Latest Technology News

You can resize Firefox tabs, group them, send them to another window, but it won’t make any difference: there’s never quite enough tab space to go around. Dustman is a free Firefox extension which helps out by automatically closing tabs which haven’t been used in the last 20 minutes.

That could be potentially risky, but as with the similar Tab Wrangler for Chrome, the developer has used several tricks to reduce the chance of problems.

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One of the concerns -- for those focused on privacy, at least -- with the likes of Siri, Cortana and 'OK, Google' is that the way these features works means they are constantly listening to what you say. In the case of Google, these recordings are stored in the cloud for the company to use to improve the service.

But voice recognition is an art rather than a science, and your phone is not always able to distinguish between commands you direct at it and ordinary conversation. As such, Google may well have recorded audio of you going about your day to day business. The good news, however, is that you can review these recordings and delete any of them -- or all of them if you want.

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As more people are switching from HDDs (hard disk drives) to SSDs (solid state drives), more data loss is occurring, a new report by Kroll Ontrack suggests.

SSD disks might be solid in their state, but don’t seem to be more reliable than HDD disks. Still, it doesn’t stop their popularity growth. Out of 2,000 global respondents to the Kroll Ontrack survey, 92 percent are using SSD technology, with more than a third (38 percent) having experienced an SSD failure. Of those failed disks, almost a quarter (23 percent) lost data.

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Tech companies are falling over themselves to embrace diversity both in the workplace, and in products. The latest example of this comes courtesy of Facebook which today releases an update to Messenger complete with hundreds of diversity-friendly emoji.

As well as bringing in the full (well, fuller) gamut of skin tones, the new emoji also nod to gender equality, as well as including redheads for the first time. On top of all this, Facebook is also standardizing its emoji set so the same selection is available to everyone, regardless of the platform they might be using.

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As an iPhone owner, I enjoy driving along in my car and listening to Apple Music. If my smartphone battery starts to drain, I don't panic -- I just grab my Lightning cable car charger and top off the juice. Where some people run into problems, however, is when they have someone else in their car. If their car only has one cigarette lighter, they cannot simultaneously leverage an additional charger for additional devices.

Luckily, I own a brilliant multi-port car charger from VisionTek -- that I highly recommend -- allowing me to share the single port with others. Unfortunately, that charger does not offer USB Type-C, the popular standard of the moment. If you need a charger that offers both Type-A and Type-C, Satechi now has you covered. The company's svelte offering can handle both connector types simultaneously, while taking up very little real estate in your car.

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The Open Source Initiative (OSI), the steward of the Open Source Definition (OSD), announced today it has created a machine readable publication of OSI approved licenses.

According to the organization, the API will allow third parties to "become license-aware", giving businesses everywhere the means to determine if a license is open source or not.

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Airport security has been a big deal since the September 11, 2001 attacks that took down the World Trade Centers and damaged the Pentagon. But it's often criticized as being a facade of security and not real protection.

How bad is it? A recent investigation uncovered a Somali colonel working as a security guard at Dulles airport right outside the US capitol.

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A growing number of organizations are moving to hybrid networks as a means of meeting their business and technical needs. Hybrid networks let companies connect a variety of locations from large offices and data centers to branch offices and remote workers. And the ability to select the service and performance levels needed by various business activities and enterprise applications make for an agile enterprise.

Your network is the central nervous system of your business. Traditional networking solutions are rigid, hard to manage, and lack visibility and control. Pure "over the top" solutions that make exclusive use of the internet certainly make life easier, but the performance required for business critical applications can’t be guaranteed. Getting it right "most of the time" isn’t an option. The market for hybrid network services is growing rapidly, which is being driven by and large by the increase in enterprise bandwidth consumption -- growing by 30 percent a year, according to Gartner’s market research. This is due to the increase in the number of devices connecting to corporate networks, the types of business critical applications and the increasing use of video communications.

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Gabe Aul, long the face of the Windows Insider Program, is standing down from that particular leadership role to focus instead on his work at Engineering Systems Team in WDG. 18 months, 35 desktop builds and 22 mobile builds down the road, Aul has realized he's unable to give 100 percent to both roles.

The new head of the Insider program is Dona Sarkar who has been with Microsoft since the days of Vista. Having worked on Windows 7, 8, 8.1 and 10, as well as HoloLens, the Windows Insider Program leadership role is one she says she has been "waiting for this job for 11 years" to get. With Windows 10 Anniversary Update due to launch in just a few weeks, she's being thrown in at the deep end.

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Even though the cloud is all the rage nowadays, flash drives are still pretty useful. If you need to install a Windows 10 or Ubuntu ISO, for instance, the little USB drives are much faster than optical media. Not to mention, with USB Type-C, flash drives can be easily mounted on both desktop and mobile operating systems -- depending on ports, of course.

Today, SanDisk releases the Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C flash drive. The retractable Type-C drive also offers a Type-A connector, making it future-proof while also supporting older devices. Although not the first drive to offer dual connectors, it is certainly one of the more elegant options.

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Microsoft is opening its HoloLens to a range of partners, the company announced at Computex today. This means that future VR headsets based on the HoloLens platform will come from a variety of manufacturers, and will be available in different forms, taking full advantage of Windows 10 Anniversary Update.

With a price tag of $3,000, the existing official HoloLens headset is out of the reach of many people, but in opening up the platform to partners, Microsoft says that cheaper price points should also be available. The company is also doing something interesting. One of the criticisms levelled at HoloLens is its limited field of vision. Partners will be able to build devices with wider fields of vision meaning that the official HoloLens will almost certainly not be the best.

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At this year’s Computex show in Taiwan, Intel announced that it is adding new chips to its Xeon E3 1500 line of server processors to help service providers handle the massive amounts of online video-related traffic created by the "visual cloud".

Webcasts, video-conferencing, digital TV broadcasts, cloud gaming, video transcoding and even the delivery of remote workstations all make up what the company and other chipmakers have begun to refer to as the visual cloud. The new chips that Intel is adding to its Xeon E3-1500 line have been created with extra capabilities that aid in accelerating video and multimedia workloads.

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Security firm Trustwave has discovered a zero-day exploit for Windows for sale on an underground Russian hacking forum. A user going by the name BuggiCorp says the vulnerability affects all versions of Microsoft's operating system, from Windows XP and 2000 upwards, including both 32- and 64-bit versions.

The source code for the exploit is offered for upwards of $90,000, and the seller explains that it can be used to elevate the privileges of any software process to SYSTEM level -- the highest there is. Payment is requested in Bitcoin, but while the exploit is considered serious, experts suggest that the asking price is a little high.

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Cyber crime is big business and that means the people behind it face many of the same challenges as legitimate organizations.

This includes operational security (OPSEC), a key tactic used by commercial and military organizations to protect privacy and anonymity. Research from cyber situational awareness specialist Digital Shadows reveals that criminals are using OPSEC as a means to an end -- avoiding detection, maintaining availability of their attack infrastructure, and retaining access to environments they have compromised.

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Businesses whose revenue come from mobile ads will seriously have to consider an alternative, because news just came in about a significant rise in mobile ad blocking usage.

According to a new report by PageFair, a start-up helping publishers get around ad blockers, and mobile app tracking company Priori Data, there has been a 90 percent rise in mobile ad blocking usage, compared to the same period last year.

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