Coffee company Keurig Green Mountain offered something of a mea culpa on Wednesday night, when its CEO admitted that the company had been wrong to build its second-generation coffee makers with tech that prevented users from brewing their own coffee independent of Keurig's licensing.

The response was swift, and people soon discovered that a simple piece of tape covering the scanner would override the “Oops!” message that off-brand coffee pod-buying scoundrels received from the machine.

There are four watches in Phillips upcoming sale that I believe could, and maybe even should, break $1,000,000. Two of them are from Rolex, two of them are Pateks, two of them are steel, and two of them are gold.

They are the things that many of us dream about, and their excellence is universally appreciated by anyone that knows anything about collectible watches.

iFixit, which regularly does teardowns of high-profile gadgets, found that the Apple Watch, which launches on Friday, won't be upgradable, which means users who want to future-proof themselves and keep the same smartwatch will be out of luck.

Planned obsolescence -- the idea that a product will eventually be obsolete, forcing customers who want to keep using it to buy a new model -- has long been part of Apple's strategy. In iPhones, for example, Apple releases new updates each year. The company's operating system, which is also updated each year, only supports some of the later models.

Anyone on the hospital’s network—including a patient in the hospital or a hacker accessing the pumps over the internet—can load a new drug library to the pumps that alters the limits, thereby potentially allowing the delivery of a deadly dosage.

The system also stores usernames and passwords in plaintext.

The pumps themselves don’t bother to check whether the system sending them updates is the MedNet system, any system on the hospital’s network can access the pumps to install a new library or anyone can reach out to them over the internet through one of their internet-facing ports, and do the same.

Japan has long been a global leader in mobile phone trends. That's why the most recent mobile sales numbers coming out of Japan are a shock.

For the past two years, smartphone sales have declined. Some 5.3 percent fewer smartphones sold in 2014 than in 2013.

Things will get much more complex, and dumb phones will have a bigger role to play in this new world. Different minorities of users will choose dumb phones over smartphones for different reasons.

For example, most educated smartphone users know that mobile apps often harvest all kinds of personal data. They might read something about Alohar Mobile inventing a system for identifying users based on how they walk.

In a new report, Kaspersky revealed the existence of a group dubbed The Equation Group capable of directly accessing the firmware of hard drives from Western Digital, Seagate, Toshiba, IBM, Micron, Samsung and other drive makers. As such, the group has been able to implant spyware on hard drives to conduct surveillance on computers around the world.

Kaspersky's analysis was right, a former NSA employee told Reuters, adding that the agency valued this type of spyware as highly as Stuxnet. Another "former intelligence operative" said that the NSA developed this method of embedding spyware in hard drives but said he didn't know which surveillance efforts used it.

The Federal Communications Commission is considering whether to impose backup power requirements on Internet providers that offer phone service, but cable companies and telcos don’t want to be required to keep customers connected through long power outages.

Not surprisingly, voice providers don’t want to face any new requirements. They argue that consumers have willingly switched from copper landlines to VoIP service despite carriers being required to inform customers of the power limitations. Customers are also increasingly using cellular service instead of landlines to make voice calls, they note.

Danielle George, Professor of Radio Frequency Engineering, at the University of Manchester, claims that the under 40s expect everything to ‘just work’ and have no idea what to do when things go wrong.

“All of these things in our home do seem to work most of the time and because they don’t break we just get used to them. They have almost become like Black Boxes which never die. And when they do we throw them away and buy something new.

The EIZO FlexScan EV2730Q is a 26.5-inch square monitor with a square 1:1 aspect ratio and a resolution of 1920 x 1920 pixels.

EIZO says that its new monitor is "wide all around". It's 1920 x 1920 pixel square resolution is said to offer 78 per cent more pixels than a traditional Full HD monitor.

It took about a week to assemble and wire up all the parts on a solderless breadboard. The heart of the system is a Motorola 68008 CPU, a low-cost variant of the more common 68000, with fewer address pins and an 8-bit data bus. The CPU has 20 address pins, allowing for 1 MB of total address space. It’s paired with a 512K 8-bit SRAM, and a 512K Flash ROM (of which 480K is addressable – the remaining 32K is memory-mapped I/O devices).

Schematics? Forget it. Everything was built incrementally, one wire at a time, while staring at chip datasheets. It’s an organic creation.