Latest Technology News

Google has given its Ad Settings page an overhaul in the name of transparency. The page gives people the chance to not only see how Google uses the data it has gathered about them to personalize the ads they see, but also exercise a degree of control over these personalized ads.

The page makes it possible to disable ad targeting, so you will see rather more generic ads if tailored advertising concerns you. The company has also updated its "Why this ad?" feature, so you will be able to determine why you are seeing certain Google-supplied ads on the sites you visit.

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When people say Chromebooks are glorified web browsers, do not listen to them. Haters are going to hate, but the truth is, laptops running Google's Linux-based Chrome OS are highly capable. In fact, the vast majority of home users would be perfectly fine forgoing Windows and choosing a Chromebook instead. Heck, even many businesses would find Chrome OS to be a delight.

Today, Samsung announces its latest such laptop -- the premium, yet affordable, Chromebook Plus (V2). This is a refresh of the first-gen "Plus" model. It can run Android apps and doubles as a convertible tablet, making it very versatile. Best of all, you won't have to wait long to get it -- it will go on sale very soon.

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Although many businesses have begun moving to DevOps-style processes, eight out of 10 respondents to a new survey say they still have separate teams for managing infrastructure/operations and development.

The study by managed cloud specialist 2nd Watch of more than 1,000 IT professionals indicates that a majority of companies have yet to fully commit to the DevOps process.

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People are worried about their personal security. Who do you trust? Facebook recently admitted it tracks just about everything you do whilst using its network, whereas one of the biggest technology companies in the UK, Dixons Carphone, announced a huge data loss.

You have to ask yourself, if a technology company can’t safeguard your data, who can you trust? On top, do you trust your web browser? What’s it storing, what information does it pass to the manufacturer and to the website you are browsing?

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Apple says that it is planning to release an iOS update that will block a loophole used by police to access iPhones.

Law enforcement agencies and hackers have been able to exploit a handset's Lightning port to get around passcode limits and brute force their way into a phone. But with the upcoming update, Apple will shut down data access via the Lightning port after an hour if the correct passcode is not entered.

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There has been something of a spate of chip vulnerability discoveries recently, and now another one has emerged. Known as Floating Point Lazy State Save/Restore, the security flaw (CVE-2018-3665) is found in Intel Core and Xeon processors and it is another speculative execution vulnerability in a similar vein to Spectre.

The security flaw takes advantage of one of the ways the Linux kernel saves and restores the state of the Floating Point Unit (FPU) when switching tasks -- specifically the Lazy FPU Restore scheme. Malware or malicious users can take advantage of the vulnerability to grab encryption keys. Linux kernel from version 4.9 and upwards, as well as modern versions of Windows and Windows Server are not affected.

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Here at BetaNews, our 20th birthday cerebration is in full swing. We have several amazing giveaways running, including the Linksys Velop Dual-Band Whole Home Mesh Wi-Fi System. But what if you don't need or want a mesh networking solution? What if you are a gamer that just wants a single router?

Enter the Linksys WRT32XB. Yes, we are giving away this hardcore Xbox One-optimized gaming router. Don't own Microsoft's gaming console? Don't worry. It will still function perfectly fine as a router for all of your non-gaming needs too. In other words, Xbox or not, you should enter the giveaway, as this router is a beast.

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Protecting customer data should always be a top priority for businesses. But doing so is increasingly extending beyond moral responsibility and taking on the form of legal requirement. As you’ve surely heard, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect May 25. This set of regulations, which replaces the Data Protection Act 1998, legislates online data rights for any organization that sells products or services to European Union (EU) customers.

Complying with these new rules might seem daunting (and even unnecessary) for US-based small businesses, particularly since there’s still a lot of confusion regarding the specifics of these new rules and requirements. But if you can understand these five keys to customer data protection, it will go a long way toward helping your business achieve compliance.

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GDPR -- it’s a nightmare for organizations, but a much-needed protection for citizens in our world of Cambridge Analytica, criminal hackers, and nation-states cyberthreats. There are many aspects of the regulation that are extremely tricky to implement, but let’s consider just one. Imagine the following scenario:

A new customer signs up to your eCommerce website. Their data gets moved into several back-end systems; maybe a CRM, an accounts system, an order management system, marketing, and probably some kind of data science workbench. Sometime later, an analyst is tasked with analyzing new customers and their behaviors, their retention rates, and other important factors. They know customer data is spread out across dozens of these systems, so they ask IT to prepare a dataset for them. Maybe a month later IT come back with a dataset that has been provisioned in the corporate Data Lake. The data isn’t quite fit for purpose and contains far more information than the analyst needs.

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Protecting your personal information has made big headlines in 2018, and will continue to do so as hackers continue to outwit even the biggest firms. This is what makes our new software giveaway so essential: a year’s license for Sticky Password Premium.

Sticky Password is a suite of products for mobile and desktop that allow you to store your online passwords, form fills and credit card information securely -- our giveaway will give you access to all its Premium features across all supported devices, including Windows, Mac, iOS and Android.

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Whenever there is a tragic event, such as a natural disaster or large-scale terrorist attack, people turn out in droves to donate blood. This is very noble, but such a donation is not only needed during publicized tragedies. Every day, hospitals around the world use donated blood to save lives.

Each year, we celebrate World Blood Donor Day -- an annual occasion to raise awareness regarding the necessity of this life-changing donation. On this day, people often want to donate, but it can be hard to know where to go. Thankfully, Google is partnering with The American Red Cross to make finding such a destination even easier. A Google employee has even chosen to share their personal story about how donated blood saved a family member's life.

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With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in effect, and Brexit negotiations in full swing, there is tremendous debate about London’s new place in the world economy. However, even in a post-Brexit and GDPR world, London is a resilient city with a 400-year history at the center of trade and finance.

In 1998, my company, Interxion,strategically chose central London as the location of its first data center. Twenty years later, we continue to invest in this city with the launch of our third data center, opening in July. So what makes London such an attractive connectivity hub for businesses all over the world?

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From retail to manufacturing, the digital transformation is taking the world by storm, and mobile is leading the charge. With mobile affecting everything from corporate processes to the customer experience, it’s important for businesses to understand just how mobile and the digital revolution are bringing big changes.

As productivity increases, so does the need to communicate more quickly. Currently, it takes 50 milliseconds to send a piece of data from one mobile device to another. Impressively, with 5G, that time will be cut to just one millisecond -- now, that’s fast. While operators are projected to spend $1.7 trillion on equipment upgrades between now and 2020 in preparation for the arrival of 5G, the results will be well worth it. By 2025, 5G is expected to reach 2.6 billion subscribers -- or one-in-five mobile connections around the world.

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The fall out from the Cambridge Analytica scandal continues for Facebook, and the social media giant is busy trying to repair its somewhat tattered reputation. The latest measures see the company introducing new privacy safeguards to inform users if advertisers are using information supplied by so-called "data brokers".

These brokers are firms that gather data about people and then sell this information on to other companies, often for the purposes of targeted advertising. Facebook is not banning the practice, merely requiring advertisers to keep users informed.

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Apple has tweaked its App Store policies, closing a loophole that made it possible for developers to gather data from phone contacts and then sell or share that data without consent.

Until very recently app developers have been able to ask for permission to access users' address books and then use this permission to gather data about contacts. But with the latest policy change -- introduced with no announcement -- Apple has clamped down on this practice in the name of privacy.

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