MEEM memory cable automatically backs up your phone every time you charge it

Meem thumb

While most smartphones can backup photos and other content to the cloud on a regular basis, there are downsides -- backups handled by third-party apps might not always happen, free storage can quickly become full (I’m looking at you, iCloud) and of course cloud services could be compromised.

MEEM memory cable offers a low cost solution to all of those problems -- automatically, and securely backing up your iPhone or Android device every time you charge it.

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Five tips to avoid becoming a ransomware victim

Ransomware eye

Ransomware is one of the major threats computer users now face, even though recent reports suggest that many people don't actually know what it is.

Delivered via spam or phishing emails that trick users into clicking on malicious links, ransomware renders computer systems, devices or files inaccessible and holds the victim hostage until payment is made, usually in the form of bitcoins.

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Oukitel’s K4000 gets maxed out

Oukitel K4000 max interface

When we reviewed the Oukitel K4000 Pro toughphone last month it came with a pretty standard Android UI.

Latest versions of the K4000 though will come with a new 'max' interface that puts fewer but larger icons on each screen. It also offers a bigger dial pad, so the phone should appeal to older users and to others who struggle to cope with smaller icons.

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Xiaomi unveils Mi Band 2 fitness tracker -- here's what you need to know

Xiaomi Mi Band 2

Xiaomi may be best known for its smartphones, but the company is also a major player in the wearables market. In the first quarter of the year it actually took second place, following the renowned Fitbit, thanks to shipments of 2.6 million units.

Xiaomi owes its success in the wearables market to the affordable Mi Band fitness tracker. Its latest upgrade arrived in late-2015, but even with the addition of a heart rate monitor the company managed to keep the cost under the very reasonable $30 mark. But now that the Mi Band 2 is here, what can Xiaomi bring to the table to woo even more consumers?

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Salesforce buys cloud commerce solutions provider Demandware

Cloud money

Salesforce has announced that it has agreed to purchase enterprise cloud commerce solutions provider Demandware in a $2.8 billion cash deal.

Salesforce will commence a tender offer for all outstanding shares of Demandware -- which boasts the likes of L’Oreal and Marks & Spencer as customers -- for $75.00 a share, with the transaction expected to close at the end of July 2016.

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SWIFT attacks date back more than a year

bank

We reported a few days ago on banks using the SWIFT inter-bank transfer system being hacked, resulting in $81 million being stolen from the Bangladesh Central Bank.

Now Luis Corrons, technical director of PandaLabs, has released more information on other banks affected, with attacks that stretch back more than a year.

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Auto-close unused Firefox tabs with Dustman

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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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How to delete all of the illicit recordings Google has gathered from you over the past year

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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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Expect to lose data when your SSD fails

SSD

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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Facebook launches updated emoji for Messenger with diversity in mind

facebook-diversity-emoji

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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Satechi releases Type-C USB and Standard USB-A Car Charger

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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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New API helps open-source developers 'become license-aware'

open source

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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A Google search could have prevented a Somali terrorist from working security at Dulles airport

airplane

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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Hybrid networks: The optimum approach

Hybrid Cloud

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 hands on Insider leadership baton ahead of Windows 10 Anniversary Update launch

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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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