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Only once in my life did I own a Mac, and the damn thing broke. In 2016, I purchased a MacBook Pro (which I have since sold) and the display started having lines go across the bottom. Long story short, I brought the laptop to a local Apple Store for service and it was fixed. When I got there, they checked me in and walked me to a wooden box and told me to have a seat. Wait, what? I spent $2,000 on a laptop from one of the richest companies on Earth, and I couldn't get a proper chair? I chose to stand instead.

Fast forward to today, and Apple announces the opening of a new physical store in China. This new store replaces the company's original Apple Sanlitun and is twice the size. Apple boasts about how great the store is, but strangely, it shared the above photo of people once again sitting on wooden boxes. What the hell is going on here? Why does Apple hate chairs?

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Earlier this year hackers were able to exploit container platform Kubernetes to install cryptomining software in Microsoft Azure.

Fei Huang, chief strategy officer at container security platform NeuVector believes that this should be a wake up call to get the attention of enterprise DevOps and DevSecOps teams. We spoke to him to find out more about the risks and how they can be addressed.

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There have been a lot of new solid state drives released lately, some of which are run of the mill, while others are cutting edge. For instance, Sabrent recently launched an 8TB PCIe SSD, while Silicon Power unveiled a speedy PCIe 4.0 drive.

Transcend recently unveiled a new line of solid state drives, and while they that won’t “wow” anybody, they are still worth a look. They all use 3D NAND, but the four SSDs come in different sizes, speeds, and interfaces.

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Want to know a secret? The iPad is a great computer. No, I don't just mean it is a very good tablet (which it absolutely is), but with the latest versions of iPadOS, it is an honest-to-goodness exceptional computer too. Once the OS received proper mouse and trackpad support, iPad became much more useful. Of course, it isn't that way out of the box. To truly embrace the laptop-like iPad experience, you also need a keyboard case with a trackpad. Apple sells its own Magic Keyboard that can convert an iPad Pro into a laptop, but it starts at $299 -- that is way too experience.

In-the-know iPad owners are aware of  another company that has long made quality iPad keyboard cases -- Logitech. Yes, that company's keyboards are well-made and elegant, but also, much more affordable than Apple's own Magic Keyboard. Today, Logitech launches a variant of the Folio Touch keyboard case made specifically for the 11-inch iPad Pro (first and second generation). Best of all, this new product is priced way below Apple's offering. And yes, it has an integrated Apple Pencil holder.

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It's only a couple of weeks since Microsoft released PowerToys v0.19.0, and the company has now pushed out its second bug-fixing update to the collection of utilities.

Just last week, v0.19.1 addressed a range of issues with the Windows 10 tool collection, and now v0.19.2 has landed. Among the changes are fixes for PowerToys Run and FancyZone, and it also addresses an issue that caused high CPU usage.

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Since the onset of the COVID-19 crisis earlier this year 80 percent of companies have seen 'slightly to considerably more' cyberattack attempts, breaking down to 88 percent in the US and 74 percent in the UK.

SIEM specialist Exabeam surveyed more that 1,000 IT security professionals at small- to medium-sized enterprises and finds that a third of respondents experienced a successful cyberattack during COVID-19, leading to network downtime for 40 percent of UK companies and 38 percent of US companies.

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The use of microservices is succeeding for 92 percent of organizations according to new research from learning resources company O'Reilly.

It surveyed over 1,500 software engineers, systems and technical architects, engineers, and decision-makers from around the globe and finds that 77 percent of respondents have adopted microservices.

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Mozilla has released Thunderbird 78.0 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s the first major update of the popular open-source email client since August 2019, and is only available as a direct download -- existing users of the Thunderbird 68.x series are advised to wait for a future release that will provide an upgrade path.

A host of new and changed features have been implemented, although the long-heralded built-in support for OpenPGP encryption has been disabled by default for now due to some outstanding issues.

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Researchers at Check Point have been working with Zoom to to fix a security issue that would have allowed hackers to manipulate organizations’ customizable Zoom 'Vanity URLs'.

The vulnerability would allow attackers to send legitimate-looking meeting invitations, with the aim of inserting malware and stealing data or credentials from unsuspecting victims.

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Microsoft's track record with updates for Windows has been a little wobbly of late, with many updates introducing problems, or creating more issues than they fix. But it seems that it is not just the famous operating system that is jinxed -- Outlook is too.

Following reports from users that the Outlook desktop app was crashing with a 0xc0000005 error, Microsoft launched an investigation. While the company is now in the processing of pushing out a fix, a workaround has been shared online for those affected.

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Overnight, Twitter suffered a massive attack by hackers who tried to use the verified accounts of celebrities and high-profile users to execute a Bitcoin scam. The likes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Kanye West had their accounts hijacked and message were posted promising that if people sent money to a Bitcoin wallet, they would get double the amount back.

Needless to say, it was a crypto scam, and Twitter took the extraordinary steps of preventing all users with a blue tick from tweeting. Twitter now has control of the situation and says that the attack came after staff fell victim to social engineering, enabling hackers to gain access to internal tools which were then used to take over key accounts.

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Another day, another solid state drive. Yes, folks, we are once again telling you about a new SSD. There sure are a lot of new models hitting the market lately, right? This time, the drive is from Silicon Power. We recently reviewed one of that company's external SSDs, but I digress.

Called "UD70," it is a PCIe 3.0 SSD that uses 3D QLC NAND. Unfortunately, it is not a PCIe 4.0 drive like the company's similarly named US70. While a PCIe Gen 3x4 SSD is nothing out of the ordinary, Silicon Power boasts about it having superior cooling capabilities. No, it doesn't have a huge heatsink. In fact, it has no heatsink at all. Actually, SP says the cooling capabilities are baked into the UD70's firmware.

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Yesterday, Microsoft rolled out a new Windows 10 Build to the Beta Channel (what used to be the Slow ring) and today the software giant follows that up with a new flight on the Dev Channel (previously the Fast ring).

Build 20170 introduces a couple of new features, but won’t be offered to Insiders running PCs with AMD processors due to a bug affecting overall usability.

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Despite the devastating recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus, phishing attacks continue to drag us and our businesses down. So how exactly do COVID-19 related phishing attacks work?

Cybercriminals have taken it upon themselves to wreak havoc and feed off the fears people have about the virus. Emails are being sent that ask their targets to open attachments containing information about the latest coronavirus statistics or news. Or, they claim to be from legitimate companies offering information about COVID-19.

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The advent of quantum computers will render ECC and RSA encryption algorithms obsolete, requiring companies to migrate their computing systems and PKI infrastructure to new, quantum-safe cryptographic algorithms.

This migration of PKI solutions to quantum-safe crypto algorithms will pose many major challenges for many enterprises. All existing applications and systems will need to be updated to support the new quantum-safe algorithms now being developed in response to the threats posed by quantum computers. The process of updating to new algorithms requires significant engineering work and many systems will require extensive updates.

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