Fast-growing Chinese tech firm Xiaomi Technology Ltd Co booked 74.3 billion yuan ($11.97 billion) in pre-tax sales last year, up 135 percent from 2013, the firm's chief executive Lei Jun said on his official microblog account on Sunday.

Xiaomi sold a total of just over 61 million phones in 2014, up 227 percent from a year earlier, Lei added in a post on his Sina Weibo microblog account.

The post did not give a related profit figure, although a filing last month showed that the firm was grappling with razor thin margins as it rapidly expands. A part of the business made around 347.5 million yuan net profit last year on revenue of 26.6 billion yuan and an operating margin of just 1.8 percent.

I was born in 1973 in Czechoslovakia. It was a small country in the middle of Europe, unfortunately on the dark side of the Iron Curtain. We had never been a part of Soviet Union (as many think), but we were so-called "Soviet Satellite", side by side with Poland, Hungary, and East Germany.

My hobbies were electronics and - in the middle of 80s - computers. The history of computers behind the Iron Curtain is very interesting, with a lot of unusual moments. For example - communists at first called cybernetics as "bourgeois' pseudoscience" (as well as sociology or semiotics), "used to enslave a mankind by machines". But later on they understood the importance of computers, primarily for science and army. So in 50s the Eastern Bloc started to build its own computers, separately and "in its own way".

From Apple's financial followers to the culture pages, expect few technology topics to garner as much attention in 2015 as the Apple Watch, which is set to launch "early" in the year.

Why? Because it's not just a new gadget. Several people, companies, and entire industries are counting on it to be a hit. Without hyperbole, the Apple Watch has the potential to create new billionaires and to change the way people live.

Fresh off the news that it's acquired the Palm brand, Alcatel has a new Pixi for us. It's not actually the first Pixi from the budget phone maker, but it is pretty unique in its own right: the phone is compatible with three operating systems, being able to run Windows Phone, Android, or Firefox OS. The OS-agnostic Pixi 3 comes in four variants, with a 3.5-inch display 3G model, and three larger versions adding LTE and coming in at 4, 4.5, and 5 inches in size.

This is an annotated version of my 31C3 talk on Thunderstrike, a significant firmware vulnerability in Apple's EFI firmware that allows untrusted code to be written to the boot ROM and can resist attempts to remove it.

While Android continued to gain market share in the global smartphone market, it saw a significant drop on another key metric: Profits.

Analyst Chetan Sharma estimates that global profits in the Android hardware market for 2014 were down by half from the prior year - the first year that there has been any significant drop.

After raising $1.1 billion in new capital, Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has been valued at $46 billion. This means it's worth more in the eyes of investors than even over-performing Uber (currently valued at $41 billion) and is now the most valuable venture-backed tech startup in the world. That's not only testament to the company's growth - sales are up by 300 percent year on year - but it even managed to produce a small profit of $56 million last year. Dedicated apps have kept customers loyal (and offered alternatives to Google services blocked in China) while its online-only sales approach has created hype and saved money on stores. There's just one element of Xiaomi's business that will never be acknowledged: its debt to Apple.

Spartan is still going to use Microsoft's Chakra JavaScript engine and Microsoft's Trident rendering engine (not WebKit), sources say. As Neowin's Brad Sams reported back in September, the coming browser will look and feel more like Chrome and Firefox and will support extensions. Sams also reported on December 29 that Microsoft has two different versions of Trident in the works, which also seemingly supports the claim that the company has two different Trident-based browsers.

However, if my sources are right, Spartan is not IE 12. Instead, Spartan is a new, light-weight browser Microsoft is building.

Windows 10 (at least the desktop version) will ship with both Spartan and IE 11, my sources say. IE 11 will be there for backward-compatibility's sake. Spartan will be available for both desktop and mobile (phone/tablet) versions of Windows 10, sources say.

A summary of some problems I faced when tinkering with Quake to get it play nicely on an oscilloscope.

If Linux is to achieve world domination, it must have One Frickin' User Interface (1FUI): a single user experience / interface behaviour and a single underlying UI toolkit API / widget set. World domination means putting Linux into corporations, schools, PDAs, and cell phones. This will only happen with 1FUI, and if this upsets the nerds, too bad. History clearly shows that if a platform/system offers a choice of user interfaces, the potential users will choose a different system.

When discussing self-driving cars, people tend to ask a lot of superficial questions: how much will these cars cost? Is this supposed to replace my car at home? Is this supposed to replace taxis or Uber? What if I need to use a drive-thru?

They ignore the smarter questions. They ignore the fact that 45% of disabled people in the US still work. They ignore the fact that 95% of a car's lifetime is spent parked. They ignore how this technology could transform the lives of the elderly, or eradicate the need for parking lots or garages or gas stations. They dismiss the entire concept because they don't think a computer could ever be as good at merging on the freeway as they are.

They ignore the great, big, beautiful picture staring them right in the face: that this technology could make our lives so much better.

In 1970, MOS memory chips were just becoming popular, but were still very expensive. Intel had released their first product the previous year, the 3101 RAM chip with 64 bits of storage. For this chip (with enough storage to hold the word "aardvark") you'd pay $99.50. To avoid these astronomical prices, some computers used the cheaper alternative of shift register memory. Intel's 1405 shift register provided 512 bits of storage - 8 times as much as their RAM chip - at a significantly lower price. In a shift register memory, the bits go around and around in a circle, with one bit available at each step. The big disadvantage is that you need to wait for the bit you want to come around, which can take half a millisecond.

Ever since rumors started swirling that Apple was working on a wearable device, I've often thought about what such a device would mean for people with disabilities. My curiosity is so high, in fact, that I've even written about the possibilities. Make no mistake, for users with disabilities such as myself, a wearable like the Apple Watch brings with it usage and design paradigms that, I think, are of even greater impact than what the iPhone in one's pocket has to offer.

Suffice it to say, I'm very excited for Apple Watch's debut sometime next year.

German researchers have discovered security flaws that could let hackers, spies and criminals listen to private phone calls and intercept text messages on a potentially massive scale - even when cellular networks are using the most advanced encryption now available.

The flaws, to be reported at a hacker conference in Hamburg this month, are the latest evidence of widespread insecurity on SS7, the global network that allows the world's cellular carriers to route calls, texts and other services to each other. Experts say it's increasingly clear that SS7, first designed in the 1980s, is riddled with serious vulnerabilities that undermine the privacy of the world’s billions of cellular customers.