Latest Technology News

As a tool to backup your photos and videos to the cloud, Google Photos should give you a fair degree of control over how and when you want the backups to be performed. However, a new update to the popular app on Android manages to do quite the opposite, removing a very useful feature -- which is sure to frustrate some users.

Google Photos has dropped the backup while charging option from the settings menu, forcing users to either perform backups manually or accept that backups can happen anytime their smartphone or tablet is connected to a cellular or Wi-Fi network.

Two-hundred-and-thirty-six 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.

Microsoft released another Windows 10 Fall Creators Update build this week. It introduced a lot of new features, but also has been causing major issues for some users.

Scratch provides a great introduction to programming for all ages, which is why it's included in Raspbian, the operating system that powers the Raspberry Pi. You can also use it to write code to control and respond to components connected to the GPIO (General Purpose Input and Output) pins on a Pi, and there’s a new version of the tool available from today.

Interacting with GPIO pins in Scratch 2.0 is easier than before, with custom blocks for setting the pin output (and getting the current pin state) replacing the old text-based broadcast instructions, which is a big step in the right direction. However, the tool can be a little slow for some operations, and there's a bigger issue to be aware of -- not all models of the Pi will be able to run it.

Facebook today launches its latest attempt to tackle online extremism in the UK with its new Online Civil Courage Initiative (OCCI). It is part of an education drive which finds the social network trying to inform charities and local organizations how to fight hate speech and extremism online.

The OCCI is being launched with involvement from a number of partners, including the Jo Cox Foundation and Imams Online, and it has a UK focus. Facebook users are encouraged to head over to the OCCI pages to share ideas using the hashtag #civilcourage.

A new survey shows that 18 percent of organizations now have more than half of their workloads in cloud-native environments. In addition many are moving from on-premises and self-hosting toward shared environments, distributing workloads across multiple providers.

The study by cloud security and network software firm Cohesive Networks also finds 57 percent of respondents say that cloud-native workloads make up at least 20 percent of applications in Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS).

Mark Zuckerberg has announced a new mission statement for Facebook. The social network is no longer interested in making the world "more open and connected," now it wants to "give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together."

The change of direction will set Facebook's course for the next decade, and it was revealed at the Facebook Communities Summit. At the summit Facebook also revealed a new batch of tools for group admins to help drive the sense of community and make groups easier to manage.

Virgin Media is urging hundreds of thousands of customers with its Super Hub 2 router to change their passwords after a Which? investigation uncovered a way for hackers to gain access to the device.

If the password for the router is not changed from its default there is a risk from hacking, but Virgin Media said the risk is small. Nevertheless, as a precautionary measure a password change is the advice for more than 800,000 users.

When it comes to the high-powered computing market and data center sectors, Intel has had a firm lead over the competition for some time.

However this may all be about to change, after AMD revealed its plans to fight back with its new EPYC 7000 series of data center processors.

AMD has revealed three new GPU server accelerators, promising a "dramatic increase" in performance, efficiency, and ease of implementation for deep learning and HPC solutions.

The new line of GPU server accelerators comprises of Radeon Instinct MI25, Radeon Instinct MI8, and Radeon Instinct MI6 and will be paired with AMD’s open ROCm 1.6 software platform.

Thumbico is a combination of an icon extraction and viewing tool, with a thumbnail viewer and creator. The program is tiny, a 28KB download, and unsurprisingly there’s no installation required -- just unzip and run Thumbico.exe.

On launch the program displays a small window. Drag and drop any executable and Thumbico extracts and displays its icon.

If you’re a Windows Insider, you know that the test versions of Windows 10 that Microsoft rolls out to you on a regular basis aren’t going to be entirely stable and problem free. Especially if you’re on the Fast ring.

But the latest release, Build 16226, which Microsoft pushed out yesterday, seems buggier than most (albeit not as problematic as Build 16212 which got released by accident three weeks ago).

IBM and Salesforce made an interesting announcement recently that they’re combining the robust Artificial Intelligence technologies of IBM Watson and Salesforce Einstein into a powerhouse solution for customers. They’re calling it IBM Bluewolf’s "augmented intelligence" solution for telecommunications.

The announcement showcases the power of putting multiple artificial intelligence solutions together for new, more robust, connected capabilities delivered to customers more quickly. While we’re well on our way to augmenting intelligence, we have a long ways to go before claiming we’ve augmented intelligence.

Microsoft Garage -- the Redmond behemoth’s R&D arm -- has released Dictate 5.0, a free add-on for those running Microsoft Office 2013, 2016 or 365 on Windows 8.1 or later. Also available for 64-bit versions of Office, Dictate brings dictation capabilities to Word, Excel and PowerPoint.

The app uses the same speech recognition engine found in Cortana to convert user speech into editable text using whatever microphone has been configured as the user’s default.

I can't say this enough -- never go cheap on a wireless router. Whether for your home or business, a flaky connection can be absolutely maddening. Not to mention, if you opt for a model from a lesser-known company, you could get left with poor update support. In other words, there could be unpatched vulnerabilities. What you want to do is target a reputable brand that has historically offered plenty of updates. Then, select a model that meets your needs.

Despite some fairly overblown concerns about data collection, one such reputable company is NETGEAR. The company not only offers routers with great features and reliability, but excellent support too. Today, the company refreshes its aging Nighthawk X6 (R8000). The new "S" model -- which replaces its predecessor -- is called "X6S (R8000P)." This new router still has six antennas, but moves from AC3200 to AC4000 (750+1625+1625 Mbps). The new model gets multi-user MIMO and has a better processor, going from a dual-core 1GHz to a dual-core 64-bit 1.8GHz CPU. Like the prior model, the X6S also has Amazon Alexa support.

Part of the joy of shopping online is being able to easily compare prices at a number of retailers so you get the best price. If you prefer to get all of your goods from the same place, eBay has a new deal that you'll love -- price matching.

The offer covers items in the eBay Deals section, and price matching is carried out against Amazon.com, BestBuy.com, Walmart.com, HomeDepot.com, Target.com, Sears.com, Wayfair.com and Jet.com. But if you want to take advantage of the offer, you'll have to take careful note of the terms and conditions.