Mainframe systems are still essential to many organizations, but a new study reveals that as many staff with mainframe skills approach retirement almost two thirds of IT decision makers say the consequent loss of skills presents a big risk to their business.

The report from enterprise computing specialist LzLabs, based on research conducted by Vanson Bourne, shows 99 percent consider their organization's mainframe applications as important or critical to business operations, yet 93 percent also express serious concerns about the mainframe environment.

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Google has already revealed plans for Chrome which it says will increase privacy and security. DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) was announced back in September, and the company is already worried that people are confused about the implementation.

The company has published a defensive blog post in which it says that "there has been some misinformation and confusion about the goals of our approach and whether DoH will impact existing content controls offered by ISPs". It goes on to try to dispel the incorrect beliefs it says have built up.

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Google's parent company Alphabet has made an offer to buy health and fitness wearable maker Fitbit, according to reports.

Although unconfirmed by either party, such a bid would not be entirely surprising. Although Google has produced its Wear OS operating system for wearables, it is yet to produce any devices of its own -- despite users clamoring for a Google-made smartwatch for some time.

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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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