How will driverless cars impact the insurance industry?
In the next decade or so, it’s predicted that our roads will be awash with driverless cars, with estimates that they will account for a quarter of global car sales by 2035. This will present either a huge opportunity for the insurance sector or a challenge that could lead to its downfall. Car insurance has long been a lucrative business, generating billions of dollars in annual revenue and supporting thousands of jobs. So the disruption promised by driverless cars is a genuine concern.
The primary challenge comes from the fact that 90 percent of road traffic accidents are caused by human error, a risk that driverless cars have the potential to eradicate, sparking a significant improvement in road safety. And while safer roads are always a welcome development, the knock-on effect would be to cause the need for third-party damage insurance to almost disappear. With fewer accidents and fewer claims, Forbes estimates that premiums will reduce by as much as 75 percent.
IBM: Remote working is awesome -- as long as we're talking about other companies
Judging by IBM's latest report on remote working, big blue seems to be a vocal advocate of the trend. However, when it comes to its very own employees it would rather they do their work in-house. How does that saying go? "Do as I say, not as I do?"
For the Making Telework, Work: Insights from SIOP 2017 report, IBM has used "perspectives from academia as well as public and private sectors" and found not only that "teleworking works" but also that "associated challenges can be managed with careful planning and communication."
Fraqtive is a fast fractal art generator
Fraqtive is an open-source generator of gorgeous Mandelbrot and Julia fractals. It’s a crowded area and there are a lot of similar programs around, but Fraqtive has enough interesting extras to justify the download.
Speed is a plus. Launch the program, a familiar Mandelbrot view appears, and you can quickly zoom in and out by moving your mouse cursor to an interesting area and spinning the mouse wheel.
Weird Microsoft Edge bug means the browser prints different numbers than it displays
Anyone using Microsoft Edge to "print to PDF" is advised to double-check their files after a strange bug was detected. The problem is reminiscent of a bug that afflicted Xerox photocopiers a couple of years ago, and sees the browser displaying one set of numbers and printing another.
Microsoft has confirmed the existence of the bug which has the potential to cause serious issues with mission-critical data. The person who originally reported the problem cites an example in which Windows 10's default web browser "displays 123456 in PDF but prints 114447."
Create professional lyrics videos with Superstring
Superstring is a free tool for creating stylish and professional lyrics videos. Choose an audio file and Superstring displays its waveform vertically. To the right of the timeline is a table where you can type the lyrics you hear at the right point.
Playback starts automatically but you can pause and restart as required, or click back on the timeline if you need to hear a particular section again.
How secure operating systems can help protect endpoints [Q&A]
Endpoints are often the weakest links in any IT system, but protecting them effectively now means much more than simply guarding against malware.
As businesses rely more on the cloud and on web-based applications, the endpoint provides a gateway that can be vulnerable to attack.
Harman Kardon's Cortana-powered Amazon Echo rival can play music, control your home, and make Skype calls
Apple is rumored to be working on a Siri-powered alternative to Amazon Echo/Google Home, and Microsoft isn’t planning on being left out either.
Harman Kardon’s Cortana-powered speaker, called Invoke, is set to launch in the Fall. A product page for it did prematurely appear on the web before being pulled, but now Microsoft has made the announcement official.
Hire and retain talent to make it in the digital economy
The way we work is transforming at an extraordinary rate. Explosive progress in the technology industry, demonstrated by the fact that digital tech investment reached £6.8 billion last year, creating 1.64 million jobs as a result, is unavoidable. Despite this positive influx of job roles, there is a mismatch between the volume of positions available and the skills that are required to do them.
To be able to maintain a grasp of its competitive edge within a global marketplace, the UK must begin to tackle the ever-increasing skills gap.
HandBrake for Mac server compromise means downloaders have 50-50 chance of Proton RAT malware infection
Anyone who downloaded the Mac video transcoder HandBrake in the last few days stands a 50 percent change of being infected with a Trojan. The download for version 1.0.7 of HandBrake was infected after the mirror download server was compromised.
The Trojan allows for an attacker to remotely access an infected computer, and a malware-laced version of the app was made available for download between May 2 and May 6. If you downloaded the app in this window, you're advised to check the SHA1/256 sum, and if you have gone as far as installing the software, there are steps to take to determine if you're infected and remove the malware if you are.
Take control of Windows 10's built-in network usage monitor
Monitoring which apps use the most network bandwidth can help you spot resource hogs, malware and more. If you’re using Windows 10, you don’t have to install any complicated network software to make this happen. The OS tracks all this information by default, and all you have to do is view it.
To check it out, launch the Settings app, click "Network & Internet", select "Data usage" in the sidebar, then click "View usage details."
Facebook uses newspaper ads to warn about fake news and gives tips to help spot it
Facebook's fight against fake news has been taken to the printed press. The social networking giant has taken out a series of ads in UK newspapers giving tips about how to spot fake news. The ad campaign comes as Brits prepare to go to the polls and vote in the snap General Election in a month's time.
The issue of fake news really came to prominence in the run up to the US election, and research has shown that Facebook has become a tool that is used as part of campaigning to spread propaganda. In addition to the print ads, Facebook has also closed down thousands of UK accounts and is also expanding its automated system for spotting fake news to the UK.
The cloud computing tidal wave
The title above is a play on the famous Bill Gates memo, The Internet Tidal Wave, written in May, 1995. Gates, on one of his reading weeks, realized that the Internet was the future of IT and Microsoft, through Gates’s own miscalculation, was then barely part of that future. So he wrote the memo, turned the company around, built Internet Explorer, and changed the course of business history.
That’s how people tend to read the memo, as a snapshot of technical brilliance and ambition. But the inspiration for the Gates memo was another document, The Final Days of Autodesk, written in 1991 by Autodesk CEO John Walker. Walker’s memo was not about how the future could be saved, but about how seemingly invincible market advantages could be quickly lost. If Autodesk, the Computer Aided Design pioneer, was ever going to die, this was how Walker figured it would happen. And Gates believed him. Now it’s about to happen again. Amazon Web Services -- the first and still largest public computing cloud -- is 11 years old, which is old enough for there not only to be some clear cloud computing winners (AWS, Microsoft Azure and a bunch of startups) but some obvious losers, too. This rising tide is not raising all ships. That’s why it’s time for the Cloud Computing Tidal Wave.
Windows 10 Creators Update has a secret UWP version of File Explorer -- here's how to find it
Microsoft has made much of its UWP (Universal Windows Platform) so it should come as little surprise that there's a UWP version of File Explorer. What is a little surprising, however, is that the app is hidden and can only be unlocked using a specially-crafted shortcut.
You need to be running Windows 10 Creators Update and you can try out the app which is somewhat reminiscent of the Windows 10 Mobile version of File Explorer. It's not clear how close to the final version of the app this is, but it's interesting to try out, and certainly something to keep an eye on.
Android Nougat beta ends as Google prepares for imminent launch of Android O beta
Google is preparing to launch the Android O beta, and ahead of this the company has officially closed the Android Nougat beta program. We've already seen a developer preview of Android O, and a second release is due later this month.
But many Pixel and Nexus users are waiting for the Android O beta as the developer preview is not really intended for public consumption. While we're not really any closer to knowing for sure when the new beta program will begin, we're clearly nearing the time that Google will make an announcement.
Fedora Linux getting native MP3 support, but who really cares?
Fedora is a wonderful Linux distribution, as it is both stable and modern. One of the biggest selling points of the operating system is that is relies on truly free open source software. This means it won't have patented or closed-source non-free packages by default. Of course, in-the-know Fedora users often added these needed packages after the fact by using third-party repositories, such as RPM Fusion.
Over the years, one of the biggest pain points for Fedora was a lack of MP3 playback due to its FOSS focus. For someone switching from Windows or Mac, it could be very surprising and upsetting that they couldn't do something as simple as play a song, or rip/convert a CD to MP3. This will soon become a thing of the past, as both MP3 decoding and encoding are coming to the operating system by default. Unfortunately, this is a case of "too little too late," as the concept of storing music locally is becoming obsolete.
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