BetaNews Staff

Analytics have become an important part of the decision-making process for many companies in the past few decades, particularly with corporations using data assets as a core competency and point of origin.

My work in the past few decades in the data and analysis field have brought forward six predicted trends to watch for in the near future:

Continue reading →

In today’s pressurized environment, decisions not only have to be right, but they also have to be made quickly. But with so much information coming from numerous different sources, it can be hard to pinpoint the important data.

Since its launch in 1985, Excel has undoubtedly transformed the way businesses operate. However, over 30 years later it has not evolved to meet the speeds and efficiencies of other, more automated, solutions. Recording, analyzing, categorizing and reporting thousands of changing data points back to stakeholders is far more complex than plugging numbers into a table. Consequently, the cutting-edge technologies of yesterday are now seen by many employees as archaic and prehistoric when compared with today’s instant digital information experiences they have come to expect in their personal lives.

Continue reading →

Cyberattacks are a global epidemic today. They target organizations, critical infrastructure, and governments around the world with timely, sophisticated attacks. Examples of this include ransomware attacks like Petya and WannaCry. These put some of the world’s most critical functions on hold for a while.

Another example was the Equifax data breach that affected about 143 million Americans. With the persistence of these attacks many people believe that by 2021 cybercrime will cause $6 trillion in damages.

Continue reading →

The entire point of purchasing a security suite is so you know it has your back. You want it to be assured the company has invested heavily in development to make sure it can counter the latest threats.

German-based independent security institute AV-Test regularly tests the latest security suites, pushing them through a range of measures including performance against the latest threats, plus how they impact your system. You don’t want a security suite to slow your PC.

Continue reading →

For many years, Virtual Reality was seen as just a futuristic concept, but in 2010, the prototype of the Oculus Rift was released, before eventually being rolled out for general consumption in 2012. Since then, other companies have followed suit, including Samsung, Sony (PlayStation) and HTC (Vive). The use of Augmented Reality has also started to rise, both in the gaming world and in many other sectors. Both technologies are now being referred to as Extended Reality (XR), and there are huge plans afoot to develop them for a range of industries.

Here are the industries that will be utilizing XR technology the most in the next four years:

Continue reading →

How many of us have time to keep an eye on every website, especially when you need to track the latest news, promotions, offers and deals? Some of us dislike all-in-one apps such as iTunes, but at least they bring together a range of sources within one handy tool.

With this in mind, we’ve created an Update Scanner for our Downloadcrew website, which enables you to follow the latest software releases, check for updates against your installed desktop apps, the latest news, store promotions and whether there’s a full software Giveaway available.

Continue reading →

There once was a time not all that long ago when security teams could plead ignorant to IT security risks, with minimal possible consequence in terms of any significant damage coming to the company. Those days are long gone. We’ve reached an era where the "I see nothing" perspective no longer works for network security. In today’s era of advanced cyberattacks, information security is too important an element of business success to dismiss.

In fact, ignorance of information security matters is prohibitively costly, as regulators can use it to justify the imposition of fines. Take GDPR’s penalty scheme, for example. Is ignorance of digital security worth €20 million or 4 percent of an organization’s global annual revenue? That’s just one data protection standard -- others such as Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme and the NY Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) Cybersecurity Requirements for Financial Institutions come with their own fines and penalties. Given that we’re also in the era of insufficient resources, the challenge for security teams is how to deploy limited resources to have the greatest impact. As the title of this post makes clear, the obvious answer is to stop spending time on the wrong things.

Continue reading →

With cyberattacks becoming more prevalent, Microsoft introduced a number of new or vastly improved security features in Windows 10, which officially hit the market in July 2015. The enterprise gave a collective nod of approval, and the Windows 10 migration was underway -- but at more of a crawl than a sprint. Although businesses wanted to take advantage of the Windows 10 benefits, the realities of deployment (associated time, cost, resource drain, and general complexity, to name a few) resulted in a slower-than-anticipated adoption process.

Now, three years in, Windows 10 has reached critical mass and continues to gain momentum. According to Adaptiva’s third annual Enterprise Endpoint Security Survey, the majority of respondents for the first time reported that their companies are running Windows 10 on most machines. In fact, more computers are running Windows 10 than all other versions combined.

Continue reading →

From November 11-15, 2018, Singapore hosted the 33rd annual Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) conference. While there, people mingled with the 20 world leaders who attended and may have even seen a security robot on patrol.

Singapore's security robot is a four-wheeled device that moves independently along a pre-defined route. It has flashing red and blue lights that increase visibility, but the bot also features onboard obstacle-avoidance technology. Perhaps the most noticeable feature of the security robot is one of its main cameras, attached to a long, thin component attachment that moves up and down and lets the camera swivel around.

Continue reading →

There are some tasks we take for granted. One of these is creating and sending PDF files when issuing invoices or providing documents in a readable format you know will be accessible by most users.

With Windows, you can use the built-in Print to PDF function, or save the document as a PDF in Microsoft Word. Similarly, whenever you print any document in macOS you can choose to save the file as a PDF.

Continue reading →

Since the birth of social media, employee vetting, including social media background checking, has been a way for employers to legally or illegally gain information about employees or prospective hires. They know what we all know: posts on Facebook and Twitter can shed a light on our true selves in a way that a resume or job interview might not.

Until now, employee screening tactics and social media checks have only been as powerful as the amount of time employers sink into them. That could change dramatically as artificial intelligence gets in on the action.

Continue reading →

A new era of internet security is upon us. As browsers, security tools, and service providers move to support the new encryption standard, are you prepared to follow suit? In August of this year, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) released the Transport Layer Security (TLS) Protocol Version 1.3. The new version, designed for the "modern internet," offers major improvements from previous encryption protocols in the areas of security, performance, and privacy. Most notably, the previous optional use of perfect forward secrecy (PFS) in 1.2 is now a requirement for all sessions in TLS 1.3.

PFS requires the use of ephemeral key cryptography, which generates a new encryption key for each client/server interaction. Previous and future sessions maintain secrecy, because the same key is never used twice. This means that even if a hacker manages to compromise one session, it will be difficult for him/her to decrypt all of the sensitive traffic on your network. That is, if your network can support TLS 1.2 and 1.3 ephemeral ciphers. Below are 6 tips for monitoring and processing encrypted data on your network as PFS becomes the norm.

Continue reading →

Medicine and other scientific areas have always used computing power wherever they could find it-- to help modeling go faster and arrive at viable drugs more quickly.

But when we apply the most recent advancements in artificial intelligence to the most advanced drug development programs, we get something else entirely: truly "personalized medicine." But what's personalized about it, and how does AI play a role?

Continue reading →

We’re constantly reminding users to backup their data. It’s not until you hear of a severe malware attack, where a business is being ransomed over their important documents, do you realize you wish you’d stored securely them in another location.

And that’s the important point of backing up your data. It offers an additional safeguard. In the case of ransomware, the easiest solution is to simply wipe your drive and restore a cloned version of your system and you’d be back up and running within minutes.

Continue reading →

Almost any article you read about how automation will affect our future can be classified into one of two narratives. The first one is that it will definitely lead to a better future, as it always had since the industrial revolution. Of course, some people will lose their jobs, but as history shows, new jobs will be created. And not just new jobs, but better jobs. The other narrative is that this time is different. The robots are becoming more and more intelligent and capable. And the number of jobs and industries they’ll destroy will far exceed the number of jobs they create. Of course, it’s impossible to tell which of the two narratives will become a reality. What we can tell is that these narratives share similar inception: more and more parts of our jobs and lives are being automated.

Take for example the process of driving. For many years now, we have been taking small parts of the driving process and automating them. For a better driving experience, we built cruise control. For route planning, we developed the GPS. Now, we are able to tackle more complex problems like lane merging and emergency braking. In the next couple of years, we will most certainly have fully autonomous cars driving on the roads. Just last week Waymo, Alphabet’s self-driving subsidiary, officially received the very first California permit to test their vehicles in the state without a human behind the wheel.

Continue reading →