Latest Technology News

The photos and videos coming out of Puerto Rico following the devastating Hurricane Maria have been heartbreaking. The little island has been destroyed -- the people have no electricity, but even worse, food and water are scarce, and tensions are running high, leading to very dangerous conditions.

Unfortunately, government aid has not been coming fast enough, with President Trump blaming the fact that Puerto Rico is an island for his poor performance in this regard -- seriously. Luckily, the private sector is stepping up to help their fellow US citizens. People and organizations are donating money, and today Microsoft announces that it is enabling free Skype calls to Puerto Rico area codes 787 and 939.

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Go out and buy a brand new Windows 10 PC and it usually ships configured with a host of trial software, often sponsored by the software manufacturer, to encourage you to switch to an alternative office suite, security or photo management tool.

You could spend time migrating all your data manually. Out of the box, Windows makes it relatively easy to transfer your preferences across to your new machine. The problem starts when you have a host of installed applications and want to get these transferred and setup as quickly as possible.

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Facebook is currently under investigation for displaying advertisements placed by Russia to try to influence the 2016 presidential election against Hillary Clinton, but Donald Trump is convinced that the social network is against him.

In a tweet, the president set out a simple accusation: "Facebook was always anti-Trump." Dredging up his bugbear of "fake news" he also made the same claim of television networks and newspapers. More than this, he suggests that there may have been collusion between those he regards as being "anti-Trump."

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Google Cloud Platform has introduced per-second billing for App Engine, Cloud Dataproc, Compute Engine and Container Engine users, following a similar announcement made by rival AWS last week.

However, while Amazon's cloud arm announced that the new pricing scheme, which involves a one-minute minimum, will apply to EC2 customers starting October 2, the per-second billing on Google Cloud Platform's aforementioned cloud services is live now. Previously, customers were billed by the minute.

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Threat detection company RiskIQ has released the latest of its quarterly reports into threat trends, this one looking at phishing.

It finds that in the second quarter of 2017 there were 39,320 unique phishing domains, down from 45,025 back in the first quarter. However, there were 316 targeted phishing brands in Q2 -- up 15.7 percent from the 273 brands targeted in Q1.

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It's important for enterprises to correctly size their public clouds in order to control costs and optimize performance.

Cloud management company Turbonomic is using this week's Microsoft Ignite conference to announce a new version of its platform that delivers dynamic optimization and allocation of storage and relational database services.

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We wouldn’t define ourselves as "Mac users", although we do use a Mac, quickly switching between OS X and Windows 10. It’s been this way for nearly 20 years, although 20 years ago, emulating Windows on a PPC Mac was far from a pleasant experience.

Roll forward 20 years and this is a vastly different and much nicer experience, primarily thanks to Apple’s move to Intel processors. On our quad-core iMac, Windows 10 flies at almost native speeds. Sure, it’s not quite as fast as running Windows 10 on Bootcamp, but it’s more than acceptable. We even create our website graphics using Windows design tools, without any noticeable slowdown.

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As part of the European Cyber Security Awareness Month, the first week of October in the UK marks Security Serious Week.

This not-for-profit event set up by Eskenzi PR will present five panel-style webinars for participants from UK businesses on the theme of Bridging the Cyber Skills Gap through Diversity and Creativity.

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If you have heard Alexa utter the message "Currently, Google is not supporting YouTube on Echo Show," you'll be aware of the issue: Google has pulled YouTube from the Amazon Echo Show.

Google says that Amazon's Echo-with-a-screen creates a "broken user experience", and it seems the company would rather there was no customer experience than a broken one. A war of words has erupted between the two companies, and neither is particularly forthcoming with detail.

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Kodi has had a rough time of things lately, and the same can be said for a number of companies and addons associated with the media center software. In particular, addons site TVAddons has been fighting legal battles, and in its case with Dish Network the operators of the site have been identified.

An amended version of Dish Network's complaint says the site is owned and operated by Adam Lackman from Canada, and they also identify the developer of the ZemTV Kodi addon as Shahjahan Durrani from London. In the complaint, both Lackman and Durrani are accused of copyright infringement, but TVAddons insists it "is not a piracy site, it's a platform for developers of open source add-ons for the Kodi media center."

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Opera Software has unveiled Opera 48 for Windows, Mac and Linux. After the last feature-light release, version 48 adds a number of interesting new features as well as improvements.

Chief among these is a new pop-up search tool, which also doubles as currency, unit and time zone converter. Opera also adds a new screenshot capture tool for web pages, plus widens its bookmark-importing tool to support Edge and Yandex browsers.

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A number of iPhone 8 owners have complained of a crackling sound in their phone's earpiece during calls. The problem is not specific to any particular carrier, and it also affects the iPhone 8 Plus.

Apple says that only a "small number of cases" of the audio problem have been reported, but there are lengthy threads on Reddit and Apple support forums with comments from those suffering with the issue. The good news is that there is a fix in the works and it's going to be delivered as a software update -- so it would seem there is not a physical problem with hardware.

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The low-code, or rapid application development platform (RAD), is growing in popularity among busy IT teams. The reality is that organizations of all sizes must find new ways to increase efficiencies, and manual coding is simply too expensive and time consuming. IT managers need to find solutions to problems quickly -- and platforms like this enable them to create integrations and automate basic processes in minutes -- all of which saves time and money, and frees them up for higher-value strategic work.

Low-code development platforms like Linx are designed to help businesses integrate and automate processes without writing reams of code. The goal is to eliminate the time-consuming drudgery of rewriting code each time you wish to do something relatively simple like publish a web service, extract data, schedule an automated task, parse CSV files etc.

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Twitter's distinctive feature -- the 140-character limit -- has been both a blessing and a curse, but out of the blue, however, the company has decided to double the limit to 280 characters. Unfortunately, the 280-charcter limit is now -- like the blue tick of verification -- some of the Holy Grail of Twitter thanks to a slow rollout.

There's no need to wait however! You can send tweets of up to 280 characters right now -- it just takes a little setting up. Here's what you need to do.

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SAP has announced its acquisition of customer identity and access management firm Gigya.

Gigya’s work revolves around helping companies build digital relationships with their customers. Its platform helps businesses manage things like customer profile or preference, as well as different consent and opt-in / opt-out settings.

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