Tech World

It’s been a few months since Sony’s game streaming service, PlayStation Now, was announced at CES 2014 and suddenly sparked very strong opinions — on all sides of the spectrum — regarding game streaming. The service, which streams PS3 and PS2 back catalog games from the cloud to compatible devices, has been in closed beta since the end of January, and is projected to release sometime this summer. It seems that release is still on track, as Sony has revealed the TVs that will be compatible with PlayStation Now, and a list of launch games has been leaked. As the games industry has been evolving over the years, a major focal point has been delivery. Thanks to Valve’s Steam — as well as smaller, easily downloadable games on the PSN and Xbox Live — many gamers have grown to accept and prefer a digital copy of a game rather than a physical box they can display on a shelf. However, during that same industry evolution, games grew exponentially in size. PC games like  Starcr...

New Facebook tool finds your friends (CNN) -- Your phone always knows where you are. And now, if you want, your Facebook friends will always know where you are, too. Facebook is introducing a mobile feature called Nearby Friends that taps into that steady stream of location information so friends can track each other in real time. The idea is to make it easy for people to meet up in real life, so they can have conversations in person instead of comment threads, temporarily replacing Likes and LOLs with eye contact and actual laughter. A live meet-up is also an excellent opportunity to grab a selfie with your pal and upload it to the Facebook owned Instagram. In a refreshing change, the new Nearby Friends feature is not turned on by default. Friends will not be able to see where you are unless you decide live-tracking is something you want in your life and visit Facebook's settings to turn it on. Making a potentially invasive new feature opt-in suggests...

This week, the major telecommunications carriers in the United States finally agreed to make a mandatory “kill switch” option available on all cell phones by 2015. It’s a move that has been praised as a long time coming and slammed as incremental. However, it has also been resisted in certain corners by those who feel that the option will be abused. No one disputes that mobile phone theft is on the rise. The San Francisco police department has reported that a whopping 67% of all theft cases are related to mobile devices; 10% of phone owners have reportedly had a device stolen at some point. Consumer Reports claims that 1.2 million phones were stolen in 2012, with 3.1 million reported thefts in 2013. The question is whether a manufacturer-enabled “kill switch,” a method of disabling a device remotely, would be an effective means of short-circuiting a thriving market in stolen devices. US carriers have previously balked at manufacturer-implemented kill switches. Sam...