Latest Technology News

The OnePlus 5 is now official -- Qualcomm Snapdragon 835, 8GB RAM, and a price rise

Three years in the making, the OnePlus 5 -- the company's "most complete and competitive product yet" -- is now official. OnePlus says it's all down to the details, and the company has made endless minor adjustments, and over 100 prototypes to settle on a final design. The handset is just 7.25mm thick, and the overall layout of the phone is all but identical to the OnePlus 3 and 3T -- and yes, there is a headphone jack.

The phone is available in Midnight Black and Slate Gray and the specs are in line with the leaks and rumors we've heard over recent weeks. OnePlus is keen that we don’t focus entirely on specs, but with the inclusion of up to 8GB of RAM, they're hard to ignore -- and it's central to the "smooth experience" the phone offers.

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Google Search now has a playable fidget spinner

Fidget spinners are this year’s big craze, especially among school children. There are lots of different types, and they can cost anything from a few dollars to a few thousand dollars.

Google is getting in on the fad, introducing a virtual fidget spinner to its search site.

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Adobe Advertising Cloud TV to deliver highly targeted TV ads

Since the dawn of time, watching TV has always been an exercise in patience and frustration. Just as you're beginning to enjoy the unfolding storyline in your favorite shows or movies, they are interrupted by a series of commercials that you most likely are not going to find useful or interesting.

That has been starting to change over the past few years as the entire advertising landscape has undergone massive paradigm shifts, but there's still a lot of work to be done in the prehistoric landscape that is traditional TV ad buying. Enter Adobe.

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Display live system stats on your taskbar with XMeters

XMeters is a free-for-personal-use system monitor which displays live CPU, RAM, network and drive stats directly on your taskbar. The details include CPU utilization by core, hard drive read and write rates, network upload and download speeds, and free and used RAM.

Right-clicking any of the monitors opens a configuration dialog. You can reorder these items, turn them on or off individually, change their display type (bar, pie or text), set colors and more.

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SiriusXM comes to Alexa and it's great

SiriusXM is a really satisfying service. Not only is it great for commercial-free music, but it offers some great talk radio, such as Howard Stern. You can even listen to popular news programs from CNN, Fox News, and more. Let's not forget the great sports coverage too.

Unfortunately, many people only listen to SiriusXM in the car, as that is where their equipment is. Luckily, there is a new convenient way to listen to the satellite service in your home -- Alexa. Yes, Amazon's assistant has a new SiriusXM skill that allows an Echo device to play your favorite channels. I have been using it this morning and it is quite brilliant.

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Microsoft Stream rolls out to Office 365 Enterprise customers

Microsoft Stream

Last year Microsoft announced the preview of its Stream enterprise video service, intended to make it easy to share and discover business-relevant video content.

Today Stream becomes available as a stand alone product and is being rolled out to Office 365 Enterprise customers around the world.

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Amazon Prime Wardrobe beta: money-saving clothes shopping with free returns

Not content with splashing some cash on Whole Foods, Amazon is also spreading out into other new ventures. The latest is Prime Wardrobe, a new clothes shopping service for Prime subscribers that's currently in beta and offers the chance to "try before you buy."

The service ties in with Amazon Fashion, and it covers more than a million items of clothing. Users can select three or more items to have shipped out to them completely free of charge, and payment is only required for anything that's kept. Returns are free, and Amazon gives shoppers a full week to try out clothes.

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The pros and cons of smart light bulbs

Home automation, "the internet of things" or IoT, has been a popular subject for the past couple of years. Unfortunately, that subject isn't always good -- some things have proven infinitely hackable, making it a bit on the worrisome side.

One of the first items to make the mainstream was light bulbs, and we've played around with a few and here is what we have found.

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BBC iPlayer now requires you to sign in for your catch-up TV fix

Last month, the BBC announced plans to force iPlayer users to sign into their account in order to watch the catch-up service. The requirement is now rolling out, and this means that the option to skip sign-in is starting to vanish.

Visitors to the site are now greeted by a message that reads: "You now need to sign in to watch. It's quick & easy. And we'll keep you signed in." Without following the instruction to sign in -- which gives the BBC the opportunity to check for a valid TV license -- it is not possible to watch any programming.

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Web hosting company pays $1 million after Erebus ransomware attack

Cash for ransomware

The cost of a ransomware attack can be pretty substantial. Businesses that are not well prepared are looking at lost revenue from downtime and massive damage to their reputation, not to mention a pretty hefty ransom bill as well.

For web hosting company Nayana, that was $1 million. Nayana, which is based in South Korea, had 153 of its Linux-based servers infected by the Erebus ransomware on June 10. The attack affected roughly 3,400 customers that relied on its services for hosting websites, databases and multimedia content.

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Digital solutions make up nearly half of a company's revenue

Digital solutions are becoming an increasingly profitable operation for many businesses, generating almost half of revenue (47 percent) for most major organizations, according to a new report.

That's according to Pure Storage which surveyed 9,000 businesses in 24 countries and in three regions (US, EMEA, Asia Pacific), and found that digital transformation is "no longer a buzzword" but is, in fact, actually happening right now.

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New vulnerability manager aims to prevent the next WannaCry

vulnerability bomb

When the WannaCry attack hit last month, a patch was already available to prevent it. Its victims were those who had failed to deploy it.

Software management company Flexera is aiming to help companies close the risk window between patches and attacks with the launch of its new Software Vulnerability Manager.

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Retail industry leads the way in data breaches

Credit card PCI DSS

The largest share of data breach incidents involved the retail industry, closely followed by food and beverages, according to a new report.

The 2017 Global Security Report from Trustwave shows that 22 percent of incidents involved the retail industry, followed by food and beverages at 20 percent.

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ProtonVPN is a free VPN service that's now available to everyone

ProtonMail has opened up its free VPN service to anyone who wants to use it. ProtonVPN was previously only available to a limited number of beta testers, but now everyone can secure their internet connection for free.

The company is best known for its encrypted email service, but the prospect of a free VPN tool will also be enticing to anyone who has concerns about privacy. It also provides a free way of bypassing internet restrictions that may be put in place by governments or ISPs.

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Protect your privacy with Disable Nvidia Telemetry

Microsoft and Windows may get most of the flak for collecting data on its users, but other companies also have issues. Nvidia’s GeForce Experience made headlines last year, thanks to some extensive data collection abilities of its own.

How extensive? Nvidia says “the application collects… hardware configuration, operating system, language, installed games, game settings, game usage, game performance, and current driver version…  GeForce Experience does not share any personally identifiable information outside the company (link).”

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