KB5015878 update broke audio in Windows but Microsoft has a fix... of sorts

Windows 10 logo on a beach

One of the most recent updates released by Microsoft that has had something of an unwanted payload is the KB5015878 update for Windows 10. Many people installing the update found that it broke audio on their systems.

Microsoft has not only acknowledged the problem, it has also issued a fix. The company is using a once-rare-but-becoming-increasingly-common Known Issue Rollback (KIR) to recall the update. Sadly, it will be of no use to people who are experiencing audio problems!

Continue reading

Microsoft is displaying ads in yet another of its apps; Windows-maker gets sneaky in mobile Outlook

Microsoft logo on mobile

There's no such thing as a free lunch, and there's no such thing as free software (well... very, very rarely). If you don't pay a monetary price for software, you're almost certainly going to pay for it with your privacy, or by seeing ads.

This is something that users of Microsoft's software have had little choice but to become increasingly familiar with -- even in the case of paid-for software. The latest of the company's apps to fall victim to the advertising plague is Outlook Mobile. Users are particularly annoyed because the ads are difficult to distinguish from emails.

Continue reading

Steve Jobs' Apple-1 Computer prototype sells at auction for $677,196

Apple-1-prototype

Apple famously began life in Steve Jobs' parents' home in Los Altos, California, firstly in his bedroom, before relocating to the garage.

For obvious reasons, items from the early days of what was to become to a tech behemoth are hugely interesting to collectors and a rare Apple-1 prototype, has just sold for eye-watering figure at auction.

Continue reading

Disaster recovery planning: A successful framework for strategy and execution

disaster plan

The rise in cyber incidents is set to continue on its meteoric trajectory over the next decade. Ransomware attacks on a business, consumer, or a device are anticipated to take place every two seconds by 2031 -- a worrying escalation from every 11 seconds in 2021. And by 2025, damages are projected to reach a staggering $15 trillion annually, up from $3 trillion in 2015, according to Cybersecurity Ventures.

At the same time, users demand better performance and user experience year-after-year, and the subsequently increased threat landscape poses real challenges in connectivity and data security. 'Insider threat' also poses a considerable risk, with 80 percent of breaches involving privileged credentials misuse or abuse and malicious insider activity from recent employees.

Continue reading

Apple will provide you with everything you need to repair your own MacBook Pro or MacBook Air

Apple Self Service Repair

Earlier in the year, Apple launched its self repair program, giving iPhone users the option of fixing their own phones. As well as providing instruction manuals and selling the parts, tool rental is also part of the program.

Now Apple has announced that it is expanding the Self Service Repair to include MacBook Air and MacBook Pro notebooks -- provided they are fitted with the M1 family of chips, that is. The company says that the program will expand to include additional Mac models soon, and that the iPhone self-repair service will expand out of the US to Europe and beyond.

Continue reading

IT leaders look to switch from legacy systems to data warehouses

Data warehouse technology concept

According to a new study more than 59 percent of data and technology leaders plan to switch their data warehousing solutions and 46 percent say a legacy system is motivating them to do so.

The research carried out by Propeller Insights for Ocient surveyed 500 people who are managing active data workloads of 150 terabytes or more. It finds 97 percent of respondents say the volume of data managed by their organization is set to grow fast or very fast over the next one to five years.

Continue reading

AIOps needs a new (customer-focused) approach

AIOps

IT infrastructure has become incredibly complicated -- intensified by the investment in digital transformations encouraged by the pandemic. One of the unintended consequences? IT teams and incident responders are stressed, and stretched farther than ever. PagerDuty’s The State of Digital Operations lays out the increased burden on these teams, the results in terms of burnout, and the impact having a more mature digital operations can have on minimizing that stress.

AIOps is an essential component to any mature digital organization, and it’s clear a new approach is needed. The sheer volume of IT events, from changes, warnings and incidents, to tickets for more routine activity are increasing 70 percent year-on-year. At a moment when increases in budgets won’t keep pace with the explosion of incidents or the complexity of IT infrastructure (if the budgets aren’t being reduced outright), leveraging AIOps to serve teams and customers is critical.

Continue reading

Organizations plagued by identity sprawl

identity individual crowd

A new study reveals that identity sprawl is a major problem for organizations, with 60 percent reporting as many as 21 separate identities per user.

The report from Radiant Logic and Gartner Peer Insights looks at the rapid growth of enterprise identity silos, and the explosion of user information, attributes, and credentials that accompanies it.

Continue reading

Your IT systems touch multiple networks -- what's your cyber hygiene plan?

endpoint security

The world is becoming more connected via the use of cloud computing services and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Over the last decade, we have watched cybercrimes skyrocket before our very eyes. Corporations today cannot afford to rely on basic firewalls and antivirus software to ensure data is protected. It is essential to create a more powerful cybersecurity ecosystem.

How big is the threat against data? First, take a look at how much data we are talking about here. By the year 2025, we can expect there to be 175 zettabytes of data across the internet and networked computer systems. Think streaming video, dating apps, your private healthcare information, banking data, social media posts, and messages. The list can go on.

Continue reading

Dealing with the risks of online collaboration tools [Q&A]

Collaboration

The shift to working remotely has led to businesses relying increasingly on collaboration tools like Slack and Teams. But while these undoubtedly increase productivity they also introduce some extra risks.

We spoke to Brian Mannion, chief legal and data privacy officer at Aware, to find out about these risks and how enterprises can address them.

Continue reading

Google is finally bringing an RSS reader back to the desktop

Rainbow news letters on keyboard

Google Reader was killed off quite some time ago, but there are still plenty of people mourning the passing of this iconic RSS reader. There have been plenty of replacements developed, but few -- if any -- manage to match the simplicity of the original.

Now Google is having a second crack of the whip. Sadly, we can't report that Google Reader is coming back, but the desktop version of Chrome is getting an RSS reader to match its mobile counterpart.

Continue reading

Why merchants don't need to buy fraud insurance to cover everything

insurance key

The discipline of fraud prevention has changed dramatically over the past five years and continues to evolve rapidly. Consequently, former truths about fraud prevention are increasingly becoming outdated myths. Legacy vendors propagate these myths to maintain relevance, but industry leaders understand the distinction and are moving forward. 

In this article, the common myth we’ll tackle is that a merchant should buy fraud insurance to cover everything -- this is typically touted in the market as a 'chargeback guarantee.' On the surface, the simplicity is appealing; the vendor is claiming to solve merchants’ fraud problems by taking liability for chargebacks, returns abuse, Item Not Received abuse, and potentially more. But the statement is very much a myth for, at the very least, five important reasons:

Continue reading

Key considerations prior to adopting SaaS

SaaS

As organizations have adapted to the evolving digital landscape, there has been a meteoric rise in popularity of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) as a business model. This is best illustrated by Gartner’s predicted increase in worldwide SaaS end-user spending value to reach $176.6 billion in 2022. The analyst firm further predicts worldwide public cloud spending to reach almost $500 billion by the end of 2022.

Affordability and flexibility are the principal drivers for businesses to move their data environment and applications from their own infrastructure to centrally located services on a remote cloud network. However, trusting arguably their most important asset -- their data -- with an outside entity often raises some concerns around data governance, compliance, costs, and beyond. Before making an investment, it’s sensible to carry out a self-assessment process on the basis of ten most commonly asked questions:

Continue reading

Twitter's new Reply Filter will help users reduce their exposure to 'potentially unwelcome replies'

Twitter on mobile with silhouetted person

Twitter, possibly more than other social platforms, seems to bring out the very worst in many people. Apparently magnifying the emboldening effect the relative anonymity of posting online brings, users often find that responses to their tweets stray a long way from what most would consider reasonable. Now Twitter is working on a solution.

Spotted in the code of the Twitter app, an upcoming "Reply filter" feature will give users the ability to control the type of response they see. Importantly, the feature does not introduce any new restrictions on what others are able to post as a reply; it just gives users the opportunity to avoid exposing themselves to upsetting responses by filtering them. Think of it like a spam folder for tweet replies. It is something that will be welcome by many different types of user -- those with verified accounts, those with a degree of celebrity, those from certain societal groups, those unwilling to deal with online abuse, and others.

Continue reading

The benefits of robotics: Which industries are reaping the rewards?

industrial robots

Industrial robots are taking over. Well, they’re becoming much more common in the workplace. In fact, according to a report by the International Federation of Robotics, the number of robots in factories has almost doubled in recent years.

The 2021 World Robot Report shows that the global number of robots per 10,000 employees has risen from 66 to 126 between 2015–2020. So which sectors are reaping the rewards?  Here, we’ll explore just this, shining a light on industries benefiting the most from robotics.

Continue reading

BetaNews, your source for breaking tech news, reviews, and in-depth reporting since 1998.

© 1998-2025 BetaNews, Inc. All Rights Reserved. About Us - Privacy Policy - Cookie Policy - Sitemap.