• Article

Technology companies have been telling us virtual reality will change the world for decades now. While VR has become more popular in recent years, it is still a niche market. Virtual reality will probably become mainstream in the future, but until prices come down even further, it will remain a hobby for enthusiasts.

With that said, Google is still banking on virtual reality, especially with its Daydream initiative. Today, the search giant is making a VR positional-tracking tool called "Seurat" open source. The code is being hosted on GitHub.

When a person celebrates a birthday, they often receive gifts, eat cake, and spend time with friends and family. After all, it is intended to be a happy occasion as the person marks another year of life.

But what the heck does a Linux distribution do to celebrate a birthday? In the case of the excellent KaOS operating system, the answer is simple -- release an updated ISO. Yes, as a way to mark the 5th birthday of the KDE-focused distro, version 2018.04 is now available for download. You get Plasma 5.12.4, Linux kernel 4.15.7, Libreoffice 6.0.3, and more.

Irish security developer Safer Networking has released Spybot -- Search & Destroy 2.7, a new version of its Windows free and paid-for anti-malware tool.

The major new feature in this release is the addition of an additional Start Center screen giving users access to frequently used functions. It also promises a number of improvements -- including Secure Boot support -- and better reliability.

A future enabled by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is not so far off, with the integration of IoT devices rising across industrial settings from oil and gas to building security.

The potential to leverage big data and analytics to optimize operations and efficiencies is driving industrial companies to move to IIoT-enabled devices, but these companies are now faced with the challenge of modernizing their legacy production systems.

Microsoft launched Windows 10 April 2018 Update this week, and if you rushed to install it you may well have noticed one or two issues. There have been complaints that various apps have been problematic since the update, but Chrome and Cortana seem to be causing the most problems.

Microsoft has confirmed that it is aware of issues with Chrome and "Hey Cortana" that can lead to Windows 10 April 2018 Update freezing. A patch is currently being worked on and should be released next week, but the company has a couple of suggestions for fixes you can try in the meantime.

Twitter has issued a warning to its 330 million users, urging them to change their passwords. The security announcement comes after the company discovered a bug that left passwords stored in unencrypted form in internal logs.

While Twitter says that the bug has been fixed and that the plaintext logs have been deleted, it is encouraging the password change out of "an abundance of caution".

More and more cyber threats keep emerging every day, affecting organizations across the board, targeting the entire spectrum of the Internet. Digital or cyber-extortion has come across as the most serious of such threats as it seeks to profit from criminal activity, akin to blackmail.

Preventing Digital Extortion from Packt Publishing will teach you the art of preventing digital extortion and securing confidential data.

Now that the Windows 10 April 2018 Update is done and rolling out to users, Microsoft can focus all of its energy on the next big feature update. Insiders who haven’t yet opted out of the program will, from today, start receiving updates from the Redstone 5 branch.

The first of these updates to be rolled out to Insiders on the Fast ring, as well as Skip Ahead, is Build 17661, and this introduces a number of big changes.

The industrial control systems (ICS) used to run equipment in manufacturing, energy, and other sectors are secured differently from office networks. Vulnerabilities often go unpatched, because organizations are afraid to make changes that might cause downtime.

To minimize the chances of exploitation of vulnerabilities, measures put in place include placing ICS components on a separate network, isolating them, or air-gapping them entirely from Internet-connected corporate systems. However, penetration testing performed by Positive Technologies has shown that such measures often fall short in practice, leaving attackers plenty of opportunity to access critical equipment.

It's World Password Day and we've already looked at tips for safe password use, but a new survey from identity management company SailPoint reveals that IT professionals aren't practising what they preach when it comes to password use.

In partnership with research company Vanson Bourne, SailPoint surveyed 400 IT decision makers about their password habits and came up with some worrying results.

Ransomware attacks grew by 400 percent last year, largely down to the success of the WannaCry attack. It’s perhaps not surprising that other variants slowed down, but this signals a shift in the way ransomware is being used.

A new report from F-Secure shows WannaCry accounted for nine out of every 10 ransomware detection reports by the end of the year.

The Windows 10 April 2018 Update is rolling out to users. If you install it and encounter major problems, as some users doubtless will, you might want to go back to your previous version, and wait until the update is a bit less buggy.

If you've been using Windows 10 for a while you’ll probably know how to do this, although the process may be slightly different to what you've been used to.

We're constantly being told that the password's days are numbered. No less a figure than Bill Gates predicted the end of the password as far back as 2004. Yet we still rely on them to protect many of our day-to-day activities.

To mark today’s World Password Day, Raj Samani, chief scientist and fellow at McAfee, has produced a set of tips that people can follow to make the best use of passwords.

Linux Mint is a pretty good Linux distribution. Many people love it because of the Cinnamon desktop environment. Hell, despite having other DE versions -- such as Mate -- the Linux Mint operating system sort of exists only because of Cinnamon. I mean, look -- Mint is based on Ubuntu, so if you want to use Mate or Xfce environments, for instance, why not just run Ubuntu Mate or Xubuntu?

The thing is, Cinnamon is available to any distro that wants to use it -- it is not only a Linux Mint affair. Since the Mint team both maintains and popularized Cinnamon, however, it will be forever thought of as a Mint DE -- right or wrong. And that is why today's announcement is so puzzling -- Cinnamon 3.8 is now available (yay!), but no Linux Mint users can try it (boo!).

Branching out into yet another field, Amazon has launched its own pet product brand, Wag.

This is not the first time the company has launched an own-label product -- it has already enjoyed success with household goods and baby products. Available to Amazon Prime subscribers, the Wag line starts off with dry dog food, but it will expand into further supplies soon.