Video conferencing increases productivity
Video collaboration increases productivity and improves both business and personal relationships, according to video conferencing technology company Lifesize.
The company polled its users and says that 99.2 percent of respondents find video conferencing boosts relationships both in and out of the office. No word on how many people were polled, though.
Oracle will pay HP $3 billion over Itanium server software
Oracle has been ordered to pay HP $3 billion after losing a lawsuit with the company regarding the software development for its Itanium servers.
During the lawsuit, HP claimed that Oracle had violated a contract by continuing to develop support software for its Itanium chip. The trial ran for one month in a California state court in San Jose ending with HP being granted the original amount it claimed at the beginning of the case.
UK government websites will default to HTTPS
Starting October 1, all government digital services (GDS) websites will be required to use HTTPS encryption, according to new security guidelines.
All services will additionally have to publish a domain-based message authentication, reporting & conformance (DMARC) policy that will be applicable to their email systems.
Office workers find printers more important than PCs
If you’d asked me what the most used item in the office is, I’d probably tell you the watercooler. But, according to new research, the most important one is the printer.
Yes, the printer is more important than the computer. Or the pen. Or the stapler.
Icaros 3.0 extends and speeds up Windows Explorer thumbnailing
Icaros is a free FFmpeg-powered tool which extends Windows Explorer’s thumbnail support to just about any video format. The package can produce cover art thumbnails for Mkv, Flac, Ape, and Mpc files, and provides extended Windows Explorer properties for Mkv, Flv, Ogm, Ogv, Ogg, Flac, Ape, and Mpc.
Icaros was updated last month with the addition of its own cache, speeding up thumbnail display and ensuring you won’t be affected if Explorer deletes its own cache.
China bans the use of social media as a news source
Continuing its control of the internet, China has announced that news outlets may not use social media as a source of news -- at least not without official approval.
The Cyberspace Administration of China says that the move is part of a campaign to prevent the spread of rumors and fake stories, but most people will see it as the government continuing to flex its online muscles.
Katy Perry is the queen of Twitter -- first person to hit 90 million followers
Katy Perry is one of my favorite pop artists. Why? Longevity. Many such singers have very short shelf lives. Having just one hit song is rarified air, but Perry keeps them coming. Her long string of hits is quite remarkable, actually.
Not only is she wildly popular with music sales and YouTube views, but social media too. You see, Katy Perry is the first ever person to achieve 90 million Twitter followers. In other words, her Tweets can reach more people than the entire population of the UK!
More than half of Android phones are vulnerable to encryption bypass
A newly revealed vulnerability on Android phones is able to bypass the full disk encryption on over half of devices.
The attack, demonstrated by Israeli security researcher Gal Beniamini, can allow an attacker to break through the levels of trust and privileges that are intended to ensure only legitimate code can access secret material, such as DRM keys or disk encryption keys.
Straighten text in scanned documents with Deskew
Deskew is an open source package which can detect skewed text in scanned text documents, and output a straightened version. It’s a command line tool, which is, well, inconvenient, but don’t let that put you off entirely -- it’s still probably easier than you’d expect.
The program doesn’t force you to install Tesseract or any other bulky components, for instance. The single 4MB includes Windows, OS X and Linux binaries and you can run any of them right away.
Apple iOS 10 playing catch-up with Android
Apple held its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on June 13 in San Francisco, where Tim Cook and his team announced a wide array of new features and functionality across Apple platforms, including a major update to iOS, the renaming of mac OS X to macOS (the new version will be named Sierra) and updates to watchOS, and tvOS were also announced.
After reading about it though, I can’t help but think that we already have a lot of the features talked about in a number of Android devices and personally feel that Apple is merely playing catch-up to Android. That said, I will leave you to make up your own mind.
Syncplify Notepad! is a polished plain text editor
Notepad! is a nicely balanced Notepad replacement, accessible to just about everyone but with plenty of bonus extra features when you need them.
The interface is an immediate plus, its Office-like ribbon organising the program’s main features across three tabs.
Apple should buy Tidal
As a Tidal subscriber, I welcome Apple acquisition—assuming lossless tracks are made available through the fruit-logo company's music services. Not that anyone should seriously believe the rumors. But one can hope.
Merger talks are typically silent affairs. When they're serious, you don't hear about them until there is a deal. Reasons are many, with regulatory being among them when public companies are involved. Acquisition rumors often mean something else: Principal party leaks information about preliminary or ongoing discussions to gauge customer and shareholder reaction; one side or the other is dissatisfied with progress/terms and seeks to apply pressure.
Facebook hits back at Israeli complaints about sabotaging police work
Facebook has responded to complaints from Israel's Minister of Internal Security saying that it does remove abusive content from the site. On Saturday, Israeli cabinet minister Gilad Erdan referred to Facebook as a 'monster' adding that it "does not cooperate" with requests from the police.
Tensions between Palestine and Israel have seen an increase in posts inciting violence and terrorism. While Erdan accuses Facebook of failing to step in as well as "set[ting] a very high bar for removing inciteful content", the social network says it work closely with numerous countries, including Israel, to stem the flow of hate speech.
Google Play now allows app and game sharing with new Family Library feature
Earlier this year Google announced that Family Library -- previously only available in Google Play Music -- was making its way to the Play Store. Now the rollout is underway, meaning that it is now possible to share your purchased apps and games with members of your family.
This new feature means that a family need only buy one copy of an app rather than several if they all want to use it. It also means that there is no longer a need to create a shared 'family account' through which to download apps and games that need to be shared.
Google adds a native Cast option to Chrome on the desktop
If you've been using a browser extension to add a casting option to Chrome, you could think about uninstalling it. Google is currently rolling out an update to the desktop version of its web browser.
The feature is making its way to Chrome 51 and can be accessed by right clicking either an open tab or the browser's hamburger menu. Should you ditch the extension, though? It really depends on your needs...
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