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When I get into a submarine, I expect certain amenities like air conditioning, an iPod sound system, a screaming red paint job, and a plate of caviar. All except the caviar are available with the C-Explorer 5 from U-Boat Worx.

The $2.4 million C-Explorer 5 is being advertised as the "world's first subsea limousine." It holds five people, has an air conditioning system, can dive down to 1,000 feet, and sports a full 360-degree acrylic pressure hull. Cruising speed is 3 knots underwater.… Read more

Peter Swire, an Ohio State law professor and privacy expert who has worked with the Obama administration, is stepping into a contentious process to create a standard way to let people stop Web sites from tracking their online behavior.

Aleecia M. McDonald announced today she's stepping down as co-chair of the Do Not Track standardization effort at the World Wide Web Consortium. She previously worked for Firefox maker Mozilla, which launched the current DNT technology after the U.S. Federal Trade Commission sought a mechanism to block online tracking, but she currently works for a program within Stanford University'… Read more

MX Video Player is perhaps not the best, but it's definitely one of the better media player apps out there. The app can access all video file formats and includes a lot of options that you can use to change the viewing environment of your videos.

This app offers a very straightforward interface, especially if you're only using it to access mainstream files. At the starting screen you're simply given the set of available videos on your device. The interface of the player has all the standard buttons when playing a file, as well as several other … Read more

While many of us plug away on monotone-colored keyboards, creative folks at Sony continue to push the bar away from the anemic designs that plague our store shelves.

If you regularly observe fashionable computer accessories, you might recall that Sony's U.S. arm sells a wide array of colorful rubber keyboard skins for Vaio computers -- however, in Japan, the company sells something much more stylish. … Read more

RadioShack Wireless today added another Android-based handset to its burgeoning roster of no-contract smartphones. Available just in time for the holiday shopping season, the HTC Desire C can now be yours for a cool $119.99.

While it's certainly not going to replace your existing Android experience, it's plenty for a first-time smartphone adopter. Those who want to dip their toes in the Android waters without breaking the bank will likely appreciate the device.

Powered by Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the Desire C features a 3.5-inch display, a 5-megapixel camera, a 600MHz processor, 512MB RAM, … Read more

A rumored Sony smartphone operating under the codename of "Yuga" could be the company's first handset to offer a 5-inch, 1080p display.

Details, images, and benchmarks posted by PocketDroid and a Swiss Android blog suggest that the device could give HTC and others a run for their money.

The hardware appears to match up fairly closely to the HTC J Butterfly. Also, after looking at a number of freshly unearthed photos of the Yuga, I see a unibody enclosure that likely means an internal battery.

While the Yuga maintains some of the design aesthetics of recent Xperia … Read more

You might think developing technology standards is plodding, bureaucratic tedium compared to something like the frenzy of smartphone innovation.

But you'd be wrong, at least in the case of Paul Cotton, who leads Microsoft's involvement in the important and often fractious world of Web standards. Web standards are hot -- and hotly contested.

Cotton, an even-keeled Canadian, discovered a passion for standards more than 20 years ago when figuring out how to digitize airplane maintenance manuals. He's comfortable with the contradictory motives of standards groups: fierce competition one moment and gentlemanly cooperation the next.

It's a … Read more

There's a "Battle of the Bay" going on tonight at Facebook's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, and it's happening in a haze of Chinese food, juggling, music, and coding. And maybe some unicycling, if you're lucky.

The social network holds its second Stanford versus Cal (University of California at Berkeley) hackathon for budding coders to try their hands at creating new products. Nearly 200 students from both campuses sat in front of their laptops at around 5 p.m. with no intention of stopping until 3 p.m. tomorrow. That's what Facebook hackathons are … Read more

The Do Not Track proposal seems to be causing confusion and frustration among some W3C members charged with approving it.

Once ratified, the DNT policy would require advertisers and other third parties to turn off tracking for Internet users whose browser settings specifically restrict it.

The push for DNT has already created a chasm between advertisers, who naturally want the policy to be as lean as possible, and privacy advocates, who want tough standards.

Browser makers have also been caught in the furor. Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, and Internet Explorer already include DNT settings. But Microsoft has caused waves by … Read more