Latest Technology News

If you spend a lot of time on social networks like Facebook and Twitter, you probably thought Hillary Clinton was a shoo-in for president, and that Donald Trump had next to no chance of beating her.

As my colleague Ian Barker explains, social networks can create something of a bubble, that pops when the real world intrudes, as it did in both Brexit and the US election.

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As companies move more of their data to the cloud it's not surprising that they’re turning to encryption in order to keep their data safe.

But if you're using a third-party cloud provider, who owns and controls the keys to your encrypted data? Rui Biscaia, director of product management at data classification specialist Watchful Software believes it's vital for companies to know.

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Information technology infrastructure is made up of many components, servers, storage, networking hardware, systems management software, and more. This can lead to a complex system being built up of components from several different suppliers.

What converged infrastructure does is to bring together all of these things into a single, integrated package. For businesses this means that they can centralize the management of all their IT resources with a view to increasing use and cutting costs. Converged infrastructure is often associated with the cloud and outsourcing, but it can work just as well applied internally within large organizations too.

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It’s fair to say, yesterday’s US election result sent shockwaves around the world. Donald Trump was seen as an outside bet by many people, but now he’s won the race for the White House, the big question, is what will his victory mean for the people, both at home and abroad?

Former NSA contractor turned whistleblower Edward Snowden has a lot to say on government matters, and today in a live Q&A he’ll be opining on how the US election results could affect your privacy, as well as any potential pardon for himself, and answering questions submitted via social media.

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A new report from Kaspersky Lab reveals that its products blocked 73,066,751 attempts to attack users with malicious attachments during the third quarter of this year.

This represents the largest amount of malicious spam since the beginning of 2014 and is a 37 percent increase compared to the previous quarter. The majority of the blocked attachments were ransomware trojan downloaders.

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Microsoft has kept its promise and delivered a vulnerability patch for its Windows operating system, for a flaw, revealed by Google, which allowed attackers to gain full control of a targeted system.

Releasing the details in a security bulletin, Microsoft says the flaw in the Windows kernel "could allow elevation of privilege if an attack logs onto an affected system and runs a specially crafted application that could exploit the vulnerabilities".

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How could Donald Trump be elected president? Judging by Facebook and Twitter a lot of people are asking that question this week. The same thing happened in the UK back in June when many people struggled to understand how the country could have voted for Brexit.

When everyone you're friends with online reinforces your world view it's easy to convince yourself that most of the world thinks as you do. It comes as a bit of an awakening therefore to discover it isn't the case and that -- shock! -- there may be people who vote that aren't even on social media at all.

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The world is still reeling from the outcome of the US elections, where Donald Trump came out on top against Hillary Clinton to become the 45th President of America.

Financial markets around the world have been affected by the shocking and unexpected news and the notoriously unpredictable digital currency Bitcoin is no exception, with prices close to hitting a 35-month high against the pound amidst investor uncertainty.

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Many people use Google Chrome, and rightfully so. The cross-platform web browser works brilliantly, and is super-fast. Plus, the search-giant's browser is very secure too, right? Not so fast...

Today, Sophos drops a bombshell by revealing that scammers are actively targeting Chrome users by leveraging a bug. These bad guys pose as Microsoft tech support and display an in-browser message that says the user's computer is infected with "Virus Trojan.worm! 055BCCAC9FEC". To make matters worse, Google has apparently known about the exploit for more than two years and simply failed to patch it.

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Google today launches a revamped version of its Safe Browsing site, bringing a number of tools and services under one roof. The tag line for the site is "Making the world's information safely accessible," and Google makes much of fact that it now keeps more than two billion devices safe online -- desktop and Android, as well as devices running Google tools such as Chrome and Gmail.

One of the main purposes of the site is to make it easier for people to report malicious sites they encounter, so other internet users can be warned and protected. But the updated site is also home to additional information from Google, such as its Transparency Reports and company policies.

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Facebook, like Google, is all about the ads. Not content with filling newsfeeds with advertising, Facebook Messenger -- already something of a privacy nightmare -- is about to become home to 'sponsored messages'. Ads by another name.

The new ad formats follow on from newsfeed data designed to direct Facebook users to Messenger, and from there the idea is to drive brand awareness and increase sales. But as with other advertising on Facebook, ads are targeted, meaning there is more than a slight degree of concern when it comes to privacy.

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We’ve already started to see the beginnings of the next big version of Windows 10 appearing in new builds for Windows Insiders. Termed the Creators Update it has a heavy focus on 3D, but there’s more to it than just that.

The previous new Insider Build, released last week, didn’t have much in terms of new features on show, but the latest offering, Build 14965, is thankfully much more exciting.

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Connectivity is vital for all businesses. Whether you need to communicate with customers, clients or employees, or simply rely on it to deliver your service, the importance of connectivity cannot be overstated.

What’s more, this importance is clearly growing. In the always-on, cloud-based, mobile-first digital world that we inhabit, enterprise connectivity is not merely desirable -- it is expected at all times.

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Google has announced that Map Maker -- the tool which can be used to make and suggest changes to Google Maps -- is to close down.

The closure is scheduled for March 2017, and Google says that the editing features will be gradually integrated into Google Maps itself as part of a streamlining process. It's not clear just how long it will take for all of the editing features to roll out to Google Maps, but some features will be missing for a while, if not permanently.

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Providing an open source platform for cloud computing, OpenStack allows the use of multi-vendor commodity hardware in a data center to process and store data, and deliver networking resources. It’s managed through a dashboard or an API and is used by many major companies around the world to manage their IT infrastructure.

OpenStack grew out of a joint project between NASA and Rackspace Hosting and launched in 2010. It’s currently managed by the not-for-profit OpenStack Foundation created in 2012. More than 500 companies are now members of the OpenStack project. OpenStack has a six-month release cycle with each release planned at a design summit. The software is modular with components focusing on different services.

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