Apps and Software

The next flight I take will have a roughly 1 in 4,600,000 chance of crashing.

That's according to Am I Going Down? a new iOS app that uses big data to help alleviate the fears of anxious travelers.

Apprehensive travelers enter their flight information (or potential flight information), including airline, plane type and the airports from which you're departing and arriving. Next, the app generates a number that tells you just how likely that flight is to crash.

The ...

NBC is streaming the Super Bowl this year for all U.S. viewers — with or without a cable subscription — but that doesn't mean the experience is seamless.

Although this is the first year the Super Bowl Halftime Show will be part of the live stream, watching online isn't exactly the same as watching on TV.

For starters, there is a delay — about 50 seconds by our calculations. This delay isn't uncommon for online live streams, but it's a bit disconcerting for anyone who wants to keep up with up-to-the-second plays on social media. ...

Google is planning to pay independent security researchers — no strings attached — to help find security vulnerabilities in its products.

Google's has had a "Security Rewards Program," which financially rewards security researchers who discover Google vulnerabilities, since 2010. This new program differs because the researchers are given the money before they even begin working, and there's no penalty for not finding anything.

As a bonus to the grant, researchers are still eligible for regular financial rewards if they do happen to disclose or fix a zero-day bug. The program is intended for Google's "top performing, frequent vulnerability researchers as well as invited experts," so this isn't aimed at amateur hackers. Google's treating the program as an experiment and is placing trust in the researchers based on their track records. ...