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You give your computer a spring clean by removing a ton of files you’ve stored for years. Then you realize a few weeks later that you accidentally deleted important documents or old photos and there’s no quick and obvious way of retrieving them.

The solution is a dedicated file recovery application. There are few better than Auslogics File Recovery 7 and we’re offering you the full version, worth $29.95, across this weekend. It’s always worth having a file recovery program within your suite of system tools.

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Increasingly businesses are moving their data and applications to the cloud. But there are always concerns about how secure the information is.

Network security company Portnox has put together an infographic looking at some of the myths surrounding cloud security and explaining why they're ill-founded.

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The UK government has made no secret of its desire to exert greater control over the internet, and home secretary Amber Rudd has gone as far as suggesting that encryption should be weakened -- and backdoors should be included in software -- to make it easier to carry out surveillance on terrorists.

Lord Jonathan Evans, the former chief of MI5 in the UK, acknowledged that encryption had got in the way of monitoring communication between extremists, but said this should not be used as an excuse to weaken security.

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A few months ago, Google brought phishing protection to Gmail on Android. Now the company is doing the same for the iOS version of the app.

The feature is rolling out over the next few weeks, and it offers a couple of safety nets to protect users from visiting potentially dangerous links in emails.

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Two months ago, Microsoft accidentally pushed out a buggy Windows 10 build to Insiders that caused chaos but also revealed something interesting -- the company's plans for a new version of Windows 10 aimed specifically at power users.

The leak is now official as Microsoft announces Windows 10 Pro for Workstations, a high-end version of its new operating system.

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Hip-Hop isn't a music style, but an entire culture. It includes rap music, yes, but also graffiti, breakdancing, and DJing. Not to mention, there is clothing, language, and more. As the great KRS-One once said, "Rap is something you do, Hip-Hop is something you live." Very true words. Hip-Hop has positively improved society as a whole, by fostering the sharing of different viewpoints, and bringing people of different cultures and skin colors together. It started in New York, but has spread globally.

Google is a very forward-thinking company, and it often shows respect to different people and cultures through its Doodle program. If you aren't familiar, this is where it transforms the "Google" logo into an artistic representation of someone or something. Today, Hip-Hop is in the spotlight because August 11, 1973 is considered by some to be the day the culture was born. The search giant is using the Doodle to both educate people on the history of Hip-Hop and to celebrate the anniversary. In other words, Google is showing mad love.

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If you work in IT solutions as a provider for managed services, cloud services, or internet services you are going to need servers that meet your needs in terms of both price and performance. So how can you keep your costs down and find the solutions that your clients and customers are looking for?

When it’s time to replace your servers, buying refurbished is the obvious solution. Hard on the heels of that thought though is a common fear of zombies -- getting stuck with zombie servers to be more specific. These comatose entities will suck not only your wallet but also your operating budget dry while providing zero value.

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Earlier today, Consumer Reports caused a huge controversy by pulling its "recommended" status from all Microsoft Surface laptops and tablets. While I personally swear by the consumer-focused organization for its coverage of vehicles and appliances, I take its computer coverage with a grain of salt. After all, it infamously panned the 2016 MacBook Pro for poor battery life, even going so far as to say Chrome provided longer usage than Safari -- totally wrong, by the way. It turns out Consumer Reports's testing of the MacBook Pro was flawed and it later reversed course, recommending the Apple laptop after all.

With all of that said, I was obviously a bit dubious of its criticism of some Surface machines. In my experience, the Surface hardware is extremely well made and owners are generally satisfied with the computers. That's not to say they are perfect -- quite the contrary. Actually, they have been prone to bugs that were later fixed (mostly) with firmware and driver updates. Despite those issues, I wouldn't hesitate to recommend any Surface product. Obviously Microsoft and Panos Panay -- father of Surface -- would share my disagreement with Consumer Reports. To solidify that, Panay has now penned a response titled "We stand behind Surface."

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The DevOps model continues to gain traction because it’s an efficient and cost-effective development approach. It yields fewer errors, shorter development cycles and reduced need for expensive code fixes after deployment. One goal of DevOps is continuous development and deployment, which necessitates the automatic creation or removal of networks, as well as automated deployment to production.

Automation is important because the fewer the number of manual steps involved, the less likely that human error will disrupt the process. Intelligent DNS improves DevOps project lifecycles by integrating with your software development and automation tools. Let’s take a look at intelligent DNS and the advantages and upgrades it offers to the DevOps project lifecycle.

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Organizations in the financial services sector are forced to innovate in order to stay relevant. At the same time, innovation is being slowed down by the need to keep data and applications safe, putting organizations in this vertical in quite a tough spot.

This conclusion was given out in a new report by Claranet. The report says that striking the right balance between innovation and security is becoming a "key competitive differentiator" in the sector.

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The latest addition to WikiLeaks' Vault 7 cache of CIA documents and tools is a user guide for CouchPotato. This project is designed to capture RTSP/H.264 video streams, typically from networked cameras.

This is rather different to the approach taken with the Dumbo project which required physical access to a computer. The CouchPotato documentation is relatively recent, only dating back to February 14, 2014.

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Microsoft has today announced Coco Framework, a means of simplifying the adoption of blockchain protocol technology. The aim is to speed up the adoption of blockchain-based systems in the enterprise, whilst simultaneously increasing privacy.

Coco -- short for Confidential Consortium -- will be available in 2018, and Microsoft will be making the technology open source to help increase uptake. Intel is working with Microsoft as a hardware and software partner, and Coco Framework features Intel Software Guard Extensions (Intel SGX) to improve transaction speed at scale.

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USB-C is everywhere nowadays. You can find it on smartphones, desktops, and laptops. Heck, I recently reviewed an amazing router that leverages the connector for power! Even lower-end laptops are getting in on it, such as the Acer Chromebook 11 C771.

The beauty of this connector, besides it being reversible, is that it can support many dongles, adding support for devices you need now, plus future products too. Today, Satechi launches two new such dongles, both of which are made with aluminum. One is a VGA adapter, while the other offers Gigabit Ethernet.

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If you’re anything like us, you land after a long plane journey, slightly shattered and attempting to adjust to your new time zone then once you’ve finally left passport control and picked up your bags, you simply want to grab a taxi and get to your hotel as quickly as possible.

To achieve this, many of course choose to book an Uber. When the process works smoothly, everything is fine. But, sadly, Uber drivers aren’t always offered the same privileges as regular taxis, so you have to somehow navigate your way to a pickup location. To do this, a phone call from the driver is often required.

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The world of banking is about to be transformed. In January 2018, the second Payment Services Directive (PSD2) will be incorporated into UK law, obliging banks to provide other organizations with access to their customers’ financial information. Known colloquially as the "open banking" directive, the new law is intended to end the monopoly of big banks and to provide consumers with a much wider range of financial services providers to choose from.

There are many technical and cultural difficulties that banks will need to overcome in order to comply with the new directive, but perhaps the most serious challenge is how to implement PSD2 without bringing themselves into conflict with another impending piece of legislation; the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

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