Latest Technology News

OfficeGenie.co.uk has conducted a research to see how much time people are wasting being distracted at the office, and it’s not good news. Those silly cat videos you watch on Facebook every day at work are costing the country billions of pounds. Yes, you read that correctly.

On average, British workers spend more than three quarters of an hour (more than 45 minutes every day) being distracted online. When you combine how much that costs, and how many workers there are in the UK, you come to a figure of £88 billion each year.

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Blocking adverts, both on the web and on smartphones, is becoming increasingly popular. Just today, Opera announced it would be introducing a native ad-blocker in its desktop browser.

Tomorrow, March 11, Samsung will start shipping its new Galaxy S7 and S7 edge smartphones to pre-orderers and they’ll be able to block ads while browsing the web immediately, thanks to Adblock Plus.

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Group messenger app Blend started out as a college-focused photo sharing app. Having moved into group chat it’s now looking to enter the enterprise space.

Apps for Android, iOS and web platforms were rolled out last year and the company is now releasing a Mac desktop version. This will have the same sophisticated chat features of its mobile and web predecessors, with an attractive and intuitive user interface for private group messaging.

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Unified communications are becoming increasingly critical for businesses, with 83 percent of organizations expecting the number of remote workers they have to increase in the coming year.

But findings from a new survey by Dell of professionals responsible for managing UC platforms show that 95 percent of respondents face challenges in delivering a quality UC service to their remote workers.

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Your CCTV camera might make you feel physically safer, but after reading this article, it will sure make you feel virtually vulnerable. New research from cloud-based video surveillance company Cloudview suggests that the majority of CCTV systems can be hacked, providing an open door to cyber attackers.

The report, entitled Is your CCTV system secure from cyber attack?, says there are "major vulnerabilities" in both traditional DVR-based CCTV systems, as well as cloud-based video systems. Hackers can "easily" hijack connections to the device’s IP address, putting a lot of people, their properties and data at risk.

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A majority of Global 2000 companies have areas within their networks that are not properly analyzed according to a new report.

The survey from network security company ForeScout Technologies, conducted by research firm Frost & Sullivan, says these 'blind spots' can lead to costly breaches due to unknown applications, traffic, devices and users operating insecurely on a corporate network.

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A growing number of major players in the tech industry are now in support for blocking ads. Apple offers this kind of feature in Safari on iOS, ASUS bundles AdBlock Plus on its mobile devices, while Three, a major UK carrier, blocks ads at the network level. And, as of today, Opera Software is also a member of this group.

Opera Software just announced that its desktop browser -- which is available on Windows, OS X and Linux -- will come with a built-in ad-blocker, which is a first for a major browser. The feature can be tested now in the Developer channel version of Opera and, once it is deemed ready for prime time, it will make its way to the public version of the browser.

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What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens online is yours forever. Things posted don't simply go away -- a problem many of today's youth will face in the future. However, it's also a problem people have to come to terms with right now, even when it's not online intentionally.

That's the case with sportscaster Erin Andrews, who was videotaped naked in her hotel room through the peephole of the room's door. Yes, it made for huge views and sensational news, but it also damaged a human being.

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LTE networks are growing in popularity, a new report by 4G-Reports suggests. Not only has the number of users surpassed one billion, but the number of networks also seems to be growing, while prices are declining, quite rapidly.

According to the Global LTE Pricing Tariff Tracker for Q4 2015, total number of users reached 1.05 billion. Unsurprisingly China, the US and Japan account for almost two-thirds of all subscribers.

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As the battle between iOS and Android rages on, it can be said that both operating systems are wonderful. True, Apple's offering allows more timely updates, but Google's mobile OS is available to many manufacturers for various device types. It is clear why Android is the most-used mobile operating system in the world -- it allows affordable devices, while Apple simply doesn't.

Today, Google shocks the tech world by releasing the first official Developer Preview of Android N -- the successor to the wonderful Marshmallow. It is available for many Nexus devices, and you can install it now. Google even shares a handy how-to guide below.

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You could, quite easily, pull off a McGyver on a Samsung Galaxy S6 or a Huawei Honor 7 phone. Security researchers have discovered a way to trick these two phones and unlock them through the fingerprint scanner, using an inkjet printer, a few drops of conductive ink and special paper usually used for printing electronic circuits.

Here’s what they did: they took scans of a couple of fingers, and just printed them, in two dimensions, on paper using conducive ink, which conducts a charge. They printed it on special paper used for printing electronic circuits and other charge-carrying systems. Pressing the prints against the fingerprint scanner managed to unlock the two phones.

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Speaking at the Common Cause Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference in Moscow via video link, Edward Snowden gave tech writers around the world an excuse to swear in headlines. Dismissing the FBI's claims as 'bullshit', the former NSA contractor says that Apple's involvement is not needed for the law enforcement agency to unlock the San Bernardino shooter's iPhone.

Snowden is not alone in decrying the demands being made by the FBI that Apple should create custom firmware to allow it to bypass the lock screen of the iPhone at the center of the terrorism case. He's one of a growing band of people convinced that the FBI is using the San Bernardino as a PR exercise. Apple has been criticized for being unhelpful, but more than this, the FBI is painting a picture that shows Apple as a terrorist sympathizer.

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This is a column I didn’t want to write. Like many of you I am tired of IBM stories and the company that was once an industry leader has become, at best, a poster child for how not to manage the later stages of a corporate life cycle. But because what’s happening at IBM is also happening right now at hundreds of other big technology companies makes it worth covering. So let me be clear: IBM is dying.

Last week a huge round of layoffs hit IBM just as I predicted back in January. The company is releasing as few details as possible. Nobody, for example, knows exactly how big is this layoff -- how many people are being let go? IEEE Spectrum found one source that said the number was 30 percent of the U.S. IBM workforce, a number which IBM says is too high. I also believe 30 percent is too high, especially if you confound it with retirements, contractors being axed, etc.

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Video conferencing and remote collaboration are hugely important for modern businesses. As more and more employees choose to work from home or at off-site locations, it is imperative that they can interface in a meaningful way. Conference calls and email just won't cut it.

While Microsoft's forthcoming Surface Hub looks great, let's be honest -- it will be expensive and could be a hard sell to company decision makers. Small businesses in particular could be priced-out of that hardware. Today, Microsoft announces Project Rigel -- a way to deliver a similar Skype Meeting-based experience, as shown on Surface Hub, but without the super-expensive hardware.

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The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has announced that it has found Verizon Wireless to have deliberately violated the privacy of its users.

Verizon Wireless is the largest US carrier with over 100m subscribers, but failed to disclose the practice of using supercookies in order to violate their users privacy from late 2012 until 2014, violating a 2010 FCC regulation on Internet transparency.

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