Latest Technology News

In a lengthy missive that has been described by some as a manifesto, Mark Zuckerberg has written a counterattack to criticism of his beloved Facebook. He waxes lyrical about a rosy vision of the future in which communities come together, everyone is included, and everyone is empowered -- largely facilitated by him. For a man who denies he has political leanings, he certainly seems to have been studying Speaking Like A Politician 101. He is nothing if not almost impressively vague.

But when Zuckerberg is not massaging his own ego as he dreams up ways to save the world ("I hope we can come together to build a global community that works for everyone"), the content of the website he created still gets a mention. In the age of Trump there is endless talk of fake news, and Facebook has certainly played a role in helping this to spread. This, along with other problems, such as the spread of terrorist propaganda, is something Zuckerberg wants to combat, and he's placing a great deal of confidence in artificial intelligence and his beloved algorithms.

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Having just introduced the idea of restricted timeouts for abusive users, Twitter has unveiled yet more measures designed to counter abuse and harassment. Now if you have blocked or muted a user, you'll no longer be notified of replies to a conversation by that user.

You will still, however, receive notifications of replies to the conversation if they come from people you follow, so you are not completely cut out. It has been warmly received by Twitter users, many of whom believe this is how things should have been from the beginning.

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Cyber security firm Bitdefender says it has recently uncovered a new type of malware which targets macOS users. The company says that the malware, which it has dubbed Xagent, is capable of stealing passwords, taking screenshots and grabbing iPhone backups stored on the machine.

Bitdefender says it still can’t be absolutely certain of who is behind the malware, but all evidence points in the direction of the APT28 cybercrime group. The company says this group uses the same dropper / downloader, as well as the same control center URLs. On top of that, Bitdefender says same artifacts have been hardcoded in the binary files.

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VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a client/server technology that lets you remotely control any target device. RealVNC has been around for many years and its VNC Connect tool is now available for Raspberry Pi.

VNC Connect is included in the Raspbian repositories, and lets you connect to your Pi from anywhere in the world, from a range of devices, using a cloud brokered or direct connection. The Pi version comes with some extra features and functionality, but there are some steps you'll need to follow before you can start using it.

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Around the world, there are many people with hearing impairments. This doesn't mean that they are necessarily deaf -- they may instead have severe hearing loss. Someone in my family, for instance, has to wear hearing aids. For these people, captioning on videos (text displayed on screen) can be a necessity, making it possible to enjoy a TV show or movie. Heck, it can be used by people without hearing issues too; they may need to mute their TV as to not wake family members.

Nowadays, captioning extends to internet videos too, including the very popular YouTube. In fact, today, Google announces that it has exceeded 1 billion captioned videos! While this is certainly an amazing accomplishment, the service's automatic speech recognition can sometimes be very wrong -- even comically so.

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If you want your latest and greatest smartphone to stand out from the crowd probably the best thing that you can do is not announce it at a major show like MWC. That's because many manufacturers will be fighting for the public's attention, as they will unveil dozens of devices in the span of a couple of days.

So, LG is trying to get ahead of everyone else by sharing some juicy details about its upcoming G6 flagship now. The highlight is the 5.7-inch QHD+ display that is said to fill the front of the device "almost entirely".

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Telephones used to have a dial. Television viewers used to have to get up to change the channel. Internet connections used to run at 56 kbit/s. And, not so long ago, organizations could run their service from a single data center. Their DNS servers were placed inside it with no contingency plan. After all, if the data center went down, the DNS server was useless.

But time and technology march on, and a single data center is now the exception rather than the norm. Enterprises run multiple data centers, sometimes in multiple countries, not to mention cloud regions and highly distributed networks. Consequently, your DNS needs to be just as highly distributed as your content. What good is a disaster recovery site if you have no way to direct your users to it?

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Hyper is a very configurable open-source Electron-based terminal. On Windows it uses the regular command prompt by default, but can be tweaked to support PowerShell or whatever shell you’d prefer.

Launch the program and it just looks like a regular command prompt with a slightly different font and window style. But wait: Hyper is powered by Chromium, and some familiar Chrome-type features are just a tap or two away.

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Why pay full price for a new laptop, desktop, or PS4 bundle, when you can get one for a fraction of the cost?

Courtesy of our partners at TechBargains we have yet another selection of fantastic deals, with huge savings to tempt you. Offers include money off new laptop and desktop PCs, HDTVs, electronics and components, and much more.

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The speed of business today affects every part of the organization, and IT is no exception. That’s why traditional methods of developing and deploying software that split up the process into multiple teams and departments are being replaced by newer, more agile techniques such as DevOps. This removes silos to get people, process and tools working together to make the product delivery lifecycle faster and more predictive.

DevOps is fundamentally changing the IT landscape -- and that includes areas such as the database, which has often not been part of the traditional development model. New research that we recently carried out shows exactly how much of an impact it is having. Our global study of 1,000 organizations surveyed database professionals using SQL Server, ranging from C-level executives and IT directors/managers to database developers and administrators (DBAs). Half of them employed 500 people or more. The overall message was clear -- DevOps is becoming mainstream, and more and more people see the database as central to the process.

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Voice assistants are all the rage nowadays, with hardware like Amazon Echo becoming very popular in homes. While some people are fearful of such devices because they are always listening for commands, some consumers are willing to trade their privacy for convenience. In other words, since consumers aren't required to buy such a device, they are empowered to make that decision with their wallets.

One alternative to Amazon's solution is Google Home. The search-giant's device is essentially the same concept as Echo -- an always-listening assistant ready to serve you. Today, Google announces that its assistant-focused device is gaining a really great new feature -- shopping. Consumers can leverage their voices to buy goods -- no need to go to their laptop or smartphone.

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Whoever gets to enforce GDPR on businesses is going to have their hands full starting May next year. According to DMA, 26 percent of marketers believe their businesses are unprepared for the General Data Protection regulation, and just two thirds (68 percent) believe they will be compliant in time for the deadline, which is May 2018.

In the second edition of DMA’s "GDPR and you" series, it says that two thirds of marketers (66 percent) have "good" awareness, up from 53 percent in June last year.

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The benefits of data science are widely recognised according to a new survey, but 22 percent of users are failing to take full advantage of the data available.

The study by Continuum Analytics, the company behind the Anaconda open source data platform, surveyed 200 data science and analytics decision makers at US organizations of all sizes and industries, as well as more than 500 data scientists to uncover similarities and disparities between the two groups.

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New data released today shows that Americans are increasingly concerned about their online privacy and security, including apprehension about increased government surveillance in the new presidential administration.

The survey by secure access specialist AnchorFree of over 1,000 users of the company's Hotspot Shield personal VPN application reveals 84 percent say they are more concerned about their online privacy and security today than they were a year ago.

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We've been talking about the cloud for some years now and, while we may look back at 2016 as a year of growing enterprise cloud adoption, 2017 will be the year when hybrid clouds really enter the mainstream. Cloud is no longer "optional" for enterprises looking to remain competitive: with businesses demanding ever-greater agility from their IT functions and with data growth continuing to explode at an alarming rate, more and more IT departments are looking to move critical IT services to a combination of private and public cloud.

Research by Veritas in 2016 found that 38 percent of workloads today exist in a private cloud, with 28 percent in a public cloud. And these numbers are expected to grow at rates of seven percent and 18 percent respectively this year. Here are a few of my thoughts and on how businesses are going to transform the way they use hybrid cloud in 2017.

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