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It’s that time of year again. Microsoft is kicking off its annual Build developer conference in Seattle today, May 7, starting with its opening keynote this morning (a second keynote is happening tomorrow).

Last year at Build Microsoft announced the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, new mixed reality headsets and controllers, and 'Project Emma', a wearable for Parkinson's disease sufferers. So what can we expect this year?

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It is now over a year since Vine closed down, and fans have been holding out for a follow-up to the video service. Co-founder Dom Hofmann previously said that work was underway on a successor called V2, but this has now been put on hold.

Blaming "financial and legal hurdles", Hoffmann now says that the project has been postponed "for an indefinite amount of time". He says that he had hoped to bring V2 to life as a personal project, but the realization that more money will be needed means that investors need to be brought onboard.

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The Windows 10 April 2018 Update rollout to PCs around the world has already started, and Microsoft says that the update will also make its way to compatible Windows 10 Mobile devices.

The number of people who will actually end up receiving this update, however, is likely to be rather limited. Microsoft says that the availability of Windows 10 Mobile April 2018 Update will vary according to "manufacturer, model, country or region, mobile operator or service provider, hardware limitations" and -- ominously -- "other factors".

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With GDPR implementation now only weeks away many businesses are still not fully prepared for the impact of the new legislation.

We spoke to Matt Klassen VP of cloud marketing at IT service management specialist Cherwell Software to find out how managed services can help companies to comply with GDPR by the may 25th deadline and to manage the additional workload it's likely to create.

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The new batch of privacy related legislations that's due to roll out across Europe later this month has claimed another victim -- Unroll.Me.

The email management service, which claims to help users "clean up your inbox", has announced that it is incompatible with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and will therefore close down in the EU on May 23. If you live in the EU, Unroll.Me will delete your account and you'll no longer be able to use the service.

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If you've not updated to Windows 10 April 2018 Update but you have installed Microsoft's Meltdown patches from a few months ago, your computer is vulnerable to a "fatal flaw".

This is not the first time a patch for the Meltdown vulnerability has led to problems with Windows, but previously it was Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 that were affected. A security researcher found that Microsoft's patch for Windows 10 "undermined the mitigation", and while the problem has been fixed in the April 2018, the company is still working on backporting an updated patch for older versions of Windows 10.

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The OnePlus 6 is due to be revealed on May 16 and, as with just about every OnePlus device, details of the latest flagship have leaked out nice and early.

There have already been a number of rumors relating to the OnePlus 6 -- such as confirmation of the notch -- but now full specifications have appeared on the website of Chinese regulator TENAA. So what can you expect from the A6000, and will it be enough to warrant an upgrade from a OnePlus 5 or OnePlus 5T?

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2017 was the year of DevOps with companies focusing on delivering better customer experience and improving operational efficiency. According to a recent Forrester report, over 60 percent of organizations surveyed said they have either already implemented or are expanding their DevOps efforts in the future. With the rise of DevOps, greater investments in software development and a faster release cadence comes a need to measure the impact of these efforts and ensure they are delivering valuable software faster. To do this, organizations are taking a more modern approach to code deployment, release management, and measurement of outcomes.

This approach known as experimentation is a new product development workflow, combining DevOps and Product Analytics, helping organizations both speed up product delivery while simultaneously providing critical insights on the performance of their features and products. Every feature release is measured against business and technical KPIs defined by the organization. Experimentation teams, historically only formed at leading technology companies, are now emerging in most enterprises who are starting to look for and build out engineering and product experimentation roles.

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Technology companies have been telling us virtual reality will change the world for decades now. While VR has become more popular in recent years, it is still a niche market. Virtual reality will probably become mainstream in the future, but until prices come down even further, it will remain a hobby for enthusiasts.

With that said, Google is still banking on virtual reality, especially with its Daydream initiative. Today, the search giant is making a VR positional-tracking tool called "Seurat" open source. The code is being hosted on GitHub.

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When a person celebrates a birthday, they often receive gifts, eat cake, and spend time with friends and family. After all, it is intended to be a happy occasion as the person marks another year of life.

But what the heck does a Linux distribution do to celebrate a birthday? In the case of the excellent KaOS operating system, the answer is simple -- release an updated ISO. Yes, as a way to mark the 5th birthday of the KDE-focused distro, version 2018.04 is now available for download. You get Plasma 5.12.4, Linux kernel 4.15.7, Libreoffice 6.0.3, and more.

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Irish security developer Safer Networking has released Spybot -- Search & Destroy 2.7, a new version of its Windows free and paid-for anti-malware tool.

The major new feature in this release is the addition of an additional Start Center screen giving users access to frequently used functions. It also promises a number of improvements -- including Secure Boot support -- and better reliability.

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A future enabled by the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is not so far off, with the integration of IoT devices rising across industrial settings from oil and gas to building security.

The potential to leverage big data and analytics to optimize operations and efficiencies is driving industrial companies to move to IIoT-enabled devices, but these companies are now faced with the challenge of modernizing their legacy production systems.

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Microsoft launched Windows 10 April 2018 Update this week, and if you rushed to install it you may well have noticed one or two issues. There have been complaints that various apps have been problematic since the update, but Chrome and Cortana seem to be causing the most problems.

Microsoft has confirmed that it is aware of issues with Chrome and "Hey Cortana" that can lead to Windows 10 April 2018 Update freezing. A patch is currently being worked on and should be released next week, but the company has a couple of suggestions for fixes you can try in the meantime.

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Twitter has issued a warning to its 330 million users, urging them to change their passwords. The security announcement comes after the company discovered a bug that left passwords stored in unencrypted form in internal logs.

While Twitter says that the bug has been fixed and that the plaintext logs have been deleted, it is encouraging the password change out of "an abundance of caution".

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More and more cyber threats keep emerging every day, affecting organizations across the board, targeting the entire spectrum of the Internet. Digital or cyber-extortion has come across as the most serious of such threats as it seeks to profit from criminal activity, akin to blackmail.

Preventing Digital Extortion from Packt Publishing will teach you the art of preventing digital extortion and securing confidential data.

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