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Biometric authentication may be more convenient than a PIN or password, but it is not as secure as you might be lead to believe. The iris scanner on the Galaxy S8 can be defeated with a photo and contact lens, despite Samsung's claims that it offers "airtight security" and provides "one of the safest ways to keep your phone locked and the contents private."

If this has you worried, Samsung says that it is "difficult for the whole scenario to happen in reality," even though the hack "appears simple." The company believes that having the right tools in the first place can prove to be problematic for anyone attempting to defeat the iris scanner.

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Facebook may be taking steps to tackle hate speech and other unsavory content but the European Union could soon force it to do more. Plans have been approved for rules that require online content providers such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to "protect children and tackle hate speech better."

Failure to comply with the rules could result in hefty fines being levied against offenders. There are still a number of hoops for the proposed regulations to pass through -- including the European Parliament -- before they become law, but it may not be long until social media sites are obliged to block hate speech videos and those that promote terrorism.

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The EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force on May 25th 2018, but a new survey by data protection company Varonis shows companies are struggling to meet the deadline and are pessimistic about its effects.

The results from 500 IT decision makers in the UK, Germany, France and the US, reveal that 75 percent of organizations say they will struggle to be ready for the deadline.

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A security vulnerability in the popular Samba networking utility could leave unpatched machines open to an attack similar to WannaCry. A single line of code is all that’s needed to exploit the vulnerability, but it is reliant on a number of prerequisites.

The vulnerability has been assigned the ID CVE-2017-7494 and is described as "remote code execution from a writable share" which could allow "malicious clients [to] upload and cause the smbd server to execute a shared library from a writable share." Security researchers say that the flaw is very easy to exploit, and tens of thousands of machines have been found to be running versions of Samba for which a patch does not exist.

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Steaming music is all the rage nowadays, and there is certainly no shortage of services. Quite frankly, you really can't go wrong when selecting one, as many of them are great. With that said, for an optimal experience, Apple Music is probably best for iOS and macOS users, while Google Play Music and Spotify are great for Android and Linux desktop users.

If you spend a lot of time on Windows 10, the Groove Music Pass service is an excellent choice, as is the associated Groove app. While Microsoft's service may not be the most popular, it provides great selection and quality. There are even apps for iOS and Android. Now, for a limited time, the Windows-maker will pay you $25 for using its service!

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If you have previously worked with cloud platforms, you will be familiar with the distributed and decoupled nature of these systems. A decoupled distributed system relies on microservices to carry out specific tasks, each one exposing its own REST (Representational State Transfer) APIs. These microservices talk to each other through a lightweight messaging layer usually in the form of a message broker such as RabbitMQ or QPID.

This is precisely how OpenStack works. Each major OpenStack component (Keystone, Glance, Cinder, Neutron, Nova, etc.) exposes a REST endpoint and the components and sub-components communicate via a message broker layer, such as RabbitMQ. The benefits of this approach are first that it allows failures to be allocated to specific components, and second that cloud infrastructure operators can scale all services in a horizontal fashion and intelligently distribute the load.

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On May 23, Microsoft did something very curious -- it announced a new product in Shanghai. No, there is nothing wrong with having a press event in China, but the time difference meant Americans would have to wake up very early to watch it, right?

No. Actually, even more odd, Microsoft chose not to live stream the event. While there was a Chinese-dubbed stream found on the web, English-speakers were left to read live-blogging instead. This is unfortunate, as Panos Panay is quite the masterful presenter -- his unveiling of products can be downright magical. Thankfully, today, the Windows-maker makes the new Surface Pro announcement video available on YouTube -- no Chinese dub.

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OnePlus is slowly releasing more information about its upcoming flagship killer, the OnePlus 5. After teasing the possible color options, the Chinese maker now reveals the processor that powers it and the location of the fingerprint sensor.

As you might expect, the OnePlus 5 will come with a Snapdragon 835, which is the latest and greatest processor from Qualcomm. This chip is also used by the Samsung Galaxy S8 and HTC U11, among other flagships.

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Microsoft officially began the Windows 10 Creators Update rollout on April 11. I cautioned about rushing to upgrade to it at the time, and then Microsoft said much the same thing shortly afterwards, recommending users didn’t install it until the upgrade was offered to them.

Six weeks since the rollout began, and still the Creators Update isn’t available to the vast majority of Windows 10 users.

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Four in ten organizations in the US and Western Europe believe C-level executives are the most at risk of cyber attacks when working outside the office.

That's according to research by iPass, whose Mobile Security Report 2017 says that coffee shops and cafes are the riskiest venues (42 percent), followed by airports (30 percent), hotels (16 percent) exhibition centers (seven percent) and airplanes (four percent).

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The big news out of Microsoft's video game division today is the launch of a new service called Xbox Game Pass. For a $9.99 monthly fee, players will be able to access a wide library of Xbox One titles on demand, making it less and less necessary to dole out dozens of dollars every time you want to play a new game.

This represents not only a milestone moment in the evolution of the Xbox One platform and the way people play games on it, but also for the console wars as a whole. Sony has a competing service -- similar in some ways and starkly different in others -- which means it's officially time to clear the stage for a new chapter in the perennial battle for gaming dominance.

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The latest move from Apple may soon lead to consumers leaving their wallets at home, now that a majority of cash registers in the UK will be able to accept Apple Pay mobile payments over £30.

According to the vice president of Internet Services at Apple Pay, Jennifer Bailey, more than half of the contactless payment terminals in the UK are now able to accept Apple Pay payments of any value. Previously they had been limited to £30, which is the limit for card readers when dealing with contactless card payments.

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The MacBook Pro only has USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 for connecting devices. For many, this is not a problem. After all, with wireless accessories, it is quite possible that a user might never need to connect anything by wire -- other than the charger, of course.

With that said, some users absolutely need to connect legacy devices, such as USB Type-A hard drives, mice, keyboards, and more. Heck, they may even need to connect to a monitor or Ethernet. Luckily, Thunderbolt 3 makes this a breeze, as single-cable docking solutions can bring all of the needed ports and more. Best of all, they can charge the computer too. Today, Elgato announces that its Thunderbolt 3 Dock will be available for purchase on June 6. While it looks amazing, it is certainly not an inexpensive affair.

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In our private lives we're used to getting answers quickly from digital assistants. So far though this is something that hasn't really taken off in business environments.

That could be about to change as data search specialist Knoema launches Yodatai, a bot that's designed to answer data-related questions.

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A federal appeals court has ruled that the Wikimedia Foundation may sue the NSA for its warrantless use of the "Upstream" surveillance program. The ruling overturns an earlier one which said the foundation could not sue due to an inability to prove that Wikimedia communication was being monitored either directly or indirectly.

The ruling by the United States Court Of Appeals for The Fourth Circuit means that the foundation is now able to proceed with legal action that was previously blocked. The amount of traffic generated by Wikimedia proved key to winning the appeal.

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