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Apple knows how to make great products -- just look at the iPhone, iPod, and iPad. Unfortunately, the company has produced several duds recently too, such as Apple Watch, HomePod, and AirPods. While Apple's wireless earbuds are popular and function decently, they can be very uncomfortable. People have different sized ear canals, so it is foolish to adopt a one-size-fits-all design using hard plastic. Sadly, Apple chose minimalism and convenience over comfort.

Thankfully, there are plenty of Bluetooth earbuds on the market that use replaceable silicone tips. The various sizes allow the user to find the best fit, which in theory, should reduce pain. Today, a company called YEVO Labs launches an intriguing alternative to Apple's uncomfortable AirPods. Called "YEVO Air," they are small and leverage a charging case like AirPods. Thankfully, however, they use the superior silicone tips. YEVO Air earbuds are more attractive than AirPods too.

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The vulnerability scan results security departments issue to the operations teams typically contain hundreds of pages and thousands of vulnerabilities to address. It’s a massive list often containing some prioritization based on the criticality of the vulnerabilities observed; and for some more mature organizations, an assessment and opinion of the security team. Typically, operations teams care about security in the endpoints. But, their job is to guarantee uptime and user satisfaction, which often suffers when deploying patches requires reboots and application restarts. And then there’s the resource constraint issue, like the difficulty of prioritization in a world where everything seems to be urgent, the lack of visibility, questions around ownership and available time, and so on. It’s a tough ask to minimize the risk in the endpoints without a holistic, multi-departmental collaboration focused on specific risk policies and profiles.

Compliance pressure doesn’t help either, because frequently it ends up being just a check-box, and not a mechanism for improving security. Therefore, while the bare minimum is undertaken very reluctantly to satisfy the auditors, there’s still a significant amount of fire drill and distraction from the daily grind.

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Malware writers have been using a free market model to sell their wares for some time. The success of this approach is clear from new research by Positive Technologies that finds demand for malware creation on the dark web is three times greater than supply.

Demand for malware distribution is twice the supply. This mismatch of supply and demand has led to interest among criminals in new tools, which are becoming more readily available in the form of partner programs that include malware-as-a-service and malware distribution-for-hire.

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Data breaches have serious consequences for SMBs and if not handled correctly can cause serious damage to the business.

It's perhaps no surprise then that according to a survey from IT infrastructure company Kaseya security remains the top IT priority for SMBs with 54 percent citing it as their main concern in 2018, up 14 percent from 2017.

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There has been a long-standing movement trying to make the web a safer place. For some time, Google's Chrome browser has alerted people when they are visiting secure sites, but with the launch of Chrome 68, it instead warns when an insecure site is encountered.

As we warned just a couple of days ago, the latest update to Chrome means you're likely to see warnings about a lot of insecure sites -- and there are some big-name sites being shamed. Included on the non-HTTPS list are some of Google's own sites, the BBC, the Daily Mail and Fox News. And there are plenty of other recognizable offenders too, as Why No HTTPS? reveals.

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We all like to think that we're smart enough not to fall for phishing emails, yet a surprising number of people do get caught out by them.

A new report from security awareness training company KnowBe4 looks at the most successful phishing emails in the second quarter of 2018. The results show that hackers are playing into users' commitment to security, by using clever subject lines that deal with passwords or security alerts.

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Much of the world is experiencing a prolonged heatwave at the moment. These sunny days are great for topping up a tan, and enjoying the beach, but not so great for using a mobile phone -- and not only because of the risk of it overheating.

If you have an iPhone, you will likely have encountered the issue of the screen brightness suddenly changing. One moment you’ll be able to see things just fine, and the next it will be too dark to view properly in the sunshine. Adjusting the brightness won’t make any difference either, but don’t worry, there is a secret setting you can use to stop this behavior.

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Search engine optimization (SEO), making sure that websites appear high in search results, can often seem like it exists in a sort of twilight zone somewhere between science and witchcraft.

So, how does SEO work? What can it do for your business? And if you do any business at all online, can you afford not to do it? We spoke to Chris Rodgers, the founder and CEO of SEO agency Colorado SEO Pros to get answers to these and other questions.

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As part of its continuing efforts to clean up the platform, Twitter has removed 143,000 apps in the last three months for policy violations. To help reduce the need for such measures in the future, the company has also introduced a new registration system that means developers must now request access to Twitter's APIs.

The change is a significant one, and with it Twitter will be hoping to prevent the appearance of malicious apps in the first place -- making its job easier and improving the overall experience for users.

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Apple has released a patch which addresses a serious performance issues with its latest MacBook Pros -- and it could double the speed of your new laptop.

Called "macOS High Sierra 10.13.6 Supplemental Update for MacBook Pro (2018) ", the patch fixes a throttling issue that was brought to light recently that saw massive performance reduction when running power-intensive tasks. Apple says that a software bug was to blame, causing thermal management software to perform too aggressively.

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BitTorrent Inc says that it has been acquired by TRON, a blockchain startup, to create "the world's largest decentralized ecosystem".

There have been rumors about the acquisition for a few weeks now, but the news has now been confirmed. TRON is thought to have paid $126 million in cash for company, and the two teams will merge and pool their talent resources.

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Amazon Echo devices are very convenient for listening to music. Not only can you use your voice to play, say, Spotify or Pandora, but SiriusXM too. Unfortunately, the Echo devices aren't exactly audiophile products. While the normal Echo is passable, the Dot is downright terrible for audio quality -- this is probably why Amazon suggests connecting it to an external speaker.

But what if convenience isn't enough? What if you want to use Alexa and also have superior audio quality? Today, a company named Cavalier Audio launches a premium portable Bluetooth/Wi-Fi speaker with Amazon Alexa support that aims to solve that dilemma. The "Maverick," as it is called, promises better audio quality compared to Echo, but also, it is comprised of premium build materials, such as leather.

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Later this year you'll be able to use Apple Pay to pay for goods bought on eBay. Starting in the fall, Apple Pay will be a payment option on eBay's Marketplace platform as the company continues to move away from PayPal.

eBay has also announced that it is teaming up with Square Capital so that it can offer business financing to sellers in the US. Aimed at targeting small businesses looking to grow, the new partnership will provide access to finance from options between $500 and $100,000.

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Cybercriminals are delving into the past to launch attacks based on some very old vulnerabilities according to the latest report from Kaspersky Lab, and they're using Linux to do it.

In the second quarter of 2018, experts have reported DDoS attacks involving a vulnerability in the Universal Plug-and-Play protocol known since 2001. Also, the Kaspersky DDoS Protection team observed an attack organized using a vulnerability in the CHARGEN protocol that was described as far back as 1983.

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IBM's i operating system -- originally known as OS/400 -- is still popular in many larger and mid-sized organizations, and it is of course subject to the same security and compliance challenges as other systems.

Big data specialist Syncsort is launching additions to its Syncsort Assure family of products to help i users achieve compliance with GDPR and other legislation, and strengthen security with multi-factor authentication.

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