Jennifer Sultan Pleads Guilty to Selling Prescription Drugs

At the height of dot-com mania 13 years ago, Jennifer Sultan and a few colleagues sold their small technology company for $70 million in stock and cash. She and her boyfriend rented a large house in the Hamptons for the summer and bought a spacious loft near Union Square. John Marshall Mantel for The New York TimesJennifer Sultan faced 15 years to life on the top charge against her, and...

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Gadgetwise Blog: App Smart Extra: Starry Night

Stars, galaxies, meteors and satellites were the subject of App Smart this week as I tested out astronomy apps to help identify objects in the night sky. These apps typically use your phone or tablet’s sensors to display a view of what you’re pointing your device at in the sky in real time, helping you identify planets and constellations. Here are more apps like this to try out:Star Walk — 5 Stars...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Clean Your Phone and Its Camera

Smartphones spend a lot of time in hand, where they can pick up germs and dirt. Wiping down the phone regularly with an antibacterial cloth intended for use with touch screens can help keep it clean. Many office supply stores like Staples or Office Depot carry disposable wipes for use on phone and tablet screens.If your phone has a camera and your photos have been looking blurry, you can clean its...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Moving iTunes Libraries

How do I transfer my iTunes library from a desktop PC to a laptop, neither of which are Apple computers?All the items in your iTunes library, like music, TV shows and podcasts, are stored in folders on the computer. The iTunes software itself, which is basically a big database program crossed with a media player, displays the items in your library in lists and makes it relatively easy to manage your...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Staying Safe From Java Threats

I hear lots of scary stuff about hackers getting into computers thru Java. What do I need to do to make my Mac and PC safe? Any worries about tablets?Java is a computing platform with its own programming language that is used in many games, business applications and other utilities. It runs on more than 850 million computers worldwide and is used often by Web browsers. Recent attacks on Apple and...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Recommending Web Pages With the Google +1 Button

What happens if I click that +1 button on a Web site?The +1 button on some Web pages is Google’s version of a personal-approval stamp or recommendation, similar to Facebook’s “Like” button for publicly declaring favorite things on a social network; you probably get the most out of the feature if you are a member of the Google Plus social network. The +1 button often appears on news and entertainment...

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In a Slight Shift, North Korea Widens Internet Access, but Just for Visitors

HONG KONG — North Korea will finally allow Internet searches on mobile devices. But if you’re a North Korean, you’re out of luck — only foreigners will get this privilege. Cracking the door open slightly to wider Internet use, the government will allow a company called Koryolink to give foreigners access to 3G mobile Internet service by next Friday, according to The Associated Press, which...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Moving the Mac’s Dock

It’s easy to move the Taskbar to a different edge of the screen on a Windows machine, but how do you move the Mac’s row of program icons from the bottom of the screen?The Windows Taskbar — that row of program icons and open files that typically appears along the bottom edge of the screen — can be moved to the top or sides of the desktop by dragging it with the mouse, or in some later versions of Windows,...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Search the Text on a Web Page

Search engines help find the Web pages you are looking for, but when it comes down to locating your keywords on the actual page, your browser can help. Most browser programs use the Control-F (Command-F on the Mac) to open a search box for finding certain words within the page itself, and most highlight the instances of the word (and number of time it appears). Google Chrome also displays yellow markers...

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Bits Blog: Marissa Mayer Puts Her Stamp on Yahoo.com

8:39 a.m. | Updated On Wednesday, Yahoo introduced a fresh new home page with Marissa Mayer’s stamp all over it.Yahoo’s home page has long been a sort of sad reflection of the company. A jazzed-up Craigslist of sorts, the site was often cluttered with low-quality ads and irrelevant content and in no way reflected the fact that Yahoo is one of the most visited sites on the Web. With more than 700...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Controlling Access to a Kindle Fire HD

Is there any way to keep my kid from roaming around through the videos on my Kindle Fire HD tablet?Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablets include built-in parental controls for restricting access to specific apps, functions and content on the device. On the Kindle Fire HD, swipe your finger down on the screen to get to the settings area and tap More. Tap Parental Controls and then tap the On button. Select...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Deleting Photos From the iPad

How do I delete photos from the iPad? Some images have a trash can icon I can use to remove them, but others don’t.The iPad’s Photos app stores both the images you have added directly to the tablet (like pictures saved from e-mail, downloaded from the Web or taken with the iPad’s camera) and those you have copied over from the computer through iTunes. The steps for deleting the photos depend on how...

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Bits Blog: Facebook Says Hackers Breached Its Computers

Facebook admitted that it was breached by sophisticated hackers in recent weeks, two weeks after Twitter made a similar admission. Both Facebook and Twitter were breached through a well-publicized vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.In a blog post late Friday afternoon, Facebook said it was attacked when a handful of its employees visited a compromised site for mobile developers. Simply by visiting...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q&A: Creating Customized Shortcuts for Microsoft Word

I find the keyboard shortcut for adding a comment to a Word document cumbersome. Can I change it to different keys?Microsoft Word’s keyboard shortcut for inserting an editorial comment into a document under review (Control-Alt-M in the Windows version or Command-Option-A for the Mac edition) does take three keys to execute, but you can reassign the command to fewer (or a more comfortable combination...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Tip of the Week: Adjusting Facebook Photo Previews

Hate the way Facebook seems to arbitrarily crop photos you post on your Timeline to fit the square preview windows? On the desktop version, you can change which part of the picture shows in the preview when you’re using Facebook through your Web browser.To do so, pass the cursor over the image and then click the pencil icon that appears in the top right corner of the post. On the menu that appears,...

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Tech Companies and Immigrant Advocates Press for Broad Changes in Law

SAN FRANCISCO — What do computer programmers and illegal immigrants have to do with each other? When it comes to the sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that Congress is considering this year, the answer is everything. Silicon Valley executives, who have long pressed the government to provide more visas for foreign-born math and science brains, are joining forces with...

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DealBook Column: Relationship Science Plans Database of Names and Connections

It sounds like a Rolodex for the 1 percent: two million deal makers, power brokers and business executives — not only their names, but in many cases the names of their spouses and children and associates, their political donations, their charity work and more — all at a banker’s fingertips.Such is the promise of a new company called Relationship Science.Never heard of it? Until recently, neither had...

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Gadgetwise Blog: Q.& A.: Checking a PC's Graphics Card

How can I tell how much memory I have for graphics and video on my Windows 7 PC?You can check out the video card your computer uses by going to the Start menu to Control Panel, selecting Appearance and Personalization and clicking on “Adjust screen resolution.” If you want a quicker way to get the same Control Panel, just right-click on the Windows desktop and select Screen Resolution.Once you land...

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Reviewing Three Brands of Tax Preparation Software

TAX preparation is moving to the cloud. The makers of the better-known tax prep programs — TurboTax, H&R Block at Home and TaxAct — say that many customers, particularly younger ones, prefer Web-based programs to old-fashioned, desktop versions. Web-based programs — techies call this cloud computing — reside on remote servers that customers access via their browsers. They offer the convenience...

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John E. Karlin, 1918-2013: John E. Karlin, Who Led the Way to All-Digit Dialing, Dies at 94

Courtesy of Alcatel-Lucent USAJohn E. Karlin, a researcher at Bell Labs, studied ways to make the telephone easier to use. A generation ago, when the poetry of PEnnsylvania and BUtterfield was about to give way to telephone numbers in unpoetic strings, a critical question arose: Would people be able to remember all seven digits long enough to dial them? And when, not long afterward, the dial...

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