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I worked in sales for some years and one of the first things you are taught is the art of the alternative close. That’s where the sales person offers someone a choice of two options, neither of which leads to "no". Here’s an example: "When is a good time to start your Windows 10 upgrade? At a preset date and time, or now?"

Microsoft’s increasingly aggressive tactics to get people to upgrade to Windows 10 are now legendary. The last trick the company pulled was to reverse the meaning of clicking the X on the nag screen. Instead of meaning, "go away and stop bothering me" it now means "yes, I want the upgrade". Or rather it did. For, according to The Register, Microsoft has now removed the X, leaving Windows 7 or 8.1 users with the choice of picking a date for an upgrade, or upgrading now. There’s no close button, no cancel option. Just reschedule or upgrade immediately.

Microsoft might have dropped support for Windows XP over two years ago, but the operating system remains hugely popular. According to the latest usage figures from NetMarketShare, it still has over 10 percent of the market.

There are numerous reasons why people might still opt to use the ancient OS, including the simplest of all -- because they like it, and it works for them -- but time has moved on considerably since XP first arrived in 2001, and the OS is missing a lot of features. Don’t worry though, you can bring XP up to date quickly and easily.

During the IOActive IOAsis event in San Francisco, security professionals were asked on their opinion on the state of security among Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and the results are not encouraging.

According to the IOActive Internet of Things Security Survey, based on this poll, almost half (47 percent) of respondents felt less than 10 percent of IoT devices have appropriate security measures. Almost nine out of ten (85 percent) believe less than half of IoT devices are secure.

When I think of horseback riding, my mind drifts to simpler times. It also conjures thoughts of cowboys, farming, and the Amish. Since the invention of motorized vehicles, equestrian travel just seems a bit old fashioned.

With all of that said, there is an apparent need to bring technology to horseback riding. How, you ask? With the Hoofbeatz Audio 'i Rock N Ride' Bluetooth speaker, currently on Kickstarter. You can now listen to music and answer telephone calls from the convenience of your saddle!

Apple Pay may be doing well in the US, but a new report from Reuters suggests that Apple’s mobile contactless payment service has not seen the same success rate outside of its home territory.

The service became available for US consumers in October 2014 and has since gained a great deal of traction and users in its home country. Outside of the US, Apple Pay is currently available in the UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and China. However in these countries technical issues, resistance from banks, and consumer indifference have plagued the service from the start.

As a system builder, I am constantly trawling the web for good deals on components. I am a fairly cost-conscious person; spending  $1700 on any processor is not something I would ever do -- value is what I target. Actually, this weekend I will be doing a budget build with an AMD Athlon X4 845 which sells for less than $70, but I digress.

Patriot is a company that makes excellent memory-based products, like RAM, flash drives, and SSDs to name a few. While its offerings are usually priced competitively, its newest product takes affordability to a new level. The all-new Spark SSD will be available in a 512GB capacity for a super-low $105!

Samsung Pay is nearly nine months old at this point yet it is only available in a handful of markets across the globe. That does not include Europe, though Samsung earlier this year announced that it would bring its mobile payments service to more countries in 2016.

The company is keeping its promise, as, after launching Samsung Pay in South Korea, US and China, it is now introducing the service in the first European market -- Spain. Here is what you need to know.

The football season hasn't begun and training camp isn't even here yet. All we've seen so far is OTAs which just give a small glimpse of what to expect. But the NFL is never far from the news cycle, and now that news involves compromised data from a laptop.

The incident occurred back on April 19th, but the league is just now getting around to making this public. The laptop was stolen from a Washington Redskins trainer's car and contained personal data about players.

There have been significantly more data breaches this year, compared to the year before, new figures from Egress Software Technologies suggest.

The company cross-checked data from security breaches in the past three years and says that 66 percent of the business sectors surveyed reported an increase in data breach occurrences. It would have been even higher if healthcare organizations haven’t had "just" a 13 percent increase.

Over the past few years Inateck has made a name for itself with good value audio kit including headsets and Bluetooth speakers.

Its latest offerings are in the closely-contested earphone market, so how well do they measure up to more established players?

Windows 10’s Start menu offers live tiles that update every few seconds or so to display information like the latest news headlines and weather, and also a changing slideshow of photos.

Live tiles are viewed by many as a bit odd, because unless you switch to tablet mode, you only ever see them when you open the Start menu, and the menu has to stay open so you can watch the tiles update. Fortunately, if have no need for such things, this feature is easily disabled.

Leveraging on possible opportunities on identity systems, Microsoft is looking into building a blockchain-based identity system and it has recently sealed a partnership to further this goal.

The tech giant has made an open source collaboration with companies Blockstack Labs and ConsenSys for their current Bitcoin and Ethereum-based identity solutions, together with various developers globally.

One-hundred and eighty-three 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.

This week has seen the release of several exciting new applications and games for the Windows platform, as well as updates for existing apps such as Viber, Forza Motosport 6 and Dailymotion.

A more and more mobile workforce is leaving US businesses vulnerable to increased risk of data breaches and theft of information.

This is highlighted in a survey of executives and small business owners by secure data destruction company Shred-It.

If you’ve ever tried creating animated GIFs, you’ll have noticed that they can get very large, especially when using complex sources like TV footage. That’s no great surprise -- the format was designed for simple animations, not full color video -- but GIF Optimizer Free may help you shrink your file sizes.

Setup is easy, because there’s no installation required -- just unzip the download and run gifoptimizer.exe.