The explosion and fire were so severe that the fire brigade had to be called in to fight the smoke and sparks that were continuing to burst out from the device.

A Vodafone spokesperson said a ‘burst of flames’ appeared from the charging port of the brand new iPad Retina demonstration model, Sydney’s Daily Telegraph reported.

Snowden may have persuaded between 20 and 25 fellow workers at the NSA regional operations center in Hawaii to give him their logins and passwords by telling them they were needed for him to do his job as a computer systems administrator, a second source said.

The revelation that Snowden got access to some of the material he leaked by using colleagues' passwords surfaced as the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee approved a bill intended in part to tighten security over U.S. intelligence data.

A couple pulled their sons out of Scottsdale Country Day School last week because they said the headmaster threatened to expel their 8-year-old for drawing "highly disturbing" pictures.

The three images in question depict a soldier, a ninja and a Star Wars character - possibilities for the 8-year-old's Halloween costume.

According to Scottsdale Country Day School's online student and parent handbook, "drawings that depict weapons" are grounds for expulsion.

Tikotzky launched both services earlier this year. Apple-Tracker, along with iPhone-Check, allowed users to input a zip code and subsequently find out whether an iPhone was in stock at local retail stores. The tool was available in the US and scraped Apple's retail store site to identify inventory availability.

There is no respite. Left unabated, climate change will cause global shortages of food and water, and drive people into deeper poverty. This is the upshot of the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report on the societal impacts of climate change, according to a leaked draft.

By exacerbating poverty, climate change may also increase the risk of violent conflict.

This afternoon, that stockpile was finally used for what pretty much everyone suspected it would be used for—launching an all-out patent attack on Google and Android.

Rockstar, meanwhile, was pretty unapologetic about embracing the "patent troll" business model. Most trolls, of course, aren't holding thousands of patents from gigantic technology companies.

Rockstar's CEO was quite straightforward about his belief that whatever promises Microsoft and Apple might have made about how they'll use their patents, those promises don't apply to Rockstar. “We are separate,” he says. “That does not apply to us.”

Ultimately, iCloud Keychain can be put to good use if you've carefully examined what it does well and doesn't do well. It works best as a complement to a complete service like 1Password or LastPass, but it just isn't convenient and robust enough to act as a standalone password manager.

You can also set up iCloud Keychain without any passcode or password. Apple states in a support document that this allows you to store passwords "only locally" on your devices, but it's clear from our tests that the system stores passwords in the cloud no matter what.

According to the teardown fanatics at iFixit, Apple's new iPad Air is twice as easy to repair as Microsoft's equally new Surface 2 – which received an as-low-as-you-can-go repairability rating of 1 out of a possible 10.

The amount of glue holding down the battery caused the iPad Air's Australian disassembler, iFixit reports, to send them "one, last, coherent message before strings of expletives" when attempting to remove the battery: "It's the worst battery ever," he said.

The mobile gaming giant announced this week that it and Activision will bring Angry Birds Star Wars to the next-gen consoles.

For a minute there I was afraid there wouldn’t be any games that would let me take advantage of the massive processing and graphic power of the Xbox One and PS4. And for only $50. What a steal!

Ruiu observed more odd phenomena that seemed straight out of a science-fiction thriller. A computer running the Open BSD operating system also began to modify its settings and delete its data without explanation or prompting. His network transmitted data specific to the Internet's next-generation IPv6 networking protocol, even from computers that were supposed to have IPv6 completely disabled. Strangest of all was the ability of infected machines to transmit small amounts of network data with other infected machines even when their power cords and Ethernet cables were unplugged and their Wi-Fi and Bluetooth cards were removed.

Ruiu posited another theory that sounds like something from the screenplay of a post-apocalyptic movie: "badBIOS," as Ruiu dubbed the malware, has the ability to use high-frequency transmissions passed between computer speakers and microphones to bridge airgaps.