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Despite being wildly popular (largely for fashion purposes) Apple AirPods are a terrible product. Yeah, they have some nice technology inside, and they sound pretty good, but holy cow, they are extremely uncomfortable. Seriously, how can a company worth many billions of dollars not come up with a better design than a rock-hard piece of plastic that you shove in your ears?

Well, today, Apple announces that it has finally fixed the AirPods. No, it is not revising the product, but instead, it is launching a more comfortable version. Called "AirPods Pro," these new wireless earbuds are apparently designed for professional music listeners. Nah, I am being facetious -- they are designed for all users -- but the "Pro" branding is absurd. But thankfully, they do have replaceable ear tips, allowing the user to find the best fit. In other words, the one-size-fits-all approach taken with regular AirPods was, in fact, stupid. AirPods Pro offer more than just increased comfort, however -- noise cancellation is the real selling point here.

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Organizations face a greater range of cyber threats than ever before. The key to dealing with these threats is better intelligence about the latest vulnerabilities.

We spoke to Jay Prassl, CEO of cyber hygiene startup Automox, which has recently launched an open community to foster cyber hygiene best practices, to find out more about how crowdsourcing and information sharing can help reduce the corporate attack surface.

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A major problem for social media and other online businesses is the creation of spoof accounts. Guarding against these can be difficult but identity-as-a-service company Jumio has come up with a solution.

Jumio Go is a real-time, fully automated identity verification platform. It includes liveness detection to spot when photos, videos or even realistic 3D masks are used instead of actual selfies to create online accounts.

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Kingston Technology's gaming brand, HyperX, is mostly known for catering to PC gamers. Today, however, the company is launching a new product for console gamers. To be more specific, the new wireless headset, called "CloudX Flight," is designed for the Xbox One.

Truth be told, it is not an entirely new product. It is simply an Xbox version of the existing Cloud Flight headset -- notice the lack of "X" after Cloud? But hey, it is still cool. You get the same specs and 30 hours of battery life, but this time, it has a stylish green paint job.

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LibreELEC is a lightweight Linux distro that is designed to run Kodi, the hugely popular open source home theater software. It is ideal for installing and using on a Raspberry Pi, although it runs on other hardware too.

LibreELEC (Leia) 9.2 Beta 2 is now available to download, with a complete overhaul of the underlying OS core to improve stability, as well as a number of refinements to the user experience.

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Following an announcement that it was pulling out of the country because of sanctions imposed by the US government, Adobe has now said that it has been granted permission to offer its services in Venezuela.

The company had previously said that it would be deleting all Venezuelan user accounts and would not be offering refunds. But now, having been granted a license by the US government, people in the country will be able to continue using Creative Cloud and Document Cloud.

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The Start menu is at the heart of Windows 10, so any problems with it have serious repercussions. Included in Microsoft's recent batch of bug-riddled updates, however, there have been two --  KB4515384 and KB4524147 -- which have broken the Start menu in various ways.

Last week Microsoft released KB4522355 proclaiming that it fixed issues with both the Start menu and search. Only it didn't fix problems for everyone. Start menu problems remain, and some users are still unable to use the search facility.

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Microsoft has beaten Amazon to win the controversial $10 billion Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud contract from the US Department of Defense.

A year ago, Microsoft employees were trying to discourage the company from bidding for the contract over concerns that the technology is develops could "be used for waging war". The DoD confirmation that the "contract will address critical and urgent unmet warfighter requirements for modern cloud infrastructure" will do nothing to calm these fears.

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The personal data of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud users was exposed earlier this month when an unsecured database was discovered online.

The database, which could be accessed by anyone without the need for a username or password, included information such as email addresses, member IDs and payment status. People accessing the database were also able to see which Adobe products were used by individuals, the country they live in, and whether they are Adobe employees.

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When Microsoft revealed the Surface Laptop 3, Surface Pro 7 and Surface Pro X recently, it also revealed Windows 10X, a version of Windows 10 optimized for dual-screen devices. At the time, details were not extensive, but now a major leak sheds some light on what we can expect to see.

Documentation for Windows 10X (or Santorini OS) has appeared online, revealing that Microsoft will also allow the operating system to be run on more traditional laptops. There are also some intriguing screenshots that give us a glimpse into the future.

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New is good. It is nice to have the newest technology with modern designs. But that doesn’t mean old is bad. In other words, sometimes a retro design can be appreciated too. In some cases, retro and modern can be merged into a single product. This often happens with automobiles. Hey, people love nostalgia. It sells.

TP-Link has some new smart light bulbs that fit into that modern/retro hybrid category. The KL50 and KL60, as they are called, are Wi-Fi enabled, don’t require a hub, and can connect to voice assistants like Alexa and Google. Despite being LED, they are made to appear vintage with a filament look. In addition, TP-Link is also launching a new multi-color light strip.

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There’s an argument against whether your modern PC requires additional optimization. Windows 10 offers basic but essential tools to keep your system running smoothly and it’s less likely you’ll run out of drive space or require a system purge to make room for a new install.

With the above in mind, system maintenance developers are coming up with new ways of making their tools essential in the modern world. Security remains a constant threat, so adding modules to keep your system safe seems to be the recent priority.

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Microsoft launched Windows XP 18 years ago today. Despite support ending for it back in 2014, the OS is still to be found on just under 3 percent of the world's PCs, according to NetMarketShare. Many people still look back fondly on it, and for good reason. It was a huge step up from the gray, bland Windows versions that proceeded it.

Although Microsoft does issue the very occasional update for XP, in the main it's now viewed as a relic from days gone by, and lacking many of the modern features we take for granted in Windows 10. But what if Microsoft updated it? To celebrate the operating system's big 18th birthday, we thought it would be fun to repost this story from a couple of months ago.

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If you have private files that you want to be able to access when on the go, you could consider uploading them to the cloud, or carrying them around on a USB flash drive. The trouble with the former option is you’re entrusting your content to a third party, and in the case of the latter, you run the risk of losing the drive, allowing anyone who finds it to view your data. You could protect your files using software encryption, but it’s not 100 percent secure.

A much better, and far safer solution is to store your data on a hardware encrypted USB drive like the Aegis Fortress L3.

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A large majority of cybersecurity and risk management leaders (83 percent) believe that developments in 5G wireless technology will create challenges for their organizations.

A new report from UK-based cybersecurity specialist Information Risk Management (IRM) shows that among the top 5G-related concerns are greater risk of attacks on Internet of Things networks, a wider attack surface and a lack of security by design in 5G hardware and firmware.

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