Latest Technology News

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.

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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."

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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A new patent from Microsoft could enable the company to not only identify and block pirate material from being shared via cloud services, but also to identify repeat offenders and take action against them.

The patent specifically refers to the ability to identify and block the sharing of "prohibited content," and this could be used to mean copyrighted material, or files that a company simply does not want to be shared. The technology relies on a fingerprinting technique which makes it possible to identify files rather than having to worry about trying to track down and delete files to prevent further sharing.

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WikiLeaks continues to release revealing documents from its Vault 7 cache. This time around the organization introduces us to a CIA tool called Archimedes -- previously known as Fulcrum.

As before, there is little to confirm whether or not the tool is still in active use -- or, indeed, if it has actually ever been used -- but the documentation shows how it can be installed on a LAN to perform a man-in-the-middle attack.

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Left-wing French presidential hopeful Emmanuel Macron has been hit by a "massive and coordinated" hack attack just before voters go to the polls. A 9GB cache of emails and photos was dumped as a torrent on Pastebin by a leaker by the name of EMLEAKS. The torrent was initially hosted on Archive.org.

It was quickly pulled offline, but not before it had spread far and wide on social media. Released just before midnight on Friday night, the leak was timed to prevent Macron from responding. French election rules forbid candidates from engaging in any form of campaigning immediately before polls open.

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Augmented reality is an impressive technology with a big future. While there are many demos surrounding AR and mixed reality, and despite some limited real-world use, it is still largely a promise at this point. In other words, the maturing technology is hardly in the mainstream, and many of its current uses are arguably inconsequential.

Today, however, augmented reality is being shown to potentially have a significant impact on the medical community. You see, a company called "Scopis" has developed a surgery solution that leverages Microsoft HoloLens. By wearing the mixed reality glasses, the surgeon sees an overlay, allowing him/her to achieve better accuracy. This, in turn, can improve the success rate of certain surgical procedures. In this case, the focus is largely on the spine, but it could be made to work with any type of surgery.

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YouTube offers businesses the ability to connect meaningfully with their audience and build an engaged base of customers and prospects. The video sharing website has never been more popular. Today, over three billion hours of videos are watched per month, with an additional 300 hours of videos being added each minute. Yet, out of all the videos uploaded to YouTube, only a very small percentage generate more than a few hundred views; and only an elite few of those ultimately end up going viral. However, when done right, uploading videos can be big business. And not just for traditional organizations.

The number of channels earning six figures each year on YouTube is increasing by 50 percent year on year. According to a 2014 Variety survey, the stars of YouTube’s most popular channels, such as Swede Felix Kjellberg’s PewDiePie and Germán Aranis’ HolaSoyGerman, are now more influential and popular than mainstream celebrities among teenagers, so they need to be taken seriously by marketers.

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Businesses in the UK will waste £37 billion on failed agile IT projects in the next 12 months, according to a new report from 6point6. The report is based on a poll of 300 UK and US CIOs. They were asked about their experiences with agile, and how its principles are being applied and executed.

More than half of CIOs (53 percent) see agile development as "discredited," and three quarters (75 percent) don’t even want to defend it any more. Seventy-three percent of CIOs think agile IT is its own industry now, and 50 percent consider it an "IT fad."

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It’s time to stuff the stereotypes. For too long in the minds of too many, gaming has been thought of as a sub-culture populated by teenage boys sitting indoors and playing shoot ‘em ups on either a console or computer.

The statistics to disprove this have been around for a long time -- the average age of a US games buyer was 36 last year and women make up more than 40 percent of gamers. Nearly two-thirds of US households contain at least one frequent gamer. Staggering stats that make it hard to pinpoint who the "typical" gamer is -- because there isn’t one anymore.

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OnePlus has confirmed that the successor to the OnePlus 3T is due for release soon. The OnePlus 5 has been rumored and hinted at for a while, but now it is official.

In a slightly unusual move, rather than making a direct announcement about the upcoming flagship killer, OnePlus instead chose to reveal the future launch to the Verge. Beyond "summer," we know nothing about the specifics of the launch but there are plenty of leaks and rumors to go on for the time being.

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