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FEB 12: The four winners of the 2019 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, for innovations that brought GPS to the world. From left: Richard Schwartz, Bradford Parkinson, James Spilker, Hugo Freuhauf It’s an innovation that allows you to pinpoint your earthly location with just the phone in your pocket; it helps drivers navigate tricky routes, and it can even direct rescuers to stricken people in disaster zones. But Dr. Bradford Parkinson wasn’t able to use his brainchild, GPS, to stop himself getting lost in London, he quipped on Tuesday, as he and three others were named winners of the £1 million ($1.29m)  Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering . The prestigious prize has been awarded every two years since 2013 to engineers responsible for innovations that benefit all of humanity. This year’s chosen technology, which stands for Global Positioning System, joins other far-reaching winners including the Internet and the cellphone camera. James Spilker, Hugo Fruehauf, and Richard

Change your passwords often? Of course not — you’re too busy  logging in safely and securely , after all. But for the well-intentioned majority of us too busy procrastinating to update their insecure passwords, there’s help from Google in the form of a new Chrome web browser extension called Google Password Checkup. Google Chrome already has built-in password management support, meaning you can generate, store, and update your usernames and passwords using Chrome itself — just head to your Settings page and hit the Passwords box. Google Password Checkup functions as a helpful second layer of security, telling you when your passwords have been compromised, and reminding you to change them before it’s too late. To figure out which passwords are secure, Google keeps an encrypted database of passwords known to be compromised, and compares it to your own credentials (which it also encrypts). The actual comparison is done locally, in the Password Checkup extension, so no personal informat

LG’s next flagship, the G8 ThinQ, has garnered  a slew of tech press headlines  today in part because its all-screen design will not only support 3D face recognition, but also double as a speaker. The company will be showing it off a little more than a week from now at MWC — where it’s possible LG may also talk about yet another G8 variant. A new trademark application shows that LG is apparently going to release an S-version of the G8, something it’s not done before with its G-series handsets. The trademark was spotted by the folks at  Dutch blog  LetsGoDigital , which reports that LG filed for the “G8s” brand name on the 1st of this month. The trademark was filed with the Korean Intellectual Property Office under “Class 9,” which includes smartphones. It’s not immediately clear what LG’s plans are for this model, though we can make some guesses. As  LetsGoDigital notes, the manufacturer released the V30s last year as a successor to the V30. The biggest differences were in the f

(CNN) A New York professor has Gen Xers reminiscing about their childhood after he posted images of his decades old Apple lle computer on Twitter Saturday night. John Pfaff dusted off the old computer that has been sitting in his parent's attic for decades, and to his surprised it still turned on. "Put in an old game disk. Asks if I want to restore a saved game. And finds one!," he tweeted. "It must be 30 years old. I'm 10 years old again." Apple IIe was the third model in the Apple II series and released in 1983. This  version touted features such as the ability to use both upper and lower case letters  and full functionality of the Shift and Caps Lock keys. All models of this computer were discontinued in 1993. Pfaff restored the saved game of Adventureland, a text command game released for microcomputers by Scott Adams in 1978. "What shall I do next,"  reads the prompt on the screen. "This is tricky, because three decades l

BBC Click's Lara Lewington looks at a new smart socket for charging devices. When the device is fully charged the smart socket automatically cuts out saving electricity. The main use is currently to charge phones and laptops but it is envisaged that in future it could be charging electric bikes and cars too.

Human rights defenders are calling on  Apple   ( AAPL )  and  Google   ( GOOGL )  to remove the Saudi government app Absher from its platforms, saying that it allows Saudi men to track women under their sponsorship. In a letter addressed to Apple's CEO Tim Cook and Google's CEO Sundar Pichai Monday, the top Democrat on the US Senate Finance Committee, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, asked the tech giants to prevent their technical infrastructure and app stores from being used for enabling "abhorrent surveillance and control of women." The Absher mobile app -- first available on iOS devices in 2015 and to Android devices in 2016 -- is a Saudi government e-portal where users can access an array of government services related to Hajj, visa, National ID, traffic violations, and health insurance among others, according to the Saudi Ministry of Interior. Among those services is a feature for male guardians to decide whether their dependents can travel abroad and the par