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Recent disclosures of U.S. government surveillance of our phone and Internet activity have heightened interest in services that promise not to collect or share our personal information.

One such service is DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine that has seen its traffic jump since news broke earlier this month of the National Security Agency's PRISM electronic surveillance program. The Guardian's Stuart Dredge reports that DuckDuckGo's daily search count reached an all-time high of 3.1 million on June 17, well above its daily average of 1.8 million daily searches prior to the PRISM revelations.

Those numbers … Read more

By being able to craft just about every element of the song, including lyrics and multiple instrumental layers, Anvil Studio makes it almost too easy to compose songs. Its interface isn't very attractive, but with great user guidance and a wealth of features, it's an awesome app for any musician.

Despite being loaded with features, this program downloads really quickly and is light by most standards. Anvil Studio has a great tutorial that opens when you get inside. It's helpful for finding all of the program's cool features, but it doesn't make you click through … Read more

Tracking packages, monitoring their every movement from the vendor to your front door, can feel a bit like an addiction at times. Once you have the tracking number, you're either refreshing the respective carrier's tracking page, or you're mercilessly opening and closing your favorite package-tracking app hoping you can will the item to inch closer to its final destination.

As someone who has used iOS as my primary device for the last three years, I have often relied on the Delivery Status app to do the dirty work for me. There's a free OS X widget … Read more

We just covered the service FedEx offers customers to track and manage incoming packages, but not all shipments are done solely through FedEx. UPS also offers a free service, similar to that of FedEx Delivery Manager, called UPS My Choice.

With UPS My Choice you'll receive alerts of incoming packages, hold for will call or authorize a shipment release for free. The paid services include requesting a hold at a UPS location, rescheduling a delivery, and delivering to another address. All of which will set you back $5 per use. Or if you receive a lot of packages, you … Read more

Apple may be aiming to challenge Samsung over eye-tracking technology.,

An Apple patent application, dubbed "Electronic Devices With Gaze Detection Capabilities," was published Thursday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. The application describes a feature in which your mobile device reacts to the movement of your head or eyes.

Turn your head or eyes away from the device, and the screen dims. Look back at the device, and the screen returns to life. Looking away could also put the entire device in standby mode, meaning certain functions are powered down to preserve battery power. In yet … Read more

Though the official 2013 hurricane season is from June 1 to November 30, the news earlier this week out of Moore, Okla., is a sobering reminder that dangerous weather comes in many forms, and you often don't know where the next disaster may strike. Even now, many states are being pounded by heavy storms as the cleanup from the tornado in Moore is still under way.

Recently, I collected a few weather apps that are great for a quick glance at the weather, but those apps won't help you much in severe weather conditions. For more-serious weather activity, … Read more

While 3D-printed guns have been grabbing most of the headlines lately, other types of firearms that make use of new technology are also hitting the scene.

TrackingPoint, a startup based in Austin, Texas, just began selling some of the most high-tech long-range shooting rifles available in the world -- they use 3D graphics, laser technology, and Wi-Fi, and allow users to live stream their exploits and post photos to social media and on personal devices.

"TrackingPoint introduces the world's first precision guided firearm -- the revolutionary new long-range shooting system that puts jet-fighter lock and launch technology in … Read more

Verizon Wireless already sells its customers' mobile data to marketers. Now European enterprise-software giant SAP is taking things a step further by testing a service that will sell data collected by a number of wireless providers.

SAP announced its Consumer Insight 365 mobile service this week at the CTIA 2013 wireless show in Las Vegas. The service will, the company said in a release, pull data from SAP's "extensive partner network" including "over 990 mobile operators;" aggregate and analyze it "without drilling down into user-specific information;" and make results available to subscribers through … Read more

Welcome to Season 4, everyone! It's only been a few weeks since we said goodbye, but it's felt like a lifetime. We've been busy planning and shooting the upcoming summer season, and seeking out the tech wonders of the world to keep the Always On train in constant motion. This season we've got it all! We'll be road-tripping in pimped-out RVs, opening up the biggest phablets of them all, road testing everything from the Chromebook Pixel to action cameras with motorcross pros, and even visiting NASA's newest space exploration vehicles. Plus a serious summer … Read more