Things We Never Knew About Twitter

    What do you get when a social media monitoring company sifts through 36 million Twitter profiles and 28 billion tweets? Quite literally, "An Exhaustive Study of Twitter Users Across the World," a detailed report from social media firm Beevolve that peers deep into the soul of the twittersphere. First, though, here's a bit about we already knew: According to the company itself, Twitter had 140 million active monthly users tweeting 340 million messages a day, as of March 2012. One third-party estimate puts the number of registered Twitter handles (active or inactive) at 500 million altogether.

  • Thus Spoke Zuck: Everything You Need To Know About Everything Zuck Shared

    Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt Tuesday for his first public interview since his company's stock value was cut in half after its IPO, which "has obviously been disappointing," he said. Zuckerberg, perhaps overly caffeinated, perhaps totally nervous, perhaps really excited, talked faster than the speed of tweets during his 30-minute interview with TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who repeatedly asked the CEO to "unpack" what he was saying. On the plus side, Zuckerberg managed to cram a whole lot of information into the half-hour session.

  • What You Need To Know About The Apple-Samsung Verdict

    The verdict in the high-stakes patent infringement lawsuit between Apple and Samsung is in. Samsung did infringe D’087 patent -- and a host of others. Here's the jargon- and legalese-free guide to what you need to know about the billion-dollar case that's just gone (almost entirely) in Apple's favor.

  • Facebook IPO: Live Updates On FB's Big Day

    Eight years, 900 million users, and several Winklevoss lawsuits later, Facebook went public in the third largest IPO in history. Despite months of hype, it got off to a rocky start. The social network raised more than $18 billion, putting the company's total market value at $104 billion. After an unexpected delay due to an overwhelming surge of orders, the stock finally started trading on the Nasdaq at around 11:35 a.m. ET, with the ticker symbol "FB." It jumped briefly to $43 a share, but then tumbled alarmingly back to its initial public offering price of $38.

  • Unzip Google -- Literally -- With Its Fly New Logo

    Google is looking fly today! The search engine is celebrating the 132nd birthday of Gideon Sundback, a Swedish engineer credited with helping to develop the modern zipper, with a large, interactive zipper in place of its usual logo that allows users to unzip their search results. Sundback wasn't the very first to conceive of a zipper-like device -- that distinction goes to Elias Howe, who patented the "Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure" in 1851, as well as Whitcomb Judson, who, in 1893, developed the "Clasp Locker" (which you can see here) and is credited with being the inventor of the zipper.

  • WATCH: Gmail Nerds Out, Offers You Intimate Info About Your Inbox

    Google's new Gmail Meter, which does all that and more, offers the intriguing option of letting us get intimate with our inboxes. Stats junkies, the email obsessed, and the introspective may be happy to learn that with Gmail Meter, they can now get pie charts and bar graphs outlining their email activity. Gmail Meter will show you volume statistics (i.e.