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Internet Explorer may be a stalwart of the world of web browsers, but it has also been an object of ridicule and derision for pretty much its entire life. Since the emergence of the Chromium-based Microsoft Edge, the writing has been on the wall for the browser just about everyone loves to hate, but IE has been lingering for longer than many people would have expected.

But now Microsoft is finally ready to pull the plug. Sort of. The company has announced that "the Internet Explorer 11 desktop application will be retired and go out of support on June 15, 2022, for certain versions of Windows 10". But what does this mean in practice, and will you be affected?

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When you are a PC builder, there are peaks and valleys when it comes to excitement about components. What I mean by this is, sometimes you are building machines with cutting edge parts as an early adopter, while other times you are using ho-hum components that have been around a while. For instance, we have been using DDR4 memory for about seven years now... boring!

On the horizon, thankfully, is the DDR5 revolution. After dealing with DDR4 for so many years now, we will soon see PCs with DDR5 memory inside. One of the companies leading this industry shift is GeIL. Today, that manufacturer announces its upcoming Polaris RGB DDR5 RAM with speeds up to 7200MHz!

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When I first encountered computers in the 1990s, they were all large grey boxes that took up enormous amounts of space. In fact, when you added in a large CRT monitor and printer, many families had to dedicate an entire room in their home to the PC. Seriously, folks, a "computer room" was actually a thing.

Nowadays, thanks to inexpensive laptops and tablets, many families no longer need dedicated rooms for a PC -- a kitchen table can be sufficient. Even if you prefer a desktop, they no longer have to be monstrous either. There are many small desktops on the market these days, including the excellent Apple Mac mini.

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As we move further into the digital age, technologies need to evolve quickly enough to support the constantly changing needs of the modern enterprise. While cloud computing has surged in popularity in recent years, most organizations must simultaneously continue to rely on their legacy systems for many of their core functions.

Despite the cloud’s ability to minimize IT infrastructure costs and adjust resources to meet fluctuating and unpredictable demand while getting applications up and running faster, 71 percent of the Fortune 500 and more than 90 percent of the world’s largest 100 banks, 10 largest insurance companies and 25 largest retailers in the U.S. all continue to depend on outdated systems to power their mission-critical applications.

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As more systems move to the cloud the threat landscape becomes more complex and detecting events that require urgent attention is more difficult.

Many businesses are turning to AI to help and threat detection specialist Vectra AI has released a new report focusing on the top 10 threat detections seen across Microsoft Azure AD and Office 365 environments.

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New research from Akamai Technologies reveals that financial services firms suffered 3.4 billion credential stuffing attacks in 2020, a 45 percent year-on-year increase.

The report also observed nearly 6.3 billion web application attacks in 2020, with more than 736 million targeting financial services -- an increase of 62 percent from 2019. Over the past three years (2018-2020), DDoS attacks against the financial services sector grew by 93 percent.

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Decision intelligence is a new, powerful practice of using information to make more efficient decisions at scale. Often touted as "the new business intelligence (BI)," decision intelligence promises to take the insights from dashboards a step further than just pretty charts based on data. Decision intelligence effectively extracts value from data, giving decision-makers easy-to-consume answers -- often based on disparate datasets or multiple machine learning models.

Leading analyst firms, such as Gartner Research, are predicting that decision intelligence will become a major factor in enterprise decision-making in the near future. In fact, Gartner predicts that 33 percent of large enterprises will have analysts that practice decision intelligence by 2023. Let’s explore more about how enterprises can transform their decision-making with decision intelligence.

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Over the last 12 months, you certainly have heard about an increasingly complex and sophisticated barrage of cyber threats. However, if your business has a limited number of IT staff and resources, you may be questioning whether having comprehensive data protection is even possible. As we have seen, cyber-attacks are not only impacting larger enterprise organizations. They affect companies of all sizes, many of which can’t afford to build and manage a Security Operations Center (SOC) with technology and skilled security staff needed to detect and contain these attacks 24 hours a day.

It may feel daunting as a smaller organization, cybercriminals might have an inherent advantage. However, many small to midsize organizations are still relying solely on basic protection like anti-virus and firewalls. Just having these baseline protections is simply not enough, and you do not have the luxury of just ignoring the situation.

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Risk is all around us. Driving down the road in our car or eating certain foods could be considered risks we assess on a daily basis. We just don’t notice we’re making those assessments because they’re subconscious. Most of the time, we don’t actively quantify a risk unless it poses clear and present danger. For example, you might avoid walking down a dark alley at night because the potential threat is clear to you -- but eating a Big Mac or Whopper frequently is likely just as threatening to your health, you just won’t come face-to-face with those threats until years down the road.

Business leaders approach risk within their company the same way. For example, a clear and present danger with Microsoft Exchange’s zero-day vulnerability led companies to quickly jump on patches that would safeguard their business from harm. But, every day, we overlook the inherent risks in our employee base, IP, supply chain and more.

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The Windows 10 May 2021 Update, aka Windows 10 21H1, is starting to roll out to users now.

As normal, it will be a phased rollout so not everyone will be offered it straightaway -- it could be months before it reaches your machine. But if previous major updates are anything to go by, you should avoid installing it for a while anyway as these releases typically come with issues and it could be more hassle than it’s worth.

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A new poll of over 4,000 UK Generation Z teenagers reveals that more plan to pursue studies in creative arts and design subjects rather than science, technology and IT.

The study from social app Yubo finds the most popular subject area for further studies is creative arts and design with nearly 15.4 percent of respondents saying they plan to explore further studies in this area, closely followed by medicine at 14.5 percent.

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Android has been a bit boring lately -- it has been hard to get excited about Google's Linux-based mobile operating system. Android 10 and 11, for instance, were more evolution than revolution. While there was plenty going on underneath the hood, there wasn't much to excite the typical Android user.

Well, folks, Android is about to get fun once again. Today at Google I/O, the search giant unveiled Android 12. Even better, the search giant has since released a Beta of the operating system. This version of the OS is very exciting, as it puts a lot of emphasis on eye candy and aesthetics -- things that do matter. In other words, typical end users will actually see something fresh and new.

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Earlier today, Microsoft pushed the big red (imaginary) button to start the roll out of the Windows 10 May 2021 Update (or Windows 10 21H1), and already some issues with it have been acknowledged by the software giant.

Since the roll out is only just beginning it’s perhaps not a huge surprise that there aren’t many known issues at the moment, but one in particular could be incredibly annoying for anyone who encounters it. Here's the list of issues Microsoft is admitting to so far.

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Microsoft began to roll out the latest big feature update for Windows 10 earlier today, and we explained what's new and how to get the update here.

With each new OS update, however, some existing features get dropped, or stop being actively developed. Here’s what’s missing in Windows 10 21H1, the May 2021 Update.

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A week ago we reported that Microsoft might have cancelled Windows 10X, its much-hyped Chrome OS competitor.

Although the software giant didn’t confirm this move at the time, it didn’t deny it either, and today the company admits that it has now pulled the plug on the spin off OS, so it can focus all of its attention on Windows 10 proper.

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