Latest Technology News

In the world of media playing software, VLC is a perennial favorite -- and with good reason. This open source tool is one of the most feature-packed players out there, and it has just received a huge and long-awaited upgrade with the release of VLC 3.0 'Vetinari'.

Many software releases are described as being major or significant, but VLC 3.0 really is a huge release -- it's a truly massive update from its predecessor. Available for Windows, macOS, Android, iOS, Linux, Chromebooks and Windows Phone, just about everyone can take advantage of the power of this incredible player.

Uber has agreed to a settlement with Google's self-driving technology unit, Waymo, over claims that that the company stole trade secrets during the acquisition of Otto. Google's parent company, Alphabet, sued Uber a year ago, and now a payment of $245 million has been agreed.

The financial settlement to be received by Waymo includes 0.34 percent of Uber's equity based on a valuation of $72 billion. Uber CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi, expressed "regret" about the matter, and said he wanted to correct "mistakes of the past."

Google is certainly no stranger to accusations of abusing its position to its own advantage, and the company has now been fined 1.36 billion rupees ($21.17 million) by India's antitrust watchdog.

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said Google was guilty of "search bias" and had been abusing its dominance in online web search and online search advertising. Particular criticism was leveled at Google's promotion of its own flight search page.

Kodi is a superb, and very flexible free media center, but in the past year or so legal crackdowns, court cases, vanishing add-ons and other bad publicity have made people wary of it, and understandably so. It’s not illegal to use Kodi, but installing add-ons that let you stream copyrighted content for free could get you into trouble.

In the wake of all this bad publicity, rival streaming service Mobdro has been gaining in popularity. The app can be installed on any Android device, including phones, tablets, Amazon's Fire TV Stick, and Google's Chromecast 2.

Apple may have just released iOS 11.3 beta 2, but the attention of world turned to the iOS source code that leaked to GitHub. The iPhone maker has confirmed that code for iOS 9's iBoot had leaked, but stressed its age.

The company said that the leak does not pose a security threat to users, insisting that "the security of our products doesn't depend on the secrecy of our source code." But while Apple tries to play down the leak, there's no denying that it is highly significant and an unprecedented embarrassment.

Do you care about your data? If yes, I hope you are backing it up. While I swear by the cloud for backups, only a fool would trust their important data to another company’s servers alone. In other words, it is smart to leverage the cloud, but you should also store your data locally. Redundancy is key, folks.

For locally stored data, I recommend external storage solutions. Why? These drives can be easily taken with you in an emergency, or physically locked in a safe if needs be. To take things further, a rugged external drive with water resistance is ideal. Today, ADATA unveils a new USB 3.1 gen 1 (USB 3.0) durable drive that meets that need.

Two-hundred-and-sixty-nine in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on the Windows Store in the past seven days.

As always, if I missed an app or game that has been released this week that you believe is particularly good, let me know in the comments below or notify me via email.

Facebook has confirmed that it is currently testing what it describes as a "downvote" button. But the social network is at pains to stress that this is absolutely not the "dislike" button people have been asking for.

The idea behind the feature is to give users the chance to downvote comments -- it does not appear to give the same option to posts. In currents tests, downvoting only appears on public Pages, and it's something that’s unlikely to spread to profiles.

Businesses go to great lengths to protect their corporate networks, but when staff take work home it can be hard to ensure data is kept secure when using personal devices and accessing data from the cloud.

In an innovative move, endpoint protection company Cylance is offering employees of companies that use its software the chance to use Cylance's enterprise-grade AI-powered endpoint prevention to protect their family's home PCs and Macs against malicious attackers.

Samsung has kicked off the Android Oreo roll-out for the Galaxy S8, three months after introducing a public beta program. The first to get it are the testers who enrolled, starting with those in Germany.

What's interesting is that, even though version 8.1 exists, Samsung is pushing Android 8.0 Oreo. That's pretty much what happened last time round with the Galaxy S7, which received Android 7.0 Nougat, when 7.1 was available.

Paul Saffo says that communication technologies historically take 30 years or more to find their true purpose. Just look at how the Internet today is different than it was back in 1988. I am beginning to think this idea applies also to new computing technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). We’re reading a lot lately about AI and I think 2018 is the year when AI becomes recognized for its much deeper purpose of asking questions, not just finding answers.

Some older readers may remember the AI bubble of the mid-1980s. Sand Hill Road venture capitalists invested (and lost) about $1 billion in AI startups that were generally touted as expert systems. An expert system attempted to computerize professional skills like reading mammograms or interpreting oil field seismic logs. Computers were cheaper than medical specialists or petroleum geologists, the startup founders reckoned, so replacing these professionals would not only save money, it would allow much broader application of their knowledge. Alas, it didn’t work for two reasons: 1) figuring-out how experts make decisions was way harder than the AI researchers expected, and; 2) even if you could fully explain the decision-making process it required a LOT more computing power than originally expected. Circa 1985 it probably was cheaper to hire a doctor than to run a program to replace one.

While Firefox has been much better lately, Chrome remains the best overall web browser. Quite frankly, it isn’t a very fair fight, as Google essentially has unlimited resources to innovate. Chrome is fast, feature-full, and very secure. It does a great job of delivering the web to consumers while also helping to keep them safe.

Continuing its trend of protecting Chrome users, Google today makes a big announcement regarding web safety. Starting in July of this year, all HTTP websites will be marked as "not secure." This follows the company marking just some sites this way.

With cryptocurrencies reaching super high valuations, it should not come as a surprise that some websites use their visitors' processing power for mining. Question is, just how many do that?

According to a new report from security firm 360Netlab, that's 0.2 percent of websites. What's interesting is that porn sites account for nearly half of them at 49 percent. Other types of websites don't even come close.

As enterprises move more of their system to the cloud, they open up more of their workloads to potential attack.

In order to offer protection against cyberattacks on cloud infrastructure workloads, services and software-as-a-service applications on public and private cloud platforms, Check Point is launching a new family of cloud security products.

The source code for the iOS bootloader iBoot has been leaked to GitHub, prompting Apple to issue a DMCA takedown notice.

Although the source code is for iOS 9.3 and a couple of years old, it appears to be the real deal and would still cause something of a headache for Apple. Copies of the code have been circulating online despite the takedown notice, and the concern is that it could be used to exploit iOS with malware.