Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square. John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesJennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and...

Read More..

Groupon Dismisses Chief After a Dismal Quarter

Andrew Mason, the irreverent programmer and musician who turned a failed social action site into the daily deals phenomenon Groupon, was dismissed Thursday as chief executive. A day earlier, Groupon reported weak fourth- quarter earnings, which caused investors to shave off a quarter of the Chicago company’s value. The news about Mr. Mason, released after the market closed, sent shares up...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Clean Your Phone and Its Camera

Smartphones spend a lot of time in hand, where they can pick up germs and dirt. Wiping down the phone regularly with an antibacterial cloth intended for use with touch screens can help keep it clean. Many office supply stores like Staples or Office Depot carry disposable wipes for use on phone and tablet screens.If your phone has a camera and your photos have been looking blurry, you can clean its...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Moving iTunes Libraries

How do I transfer my iTunes library from a desktop PC to a laptop, neither of which are Apple computers?All the items in your iTunes library, like music, TV shows and podcasts, are stored in folders on the computer. The iTunes software itself, which is basically a big database program crossed with a media player, displays the items in your library in lists and makes it relatively easy to manage your...

Read More..

Yahoo Orders Home Workers Back to the Office

Since Marissa Mayer became chief executive of Yahoo, she has been working hard to get the Internet pioneer off its deathbed and make it an innovator once again. She started with free food and new smartphones for every employee, borrowing from the playbook of Google, her employer until last year. Now, though, Yahoo has made a surprise move: abolishing its work-at-home policy and ordering everyone...

Read More..

Nokia Unveils Low-Priced Phones

BARCELONA — Nokia on Monday introduced two new low-priced basic cellphones, plus two lower-priced versions of its flagship Lumia Windows smartphone — part of an effort by the former market leader to compete amid an intensifying price war in handsets. The four new phones — the Lumia 720, Lumia 520, Nokia 301 and Nokia 105 — will help Nokia maintain and perhaps build on its position as...

Read More..

DealBook: Judge Sides With Einhorn and Halts an Apple Shareholder Vote

9:26 p.m. | Updated A federal judge on Friday ordered Apple to halt collecting shareholder votes on a contentious proposal to change some of its corporate charter, handing a victory to the hedge fund manager David Einhorn.The ruling issued Friday touches on a fairly narrow legal point. But it signals a clear victory for Mr. Einhorn, who has taken up a fight with Apple over using some of the $137 billion...

Read More..

In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

HONG KONG — North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will get this privilege. Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by next Friday, according to The Associated Press, which...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Moving the Mac’s Dock

It’s easy to move the Taskbar to a different edge of the screen on a Windows machine, but how do you move the Mac’s row of program icons from the bottom of the screen?The Windows Taskbar — that row of program icons and open files that typically appears along the bottom edge of the screen — can be moved to the top or sides of the desktop by dragging it with the mouse, or in some later versions of Windows,...

Read More..

Some Victims of Online Hacking Edge Into the Light

Steve Ruark for The New York TimesAlan Paller of the SANS Institute said recently hacked companies were seeking safety in numbers. SAN FRANCISCO — Hackers have hit thousands of American corporations in the last few years, but few companies ever publicly admit it. Most treat online attacks as a dirty secret best kept from customers, shareholders and competitors, lest the disclosure sink their stock...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Locking Caps on an iPhone

While I have no desire to SHOUT MY WAY through text messages, I do have to use ALL UPPERCASE sometimes and would like to have CAPS LOCK available on my iPhone. Do I have ANY HOPE?While the phone’s software keyboard has no dedicated Caps Lock key, quickly tapping the Shift key twice turns on the Caps Lock function. The Shift key turns blue when in Caps Lock mode. To turn off the Caps Lock mode, tap...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Controlling Access to a Kindle Fire HD

Is there any way to keep my kid from roaming around through the videos on my Kindle Fire HD tablet?Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets include built-in parental controls for restricting access to specific apps, functions and content on the device. On the Kindle Fire HD, swipe your finger down on the screen to get to the settings area and tap More. Tap Parental Controls and then tap the On button. Select...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Deleting Photos From the iPad

How do I delete photos from the iPad? Some images have a trash can icon I can use to remove them, but others don’t.The iPad’s Photos app stores both the images you have added directly to the tablet (like pictures saved from e-mail, downloaded from the Web or taken with the iPad’s camera) and those you have copied over from the computer through iTunes. The steps for deleting the photos depend on how...

Read More..

Dismissed as Doomsayers, Advocates for Meteor Detection Feel Vindicated

For decades, scientists have been on the lookout for killer objects from outer space that could devastate the planet. But warnings that they lacked the tools to detect the most serious threats were largely ignored, even as skeptics mocked the worriers as Chicken Littles. Jim Watson/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesDr. Edward Lu, a former NASA astronaut and Google executive, has warned...

Read More..

Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Creating Customized Shortcuts for Microsoft Word

I find the keyboard shortcut for adding a comment to a Word document cumbersome. Can I change it to different keys?Microsoft Word’s keyboard shortcut for inserting an editorial comment into a document under review (Control-Alt-M in the Windows version or Command-Option-A for the Mac edition) does take three keys to execute, but you can reassign the command to fewer (or a more comfortable combination...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Adjusting Facebook Photo Previews

Hate the way Facebook seems to arbitrarily crop photos you post on your Timeline to fit the square preview windows? On the desktop version, you can change which part of the picture shows in the preview when you’re using Facebook through your Web browser.To do so, pass the cursor over the image and then click the pencil icon that appears in the top right corner of the post. On the menu that appears,...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Replacing the Motherboard Battery

My ThinkPad laptop asks me to reset the date and time each time I boot up. Why?Although there could be software issues involved, the battery on the motherboard may be weak or dead. This battery — sometimes referred to as the backup battery, BIOS battery or CMOS (complementary metal oxide semiconductor) battery — supplies power for the computer to retain basic settings like time and date.Replacing...

Read More..

DealBook Column: Relationship Science Plans Database of Names and Connections

It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips.Such is the promise of a new company called Relationship Science.Never heard of it? Until recently, neither had...

Read More..

Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Checking a PC's Graphics Card

How can I tell how much memory I have for graphics and video on my Windows 7 PC?You can check out the video card your computer uses by going to the Start menu to Control Panel, selecting Appearance and Personalization and clicking on “Adjust screen resolution.” If you want a quicker way to get the same Control Panel, just right-click on the Windows desktop and select Screen Resolution.Once you land...

Read More..