Latest Technology News

From now until September 25, Apple is running a Back to School promotion, and there are some great offers for students.

If you qualify, you can bag yourself a free pair of Beats headphones or earphones when you buy a Mac or iPad Pro -- including the Powerbeats3 Wireless in new Beats Pop Collection colors. There are also special deals on accessories and AppleCare.

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Microsoft has launched a free version of Teams, the company's collaborative chat tool. Teams has pitted itself against the likes of Slack since it first appeared, but the arrival of a free edition makes it a viable alternative.

As this is a free product, it should come as no surprise that there are limitations. However, the free edition of Microsoft Team can still be used by up to 300 people -- the same as the Essentials and Premium versions -- which should be enough to cater for most small to medium sized businesses.

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If you haven't heard, YouTube TV experienced an ill-timed outage yesterday. Well, I suppose there is never a good time for a service disruption, but still, this was during a rather important sporting event. What game was it? The big World Cup match between England and Croatia. I'm not a fan of soccer, but I can understand how having your TV service disrupted during such a major game could be annoying. If it was during the World Series or Super Bowl, I'd be rather upset.

YouTube TV apologized profusely on Twitter, and ultimately, the service was restored long before the match was over. In other words, subscribers were able to experience England's crushing defeat. If you weren't satisfied with the apology, YouTube TV is offering something that should make up for the inconvenience -- a free week of service.

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Malwarebytes already offers a decent security app for Android, but the company has never had a version for iOS -- until now.

While iPhone and iPad users are less at risk from malware than their Android counterparts, thanks to Apple’s walled-garden, they aren’t necessarily completely safe -- the threat of spam calls, scam websites, fraudulent texts and bad ads remains.

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With every new privacy scandal that erupts across the digital landscape, we smartphone users and digital nomads must ask ourselves the same question: Have we reached diminishing returns on the usefulness of modern technology? It seems sometimes like every new convenience arrives with a litany of security concerns attached.

The latest news to strike a blow to our expectations of digital privacy is that smartphone apps appear to have been taking screenshots of users' devices and records of their keystrokes without their knowledge.

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Apple is making huge news today with the refresh of its wildly popular MacBook Pro laptops. The portable computers are more powerful than ever and feature a quieter keyboard. In addition, the company will be selling an optional eGPU made by Blackmagic that will transform the notebooks into graphical powerhouses.

MacBook Pro computers are very well-made, but they are quite expensive too. Even if you buy the Apple Care protection plan, it is a wise idea to invest in a case or bag for it too. Today, the iPhone-maker releases new leather sleeves that should protect both the 13 and 15-inch MacBook Pro laptops from scratches and dents. As you can imagine, since it is an official Apple product, it is rather pricey.

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TagHelpers are introduced in ASP.NET Core MVC as a new way of writing server-side code that renders HTML tags (elements), that is much closer to the HTML format than to Razor.  TagHelpers represent a mechanism to add server-side processing to a regular HTML tag, which in many ways is very similar to Angular or React directives.

Compared to Razor, the code is way cleaner, there is no context-switching and no need to use @ escape sequence like in Razor.

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As well as refreshing its MacBook Pro line-up, Apple today started to sell the $699 Blackmagic eGPU. This 8GB external GPU features a Radeon Pro 580 to bring more graphic horsepower to laptop users.

The aim is to bring desktop-level power to laptop users when they are working on graphic-intensive projects. At a shade under $700, it's not a cheap piece of hardware, but it also doubles up as something of a docking station.

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Traditional signature-based antivirus solutions struggle to cope with the pace of change in today's malware world. But while enterprises have had access to sophisticated machine learning solutions for a while these have largely been denied to consumers.

Now though Cylance is launching an AI-based antivirus solution aimed at the domestic internet user.

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There's growing interest in biometric security solutions as passwords are increasingly seen as outmoded and at risk from phishing and other attacks.

Biometric solutions provider ID R&D is launching a new version of its voice biometric security solution, IDVoice. Enhancements to the product allow it to deliver what is claimed to be the industry's fastest and most accurate text-independent biometric verification.

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Apple today announces that it has refreshed its MacBook Pro with the latest Intel processors for faster performance, True Tone displays, and quieter keyboards.

The switch to newer processors brings a big improvement to performance. How big a boost? According to Apple, the 8th-generation quad-core Intel Core processors in the 13-inch MacBook Pro will make it twice as fast, while the 8th-generation 6-core Intel Core processors in the 15-inch model will deliver 70 percent better performance.

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A new report finds that 86 percent of businesses describe their cloud strategy as multi-cloud today, with performance and innovation rising above cost savings as the top measures of success.

In addition the report, produced by Forrester for enterprise cloud specialist Virtustream, reveals that 60 percent of enterprises are now moving or have already moved mission-critical applications to the public cloud.

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If you are a hardcore PC gamer, you are probably willing to spend almost anything to get an edge. For online multiplayer games in particular, not only is your CPU, GPU, and RAM important, but so is your networking hardware. From your modem, to your router, and ultimately your network interface card, what you have matters.

Speaking of NICs, there is an intriguing new offering from a company called Aquantia. Called "AQtion AQN-107 Gamer Edition," it is a 10G card, which yes, is total overkill. A standard gigabit card is fine for most gamers, but the thing is, this 10G card is quite affordable. Not only is the price reasonable, but it comes with specialized software for Windows that will prioritize gaming traffic and reduce lag. Maybe buying a 10G card isn't so crazy...

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Google's Chrome browser may be popular, but you'll find a lot of its users complain about high memory usage. With Chrome 67, things just got even worse.

If you've noticed that Chrome on the desktop is using more RAM, you're not imagining it. Google has enabled a Site Isolation feature in Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS to help mitigate against the Spectre vulnerability -- and it's a bit memory-hungry.

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It seems that the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities saga is never-ending, and now there are two new related CPU flaws to add to the mix. Dubbed Spectre 1.1 and Spectre 1.2, the vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-3693) exploit speculative execution and can modify data and bypass sandboxes.

Two security researchers have disclosed details of the new vulnerabilities, both of which have the potential to leak sensitive data. By tinkering with the speculative execution processes of Intel and ARM CPUs, it would be possible to use malicious code to extract information such as passwords and crypto keys.

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