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UK companies were hit with fines totaling over £3.2m last year after falling foul of data protection laws, a new report reveals.

Analysis of figures from the ICO by PwC found that the 35 fines handed out in 2016 were almost double of  the previous year, despite repeated warning that the new GDPR regulations are just a year away.

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When Apple unveiled the newest MacBook Pro laptops in October of 2016, some people were upset that they didn't come with 7th-generation Intel Kaby Lake processors. Instead, the company opted for the 6th-gen chips. One big issue with this is that the memory was limited to DDR3 rather than the newest DDR4. Despite these shortcomings, the machines sold well -- they were hard to come by for quite some time after launch.

Today, Apple finally refreshes the MacBook Pro machines with the latest such Intel processors. But that is not all. In addition to the Pro laptop, the company is delivering Kaby Lake to the newest MacBook (non-pro) and iMac computers too. Surprisingly, the MacBook Air gets a little speed bump to 1.8GHz.

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In the new digital communications age it’s often the simplest, yet most elegant solutions that capture our imaginations and take off. People across the world have fallen in love with the sleek, pocket-friendly form of the iPhone, for example, or the pared-back concept of Twitter. Consumers can follow the journey of low-cost goods such as a coffee maker from Amazon or a pizza from Dominos from the warehouse to their doorstep quickly and easily via their smartphone or tablet. In London each week, 30,000 people download the Uber app knowing that this will enable them to hail a taxi with a swipe of the technology in their pocket.

The automotive industry has been among the pacesetters, of course, in embracing stylish innovation. The advent of the driverless car and the use of virtual reality and other immersive technologies like augmented reality to drive marketing and sales of vehicles provide compelling examples of how pioneering the sector can be. Car servicing has remained a stubbornly conservative low-tech industry until recently, however.

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At WWDC today Apple announced not only High Sierra, but also watchOS 4. One of the biggest updates -- or at least the most visible -- here are to be found on watch faces. As well as being customizable, faces can now dynamically change based on various criteria, such as location and time of day.

Apple is also bring kaleidoscopic faces to the Watch -- something it describes as "trippy." But perhaps the most exciting update is the fact that Siri can now be used on Apple Watch.

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It's WWDC 2017 and, for the first time, Tim Cook has revealed the precise number of announcements we can expect from the keynote: six. The first of them is the news that Amazon is coming to Apple TV.

Apple isn't saying exactly when this is happening, but Apple TV is finally going to benefit from Amazon Prime TV. The two companies have traditionally been rivals, but have now managed to become friendly enough to join force.

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If you’ve developed an app then the last thing you want to see is it languishing in the app stores, attracting just one or two downloads a week. The dream is to see it "fly off the virtual shelf," attracting hordes of fans who willingly pay to use your app.

So, what is the secret? Unfortunately, just having a great idea isn’t enough. For every app success, there are 10 great ideas that just never get that much interest. But why?

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Social media platforms are, by their very nature, keen to be welcoming to as broad a spectrum of people as possible. Twitter, YouTube, and other services of their ilk like to be seen to be as inclusive as can be imagined and Facebook is no different.

This month is Pride Month, and Facebook is not only joining in the celebrations, but also using it to indulge in a little self-celebration and self-congratulation. The social network is rolling out a rainbow frame, a Pride reaction and Pride-themed masks for photos, Pride stickers in Messenger and more, but the company is also falling over itself to prove how diverse not only its userbase is, but also its workforce.

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It's becoming increasingly clear that data breaches can happen to any company and at pretty much any time.

Protecting your company's data isn't just about securing your own systems, it also means ensuring that any third-parties you contract out services too are taking appropriate care too.

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Image2ASCII is an open-source Windows application which converts digital pictures to stylized ASCII art. The program is tiny, and arrives as a stand-alone executable. There’s no installation required, simply download and run it.

Image2ASCII’s interface follows its own rules. It has a couple of boxes for the loaded and converted images, and a bunch of icons, without captions or tooltips, which you have to figure out for yourself.

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While Agile adoption among businesses is on the rise, systems and processes that support fast, continuous planning and delivery continue to lag behind.

Project management company Changepoint is using today's Gartner Program and Portfolio Management Summit to launch new capabilities for its Daptiv PPM solution, allowing businesses to manage traditional and agile projects in tandem.

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Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicks off today, Monday 5 June, in San Jose, with the big keynote speech scheduled for 10am PDT/1pm EST/6pm BST. As always it will be streamed live so you can tune in at home or (maybe) work.

As WWDC is for software developers, Apple doesn’t usually reveal major new hardware, but we are expecting to see a "Siri" speaker announced, and maybe some new MacBooks. We're also anticipating information on iOS 11, which probably won't run on 32-bit hardware, and updates to macOS, watchOS and tvOS. There are likely to be some interesting surprises too.

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After selfie taking, the act of face swapping is an incredibly common use for smartphones. iPhone users have a plethora of tools to choose from -- as, indeed, do those who prefer Android devices, and Microsoft has decided to get in on the action with the appropriately-named Face Swap app for Android.

The free app does very much what you would expect -- combining the joy of selfies with the fun of face swapping. Snap a selfie and you can then swap faces from another photo -- it's a simple idea, and Microsoft has put its own twist on it by integrating Bing Image search.

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Kodi -- the software previously known as XBMC -- is a cross-platform media center solution that many people enjoy daily. Quite frankly, its not hard to see why it has become so ubiquitous -- it has tons of features, a great user interface, and the ability to gain new functionality with addons.

While the program is 64-bit on macOS, Android, and Linux desktop operating systems, Windows has remained a 32-bit affair. According to the developers, the transition to 64-bit on Windows was not seen as a priority. Finally, however, after many years of users requesting a 64-bit Windows program, it is here. Well, technically, it is still a nightly development release, but users can download that immediately and begin using it. A stable release will be here soon, with a UWP version much further out.

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What happens when a digital assistant decides it no longer wants to help you? In what is either a case of a sentient digital uprising, or just a software bug that Google is scrambling to fix, owners of a Google Home smart speaker may be waking up today to realize their daily dose of traffic conditions and weather updates are not being delivered to them on a cloud-based silver platter as usual.

First brought to attention by a user on the official Google Home Help Forum a few days ago, many users are discovering that every single "OK, Google" request they make to the digital speaker is being met with an automated error message.

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ESET SysInspector (32-bit) is a powerful tool for examining the low-level details of a PC, and perhaps spotting malicious files, poorly configured settings and other issues that might be causing you problems.

The program has been around for a long time, but we’ve not looked at it for several years, and as ESET issued a rare update recently we decided to see what it could do on a test Windows 10 laptop.

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