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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

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.

Continue reading →

Google's plans to gather Street View data in India have hit a brick wall after the country rejected the company's proposals.

Indian security agencies expressed concerns about plans to send Google Street View cars around the country, taking 360-degree photos along roadways. This is certainly not the first time Google Street View has faced problems, with numerous cases relating to privacy resulting in changes being made to the service.

Continue reading →

Cyber attackers use a variety of anonymity techniques to avoid detection. Many attacks come from anonymous proxies and anonymity networks are often use valid, but compromised, credentials.

Access control specialist SecureAuth is launching a new Threat Service product to stop suspicious logins even if attackers have valid credentials and even if they are logging in from an anonymous network.

Continue reading →

One-hundred and eighty-four in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 8.x and Windows 10 in the past seven days.

Duplicate Cleaner has been selected as application of the week. It is a sophisticated duplicate files cleaner for Windows 10 that competes with desktop programs in regards to functionality.

Continue reading →