Want to know what's going on at home while you're away? Win a Wi-Fi camera that streams live video of homestead happenings to your smartphone, tablet or computer.
Colin West McDonald
Important-announcement time: We notify Crave giveaway winners via email, so please make sure the email address connected to your CNET account is current. Otherwise you might miss your prize, a misfortune that has befallen several giveaway participants in recent months.
Now that that PSA is out of the way, we've got a brand-new freebie, an ArcSoft Simplicam Wi-Fi security camera. It lets you check in on your kids, pets, chairs and sofa from your smartphone.
The facial-recognition feature is available through an optional cloud service starting at $5 a month (ArcSoft is tossing in a $49.99 one-year subscription to the Closeli Cloud for this giveaway). Without cloud-recording services, you still get motion and sound alerts and live 720p streaming to your smartphone,tabletor computer via the free Closeli app.The camera has the motion and sound alerts typical for surveillance cams but stands out for its facial-recognition capabilities. It can't actually distinguish between faces, but it can recognize that it's looking at one, and theoretically, notify you that a human, as opposed to a cat or a rustling branch, has triggered its motion sensor.
In her CNET review of the ArcSoft Simplicam, Megan Wollerton has a few minor quibbles with the $149.99 Simplicam, but says that "Simplicam impresses and in some ways surpasses pricier models." So how do you go about snagging one for free? There are a few rules, so please read carefully.
The share of PCs running on Microsoft's latest operating system jumped in October.
A little more than a year after Windows 8.1 was made available, the update to Microsoft's PC operating system is finally seeing some progress.Microsoft
The market share of PCs that run Windows 8.1jumped to 10.9 percent in October, up from 6.7 percent in September and 7.1 percent in August, according to Net Applications, which tracks activity through analyzing the browsers hits of specific websites.
The share gains suggest a small bit of momentum as Microsoft seeks to upgrade all users to the latest version of its marquee Windows operating system. While consumers didn't respond toWindows 8, which was the first to emphasize tiles as part of its user interface, the company has added back features with 8.1. In August, it added small touches like a Shutdown button on the Start screen and the ability to run modern apps from the desktop.
Customers, however, have been more keen to hang on to their existing version of Windows. Windows 7had the largest share with 53.1 percent, following by Windows XP at 17.2 percent. The share of XP users is falling (it was at 23.9 percent in September) consistently after Microsoft cut off support for that version of Windows in April.
There may be users who are hanging on and waiting to see how the next version of Windows will run.Microsoft unveiled Windows 10 last month. The update moves away from the tiled "Metro" interface, replaced by live tiles and a more classic Windows experience, addressing a primary complaint with Windows 8.
Apple's CEO publicly discussed his sexual orientation for the first time in an effort to help anyone "struggling to come to terms with who he or she is."
Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly acknowledged his sexual orientation for the first time, saying he wants to use his position as leader of one of the world's most valuable companies to bring attention to the discrimination minorities face.
"I'm proud to be gay. I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me," Cook said in an 800-word essay posted on Bloomberg Businessweek. "Being gay has given me a deeper understanding of what it means to be in the minority and provided a window into the challenges that people in other minority groups deal with every day. It's made me more empathetic."
Cook, who has been CEO of Apple for three years, described how he's been open about his sexuality with many people, but has tried to maintain some privacy on a wider public level. He quoted Martin Luther King in describing how he decided to balance his desire for privacy with his position as a role model, which gives him a platform to speak out on issues of discrimination.
"Plenty of colleagues at Apple know I'm gay, and it doesn't seem to make a difference in the way they treat me," Cook wrote. "Of course, I've had the good fortune to work at a company that loves creativity and innovation and knows it can only flourish when you embrace people's differences. Not everyone is so lucky."
Cook said he doesn't consider himself an activist, "but I realize how much I've benefited from the sacrifice of others. So if hearing that the CEO of Apple is gay can help someone struggling to come to terms with who he or she is, or bring comfort to anyone who feels alone, or inspire people to insist on their equality, then it's worth the trade-off with my own privacy."
As recently as September, Cook tweeted in support of the Austin, Texas, pride parade celebrating gay rights. In his tweet, Cook gave "a shout-out to 3000 Apple employees and their families marching in the#AustinPride parade! Inclusion inspires innovation. #applepride." And while talking about Apple's diversity report in August (which showed most Apple employees are white men), Cook said Apple's "definition of diversity goes far beyond the traditional categories of race, gender and ethnicity."
"It includes personal qualities that usually go unmeasured, like sexual orientation, veteran status and disabilities," he said in the diversity report. "Who we are, where we come from, and what we've experienced influence the way we perceive issues and solve problems. We believe in celebrating that diversity and investing in it."
The Alabama-born 53-year-old described himself as "an engineer, an uncle, a nature lover, a fitness nut, a son of the South, a sports fanatic, and many other things." He joined Apple in 1998 from IBM and temporarily took over from Steve Jobs as Apple's CEO in 2009. He was appointed to the position permanently in August 2011. Jobs died from cancer in October 2011.Cook on Thursday said being gay has been "tough and uncomfortable at times, but it has given me the confidence to be myself, to follow my own path, and to rise above adversity and bigotry. It's also given me the skin of a rhinoceros, which comes in handy when you're the CEO of Apple."
