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Apple's planned purchase of UK-based music-recognition app Shazam for $400 million is facing an investigation by the European Commission.

The commission is concerned that the purchase could give Apple an unfair advantage because of the access it would have to user data, and there is also concern that consumer choice could be limited. Initial investigations found that Apple may use the takeover to encourage Shazam users to move to its own music streaming services, so the commission is undertaking a more in-depth probe.

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Mesh networking systems are all the rage these days, and it isn't hard to see why. Traditional wireless routers can be deficient in large houses, failing to reach all of the rooms. It can be quite frustrating to experience dead zones in your home, and fiddling with range extenders can be annoying. Mesh networks blanket your home in glorious Wi-Fi by utilizing several well-placed access points.

Today, ASUS unveils its latest mesh networking system. Called "Lyra Trio," it is comprised of three AC1750 access points. The 802.11ac devices are pyramid-shaped and contain vertical 3x3 MIMO antennas. If you don't have experience with setting up a home network, don't worry -- you can use a special smartphone app (Android and iPhone) to do so easily.

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Facebook faces lots of criticisms and questions, and while much of this is focused on privacy and security, there are also lots of queries about what is permitted on the platform. To help users to understand what's allowed and what's not, the company has published its Community Standards for everyone to read.

As well as making it clear exactly what sort of content is likely to attract the attention of censors, Facebook is also introducing a new appeals process, giving people the ability to fight back if their content is removed.

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Anyone who downloaded and installed Windows 10 Redstone 5 Build 17650 for Skip Ahead may have noticed references to the previously unheard of Windows 10 Lean. Microsoft has made no announcement about this, so WTF is Windows Lean?

As you might guess from the name, this is a version of Windows 10 where the focus is on reduced size. With an install footprint around 2GB smaller than Windows 10 Pro, Windows 10 Lean is a stripped back version of the operating system with unnecessary extras cut out.

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It’s past time for companies to begin their digital transformation efforts in earnest. Those companies who have taken advantage of advancements in cloud computing via Artificial Intelligence technology have been able to enhance their customers’ experience, improve decision making and impact the bottom line. We can’t underestimate the impact customer experience  will have on revenue. For example, Forrester suggesting that 30 percent of companies will see declines in customer experience performance in 2018, which will translate into a net loss of a point of growth.

Yet some companies still do not understand the urgency and potential benefits of digital transformation. Approximately one-fourth of CEOs will fail to implement timely digital transformation efforts in 2018, and they find themselves growing exponentially further behind their competitors when it comes to overall efficiency and effectiveness -- a difference that will also be apparent to customers. Additionally, 59 percent of companies remain at a "digital impasse," or an early stage of digital transformation maturity, where they have seen little benefit from their efforts. Before moving away from static dashboards to providing actionable insights can begin, building a solid data foundation -- including data quality and timeliness, harmonized data, and increased privacy and security -- is an essential first step to ensuring the success of any analytics or BI platform integration. Implementing actionable analytics in particular requires the correct groundwork for users to efficiently sift through data and utilize insights.

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This is the question Facebook poses and (sort-of-but-not-really) answers in the latest addition to its Hard Questions series. It's the social network's latest attempt to claw back some respect and trust from its users in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal, and it sees the company insisting that "you are not the product".

Whether this is believed or not is neither here nor there. That the company is now having to go to such extraordinary lengths to appear transparent, to try to prove that nothing untoward is going on, is simply indicative of the massive level of suspicion leveled at Facebook.

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Chrome OS is a fairly flexible operating system, and its support for Android apps via the Google Play Store opens up a world of software. It has been thought -- and hoped -- for some time that Linux support might be on its way, and this is looking increasingly likely.

A Terminal app has appeared in the Chrome OS dev channel, strongly suggesting that support for Linux applications could well be on the horizon -- something which will give Chromebooks a new appeal.

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Microsoft developers working on Windows 8 created a puzzle and embedded it in the wallpapers used for internal builds of the operating system.

The team knew that the images would leak out to the public -- and probably the internal builds of Windows -- so they decided to have some fun with it. Over the course of numerous builds, the puzzle was developed -- but only one person ever solved it!

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The percentage of critical vulnerabilities in online banking systems is falling, but two thirds still contain at least one critical vulnerability according to a new report.

Enterprise security specialist Positive Technologies has released its Financial Application Vulnerabilities Report, drawn from audits performed by the company.

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The cloud is the best place to run analytics according to 83 percent of the world’s biggest companies.

A new survey for Teradata conducted by Vanson Bourne shows that by 2023, most organizations want to run all of their analytics in the cloud. But an overwhelming 91 percent say that analytics should be moving to the public cloud at a faster rate.

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Let me clear the air right off the bat: most SMB owners are making more than one major mistake in their hunt for an Internet Service Provider (ISP). The big players in the ISP space love preying on the SMB market because it's so easy to oversell bandwidth, obfuscate the facts, and generally make the process a "smoke and mirrors" game which serves to their advantage.

I'll be the first to admit that broadband shopping is a tricky affair. Service areas for ISPs and their various offerings are as arbitrarily drawn as gerrymandered political districts in the US. Their sales reps are generally trained on how to guilt trip SMB owners into too much bandwidth by relying on keywords like 'productivity' and 'downtime'. And most decision makers have no idea how to shop for broadband based on actual usage needs and instead let ISP reps make this judgement call for them. All of these factors contribute to ISPs having an unfair advantage in negotiations, upselling services and pipelines that merely line sales rep quotas.

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We reported just over a week ago that fake ads promoting cryptocurrency scams were using the names of leading UK business figures.

Now one of those whose names has been featured, consumer advice expert Martin Lewis, is suing Facebook for defamation over the use of his face and name.

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I began writing the print version of this rag in September, 1987. Ronald Reagan was President, almost nobody carried a mobile phone, Bill Gates was worth $1.25 billion, and there was no Internet in the sense we know it today because Al Gore had yet to "invent" it. My point here is that a lot can change in 30+ years and one such change that is my main topic is that, thanks to the GDPR, the Internet is no longer American. We’ve lost control. It’s permanent and probably for the best.

Before readers start attacking, let’s first deal with the issue of Al Gore and the Internet. What Gore actually said to Wolf Blitzer on CNN in March, 1999 was "During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet." And he did. In 1986-1991 Gore sponsored various bills to both expand and speed-up what had been the ARPAnet and allow commercial activity on the network.

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For 2018, I decided to take stock in my finances to see exactly where my money is going each month. I found many ways to cut costs, such as making my own lunch instead of buying something from a deli each day. In New York, a sandwich, bag of chips, and a Snapple can easily run you $13! Food aside, there was one thing in particular that was really destroying my budget -- cable.

When I say cable, I am referring to the traditional "triple play" service, where you get television, internet, and phone. For this, I was paying over $200 a month! This was without any premium channels -- no HBO, Starz, or Showtime. The most ridiculous part? I was being charged monthly rental fees for the cable boxes and modem. Well, enough was enough. Thanks to YouTube TV, I "cut the cord" and I couldn't be happier.

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Windows 10 Spring Creators Update will probably actually be released with a different name: Windows 10 April Update. Users who have installed build 17134 -- believed to be the RTM build -- have spotted a reference to the new name in Microsoft Edge post installation.

This is not the first time this name has been suggested. Less than a week ago a Microsoft video emerged that made reference to Windows 10 April 2018 Update, and the new discovery in Edge would only seem to offer further proof.

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