Latest Technology News

Here's the deal, folks; I eat meat. Cows, fish, chickens, lamb -- I do not discriminate. With that said, me having to kill these poor creatures would break my heart. Does it make me a hypocrite that I can eat something, while simultaneously caring for it? Probably. Unless my life depended on it, however, I could never hunt. That is not an attack on hunters -- if you eat what you kill, more power to you.

While I understand the need to hunt for food, I do frown on enjoying the kill. So I am a bit upset by the Bracketron Xventure hunting mounts. These products let you mount an iPhone or other camera on your rifle or bow so you can record video of your kill. Why does this upset me? Well, I struggle to understand someone actually wanting to replay and relive the memory of taking an animal's life. Am I off-base here?

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Xiaomi is entering the laptop market with a device that looks to carry on the company tradition of delivering high specs at low cost.

The model has not yet been named, but is available for pre-order via Chinese retailer Banggood for £490.50.

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Hey, bro -- ready to do some extreme sports? Yeah, me too. I'm about to do some naked skydiving and then surf during a hurricane. Of course, I will capture all of my gnarly adventures with my camera, so I can show-off how extreme my life is on social media, bro.

Obviously, I am joking, dear BetaNews readers. As you know by now, the most extreme I get is getting a venti blonde roast from Starbucks rather than a tall. Still, despite my boring life, I like rugged technology. This is especially true when it comes to backing up files. My family photos are precious to me -- the more durable the storage drive, the better. Today, Sandisk announces such a hardcore external drive -- the Extreme 510 Portable SSD.

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There’s no shortage of VR products available to buy, but the daddy of them all is unquestionably Oculus Rift. Unlike some rivals, this isn’t just a device you slap a smartphone in and strap to your face, it’s a full blown VR system with a sensor for tracking head position, and an input device that’s been built specially for navigating VR worlds.

The Rift has just gone up for pre-order now, and Oculus will start shipping it from March 28. It will be available in 20 countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan. The full list of supported territories is here. It will also be available through select retailers from April.

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Fitbit's stock has taken a dive after the company announced a smartwatch at CES 2016, sending shares from $30.21 at the stock market's opening yesterday, to just $23.73 at the time of writing this article. It would seem that investors were not too keen on Fitbit going after the likes of Apple Watch with its upcoming Blaze.

Fitbit is focused on fitness trackers, and is actually the largest vendor in the wearables market, having shipped 4.7 million units in Q3 2015. The smartwatch market is dominated by Apple Watch; although there are no official sales numbers, IDC says that Apple sold 3.9 million units in the same time frame.

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Using the web can mean selling your soul to the devil. Or Google. (Which you may well regard as the same thing.) With the increased interest in privacy there is a new market for tools and services that help to protect users. Catering to web users who are concerned about how Google might use search data, Oscobo is a new search engine that promises not to track users.

Founded on the belief that "personal data should remain just that -- personal", Oscobo is a UK-based company that says it won't store any data about its users, let alone share it with anyone else. With the controversy surrounding the snooper's charter, it makes sense that the privacy-focused search engine should start life in the UK, but there are plans to expand further afield to provide tailored results for people around the world.

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Apple's stock has taken a huge hit in the past couple of months, with shares now trading close to the $100 mark. Investors seem to be overly concerned with the iPhone's performance in the last quarter of 2015, after analysts have delivered mixed sales estimates, and a so-called report of a 30 percent production cut for the first quarter of 2016 is only making things worse.

So, unsurprisingly, Apple is looking to reassure investors that it's in good financial health, revealing today a "record-breaking holiday season for the App Store". Is this the company's way of suggesting that hardware sales have actually been strong during the holiday season?

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Blackphone is marketed as the most secure Android phone available so it's bad news that researchers at endpoint protection specialist SentinelOne have uncovered a vulnerability in the Blackphone One that would allow some of the phone’s protection features to be bypassed.

The vulnerability means that apps could be installed without asking for permissions, so they could access features and information on the phone without the user’s knowledge.

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Most consumers are oblivious to the existence of virtual reality headsets. Part of the problem is that, even though some companies have announced VR devices and there has been lots of talk surrounding them, only a few of them are actually available for consumers to buy.

HTC is now adding its new Vive Pre to that list. The company's second-generation VR headset, which it just announced at CES 2016, will be made available to the public this April.

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All good things must come to an end. But the same can be said about bad things, and many people will be pleased to hear the death knell sound for Internet Explorer 8, 9, and 10. While Microsoft may be keen for people to use Edge or -- if they must -- Internet Explorer 11, not everyone feels the same.

With the likes of Firefox, Opera, and Chrome available, it might seem like madness that anyone would like to stick with an ancient version of Internet Explorer instead, but choice is everything. A patch that is due to be delivered to Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, and Internet Explorer 10 in the coming day will introduce a nag screen that will pester users into upgrading. If you're happy with your decision to stick with an older version of IE, here's a hack to banish the pestering.

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If you don’t use it regularly, the Caps Lock key can be a real nuisance, just a way to introduce cASE eRRORs if you accidentally hit it while typing.

SmartCapsLock provides a simple solution -- just select the messed-up text, hit Caps Lock again and its case is immediately reversed.

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Ultra HD is the latest technology in televisions after the failure of 3D to get traction. Different manufacturers are using varying operating systems to power the sets and make them smart TVs. Roku is getting a foothold in this market and Opera is used quite a bit. Mozilla is in the game also.

Panasonic, one of the more popular television OEMs, is announcing that Firefox OS will power its new UHD offerings. This isn't entirely new as Panasonic has previously used the platform on some of its sets available around the world.

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In less than a week, Microsoft will only offer support for Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge. As of Tuesday 12 January, Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 will die. The aging browsers will receive one more update, and then will be consigned to the trash.

Tuesday is the day that older versions of IE reach the end of their support cycles, and Microsoft is keen for everyone to move to either Microsoft Edge or -- for the diehards -- Internet Explorer 11. If you have not already made the switch (or jumped to Chrome or Firefox), one more patch, KB3123303, will pester you into upgrading.

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You might already know that the number of mobile-connected devices has already exceeded the world’s population, and in order to survive, businesses will need to respond.

Smart, connected devices can improve your business efficiency while reducing operational costs. In order to take advantage of these systems, it is important to know what they are, their benefits, and some of the best options to use within your organization.

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S.M.A.R.T. which stands for Self-Monitoring Analysis and Reporting Technology is a fantastic tool for anticipating hardware errors on hard disk drives. The utility can test for bad sectors and some software can even test for temperature, core speed and system fan speed anomalies. When S.M.A.R.T. software indicates an imminent hard drive failure, the user is notified so that data can be backed up and data loss avoided. Diagnostic programs are widely used on mechanical hard disk drives and RAID, but how reliable are they on solid state drives SSDs?

Checks include electrical and mechanical performance and read/write error rates. Electrical tests include RAM and read/write circuitry. Mechanical tests seek servo information on data tracks, scanning for bad sectors across the entire disk surface. However solid state drives are constructed very differently, although flash media does develop errors over time -- normally bad flash blocks in the NAND memory chips. Just like traditional hard disk drives, the controller manages these bad blocks and re-maps them to ‘extra’ blocks. Eventually the drive will run out of ‘extra’ blocks and S.M.A.R.T. is quick to identify this.

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