Bluetooth 5 is on the way: twice the speed, four times the range, and location-awareness
Due to be announced next week on June 16, Bluetooth 5 has a great deal to offer. Ahead of the announcement, Bluetooth Special Interest Group executive director Mark Powell has revealed a little about what we can expect.
The headline-grabbing specifications for the latest version of the wireless standard are a quadrupling of the current range, and a doubling of the current speed. Slightly less exciting is the change in naming convention which is a move to simplify the communication of major changes, but another key feature of Bluetooth 5 is support for location-aware services.
YouTube star Christina Grimmie shot and killed after concert
The world has lost many greats of late including Prince and Muhammad Ali. Now it loses one more, though perhaps a bit less known to the older generation, but that makes the story no less sad.
Christina Grimmie, who amassed fame on YouTube with over three million followers, and then went on to become a finalist on The Voice working with Adam Levine, was playing a concert last night in Orlando, Florida.
Google turns evil and backs controversial Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership (TPP)
The Trans-Pacific Trade Partnership, or TPP, is a controversial trade agreement which has been decried by many as limiting privacy and freedom of expression, as well as lacking transparency. Google has just announced that it supports TPP.
While the TPP has been signed by the Obama administration back in February, it is still to be approved by congress. In the meantime, many companies, organizations and interest groups have spoken out against it. Google admits that the TPP is not perfect, but joins the likes of Microsoft in lending its support.
Facebook threatens to delete users' photos if they don’t install the Moments app
Not content with forcing people into using its Messenger app, Facebook is continuing its aggressive tactics and driving users to install its photo-sharing app, Moments. The social network has warned users that their photos face deletion if they fail to use the Moments app.
Unsurprisingly, this has led to a huge surge in interest in the app, pushing it to the top of the download charts. Facebook has announced that it is going to delete Synced Albums and Synced Photos if Moments is not installed by July 7, sending warning emails to a number of users.
Google explains that search autocomplete censors suggestions
If you use Google as your search engine, you'll no doubt have noticed that as you type, a list of suggestions appears. This is an example of Google trying to be helpful, but the autocomplete suggestions can also be amusing or just plain weird -- thanks, algorithms! In recent days, Google has been accused of tinkering with search suggestions in a way that favors Hillary Clinton -- something the company strenuously denies.
You may have wondered how Google comes up with the suggestions it makes, and Tamar Yehoshua, VP of product management has spilled the beans. She reveals that as well as trying to be helpful to the searcher, the autocomplete algorithm also censors suggestions to discourage people from conducting "offensive or disparaging" searches about others.
Report: Amazon is on the verge of launching its own music streaming service
A report from Reuters, citing two sources close to Amazon, says that the online retail giant is about to launch a music streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify. The as-yet-unnamed service is expected to launch towards the end of summer or beginning of fall, pending negotiations with record labels.
With a rumored monthly fee of $9.95, the streaming service does nothing to compete with its rivals financially, but Amazon will still be hoping that it will help boost its Echo product. The paid-for streaming service will sit alongside the free one currently available to Amazon Prime subscribers. Amazon believes its ecosystem will help it stand out from Google Play Music, Apple Music et al.
Cisco: Internet traffic will triple by 2020
According to Cisco’s recently released annual Visual Networking Index (VNI) Complete Forecast for 2015 to 2020, global IP traffic will almost triple at a compound annual growth rate of 22 percent over the course of the next five years.
A large part of this growth in IP traffic will be caused by the one billion new users that will join the global Internet community during that time. Currently there are three billion users on the Internet but by 2020 this number will grow to 4.1 billion.
It's not just Windows 10 that has telemetry issues -- Microsoft has done the same with Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler
An eagle-eyed Reddit user has noticed that code run through Visual Studio 2015 C++ compiler make calls to Microsoft's telemetry services. Microsoft has already upset a large number of people with the privacy and telemetry issues in Windows 10, and there is now a busy thread on Reddit discussing the company's thinking behind including this 'feature'.
Coders have expressed concerns that Microsoft appears to be inserting calls to its telemetry service into binaries as they are compiled. Calls to telemetry_main_invoke_trigger and telemetry_main_return_trigger raised a few eyebrows having been found in both debug and release versions of the software. The good news -- maybe -- is that telemetry can be disabled.
Grace Digital CastDock X2 is an elegant Google Chromecast Audio speaker dock
Wireless speakers are hardly new -- there are probably more Bluetooth variants than people nowadays! If you search on a site like Amazon, you will be hit with a deluge of these speakers, many from no-name companies, and at rock-bottom prices. Many of them are terrible, offering both poor sound and build quality.
To stand out among these wireless speakers is hard, but Grace Digital has managed to do just that, with its all-new CastDock X2. Rather than use Bluetooth, it leverages Google's Chromecast Audio dongle, making it a Wi-Fi speaker.
Many UK workers don't know what ransomware is
It seems all that talk by security experts how employee education is the best way to protect a business from a cyber-attack has fallen on deaf ears.
A new study by ISACA, based on a poll of 2,000 UK consumers, says that more than half of those haven’t gotten any cyber-security awareness training, at all.
How to remove location data from your photos
Saving the location in photos you take with your smartphone, tablet or camera is a good idea if you want to keep track of where you've captured those moments. Some services, like Google Photos, will do that for you automatically, showing a history of places you've been based on their coordinates. However, when it comes time to share your photos online, you may want to remove the location data.
The location data, alongside other types of identifiable information, will also be shared alongside them, potentially exposing you and your loved ones to all sorts of complications as a result. Fortunately, you can remove the location data from your photos. Here is how you can do that.
First batch of Chromebooks reach End Of Life and get no more support or updates
The original Chromebooks launched back in 2011 are reaching the end of their support cycle. With Google offering a fairly generous five years (*) of support and updates, users have had a good run, but the Samsung Series 5 Chromebook is the first device to drop off the support list.
Having been launched in August 2011, Acer AC700 Chromebook will be in a similar position in a couple of months. But it's not entirely clear what will happen. Google says that after five years, automatic updates are "no longer guaranteed", but the company has continued to provide updates for its own devices that originate from 2010.
Collective defense helps security professionals collaborate against cyber crime
To be effective in fighting cyber crime it's important that businesses are able to share intelligence effectively.
Endpoint security company Carbon Black is enabling this with its new Detection eXchange, a collective defense ecosystem which will enable thousands of security professionals to collaborate against hackers and prevent cyber attacks.
Run DOS programs on Windows with MS-DOS Player
Windows hasn’t been able to run old DOS programs for a very long time. Double-click and you’re simply told "this app can’t run on your PC". MS-DOS Player for Win32-x64 is a tiny DOS emulator which enables running simple commands and programs (not full games) with the absolute minimum of hassle.
MS-DOS Player arrives with 8 binaries, each one emulating a separate processor and supporting 32, 64 or both types of Windows. If you don’t know which you need, just head straight for the i86_x86 folder where you’ll find a single msdos.exe file.
Three in four apps do not meet GDPR requirements
Using cloud apps in a business environment, be it Shadow IT or not, is going to be risky business in a couple of years, as a vast majority of today’s widely used apps do not comply with the upcoming rules and regulations of the EU GDPR.
GDPR, or general data protection regulation, is a EU-crafted document aimed at regulating the corporate use of data, and how businesses must act in order to ensure maximum safety of customer data used, as well as privacy. It will come into force in less than two years.
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