Logi ZeroTouch from Logitech is a smart car mount for Android smartphones
People are seemingly addicted to their smartphones nowadays. You know what I am talking about. Everywhere I go, I see people glued to their phones like zombies. You know what? I am guilty of this too. While I am texting and tweeting while walking or eating in a restaurant, I never do so while driving -- that is just plain stupid. Unfortunately, many people are guilty of texting and driving. It became so prevalent here on Long Island, that some rest stops on the expressway were re-purposed as "text stops", so people can pull over to interact with their tech.
If for whatever reason you need to interact with your phone while driving -- texting, making phone calls, playing music, etc. -- Logitech has a new solution so that it can be done more safely. The Logi ZeroTouch is a car mount for your Android phone, but it is more than that. It is "smart", meaning that your phone knows when it is in the mount, enabling a hands-free experience.
Embark on The Grand Tour with the Top Gear gang
It's been a while since the boys were together on your screen. But Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May are reuniting, but this time the offering has a brand new title. And on this go-around they won't be on the BBC, they'll instead be debuting on Amazon Prime.
Now the brand new show, which is currently in production, has finally got a name. It's been decided it will be called The Grand Tour, because of the way it is being made.
Nest makes Thread networking protocol open source -- names it 'OpenThread'
Some people still have the perception of open source being for hobbyists and Linux enthusiasts. I can understand this wrong viewpoint, however. After all, Microsoft has long had a stranglehold on both home and business workstation computing. That company has historically been a closed-source champion. Over time, open source ideology has matured, being embraced by many major companies -- the Windows-maker included.
Today, the Google-owned Nest makes a big announcement. Its 'Thread' networking protocol is now open source. Dubbed 'OpenThread', the source code is now available on GitHub. Will it see a large scale adoption?
Digital transformation: The biggest concerns
An Appian/YouGov survey analyzed 400 business executives, from companies with more than a billion dollars in revenue, about their digital business transformation plans, and the results are just in.
According to the survey, 14 percent have fully migrated to all intended areas. Another 48 percent managed to migrate partially, but not everything.
Stylish protection from the latest Inateck laptop sleeves [Review]
The world is a harsh place and if you carry your laptop around with you it's almost inevitably going to pick up knocks and scrapes.
We've looked at Inateck's range of protective sleeves in the past and the company has just launched three new versions aimed at keeping your kit in peak condition.
Facebook encourages wannabe hackers by making Capture The Flag open source
When a medical student is learning how to do surgery, he or she can't walk up to somebody on the street and start cutting into them. Instead, they will initially practice on cadavers and computer simulators. The same can be said for hacking. If a person wants to learn how to discover or test vulnerabilities, hacking the Pentagon or University, for instance, is not a wise idea.
Luckily, like a medical surgeon with a cadaver, Facebook offers its Capture The Flag platform -- hacking challenges in a test environment. Today, it is making that gamified security training platform open source in an effort to encourage wannabe hackers and security enthusiasts.
DevOps and Docker adoption take off in the enterprise
Back in February RightScale released the results of its latest State of the Cloud Report. This year it asked some additional questions surrounding the use of DevOps tools including Docker.
Today it has launched an additional DevOps Trends report offering a look at these extra findings. These show that DevOps adoption increased from 66 percent in 2015 to 74 percent in 2016 and that Docker adoption has more than doubled in the same period.
Google proposes equality-boosting emoji showing professional women
Google workers feel that emoji could be used to promote gender equality. A quartet of employees have put forward a new set of emoji that portray women in a number of different professional roles such as technology engineer, mechanic, and farmer.
In a bid to balance things out a little, the emoji proposal sees women portrayed in more roles than ever before, including those traditionally thought of as being male-dominated. A set of 13 new emoji have been submitted to the Unicode Consortium for consideration. They may later be added to the official emoji set.
Microsoft shows Windows 10's growth accelerating, but all is not as it seems
At the start of every month, NetMarketShare publishes the usage share for all of the desktop operating systems, including Windows 10. The operating system has been growing at a steady, if rather unexciting rate, gaining around 1 percentage point a month, including in April.
Despite Microsoft aggressively pushing Windows 10 onto as many systems as possible, the monthly trend shows growth is slowing. But hold on a minute! Microsoft today releases its own figures, and they show not only does the operating system have a much, much larger share than NetMarketShare reports, but growth is skyrocketing!
Facebook panders to European privacy concerns by stripping facial recognition from Moments app
Facebook has rolled out its photo-sharing app Moments around the world, and users in Europe have been treated to a modified version. Specifically, the European version of the app lacks the facial recognition feature that allows for automatic tagging of people.
In many ways, Facebook has been forced to release a degraded version of Moments to its EU audience because of the varying privacy laws that exist in different countries. The hobbled app will not attempt to identify individuals in photos, but will group together images that "appear to include the same face".
Android devices suffer higher failure rates than iOS
People have become increasingly reliant on smartphones and as a result they have become less tolerant of poor performance and device problems.
Blancco Technology Group has released a report based on the latest results from its SmartChk diagnostic platform, showing higher failure rates in Android devices than in iOS ones, and revealing some interesting trends.
GitHub's gift to paying developers -- unlimited private repositories
Today GitHub changes its pricing structure for both individual developers and organizations. As well as simplifying pricing, the change also sees the introduction of unlimited private repositories, representing a real term financial saving.
The new pricing means that developers now just have two options to choose from: individual accounts for $7 per month, or organization accounts for $9 per user per month (or $25 per month for the first five users).
Outdated Internet Explorer versions still run on many business PCs
Businesses around the world don’t really enjoy updating their software, security researchers from Duo Security have found, exposing themselves, and their organization to risks of cyber-attacks, phishing, scams and malware.
Researchers looked at a sample of two million Windows devices used by businesses around the world and found that almost a quarter, and that’s 500,000 devices, are using an outdated and unsupported version of Internet Explorer.
Microsoft releases Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342 -- here's what's new
Windows Insiders now have a new build to test, as Microsoft just released Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14342 to Fast Ring. As always, users can expect a significant number of improvements and bug fixes to be included, but also some known issues to be present.
One of the biggest changes is related to Wi-Fi Sense. Because it has not been very popular with Windows 10 users, Microsoft is not dropping its biggest feature -- the ability to share Wi-Fi networks with contacts. Wi-Fi Sense will still be available in upcoming builds, though with limited functionality.
WhatsApp says "what's up?" to Windows and Mac
Back in the day, I remember AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ being all the rage for messaging. For a while, MSN and Yahoo! Messenger were popular with the young folks too. Nowadays it seems to be Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which is a bit weird, because Facebook owns the latter -- hopefully they merge eventually.
One of the frustrating things about WhatsApp, however, is that it does not have a desktop client, instead being web and mobile only. Well, now this changes. Today, the messaging solution gets an official client for both Windows and OS X -- sorry Linux desktop users. At least that aforementioned web version is available.
Most Commented Stories
© 1998-2024 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy.