I don’t use the Windows Calculator very often, but occasionally I need to work something out and so fire it up. Today, upon opening the calculator, I was presented with a message asking me to rate the app in the Windows Store. If I was enjoying it. Which of course I wasn’t. It is a calculator after all, and the only time I’ve ever enjoyed using one of those was as a teenager when I typed in "5318008" and turned it upside down. Even the enjoyment of doing that was very short lived.

Now, the Windows 10 calculator begging for user ratings in the Windows Store isn’t a new phenomenon. A thread on Reddit discussed this some months ago, but this is the first time I’ve experienced it for myself, and obviously three months after it was first flagged as a nuisance, it’s still going on. Seriously who at Microsoft thought this was a good idea?

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The results of a new survey show that many organizations continue to demonstrate a complacent, lax attitude toward backups, leaving them vulnerable to evolving threats.

The study from cloud-based backup provider CloudBerry Lab finds that almost half of respondents (49 percent) have only one copy of their business data, which could cause major operational disruption in the event that data becomes inaccessible.

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Yes, the Internet of Things, commonly called the IoT, has been steadily growing and increasingly hard to ignore. It's not all bad, though. In fact, it's great when it works and when it isn't being hacked. Security is obviously the number one concern. Nobody wants a hacker turning off lights, or worse.

Now Dell is teaming up with a number of companies for what it calls its "IoT Partner Solutions Program". Those involved, at least initially, are GE, Microsoft, OSIsoft, PTC, SAP and Software AG.

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Remote access Trojans (RATs) have been used for many years to allow attackers to gain access to and take control of user’s systems.

Usually RATs are delivered when a user opens an email attachment or downloads a file from a website or peer-to-peer network. This involves direct delivery of the payload which makes detection easier.

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Windows 10 brought a host of overdue command line improvements -- like selection, resize and copy/ paste tools which actually work as you expect -- but there’s plenty of scope for more.

Terminal Wings extends the console further with Chrome-style tabs, new color and wallpaper options, transparency settings, "minimize to tray", and more.

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Large hospitals often have thousands of workstations used by multiple employees to access confidential patient data, so securing them can be a major challenge.

Endpoint security specialist Duo Security has compared its customers in healthcare with those in other industries to determine how the sector differs in its security requirements.

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Adults in the UK are turning to online learning platforms in order to stay competitive in their fields and to learn new skills, despite their increasingly busy schedules.

Coursera, which offers online courses from some of the top universities worldwide, has noticed that the number of new users registering for its educational platform has increased by 50 percent over the course of the past 12 months.

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Facebook Messenger is one of the most popular messaging services today, boasting over 900 million monthly active users. However, since competition in this market is increasingly fierce, to maintain momentum the social network has to keep improving its service.

Earlier this month, at its F8 developer conference, Facebook announced support for chat bots with the purpose of enabling businesses to deliver better customer support, and now it is rolling out group calling to Messenger users across the globe.

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The modern internet user is somewhat paradoxical -- looking to be more connected and contactable than ever before, whilst simultaneously seeking privacy. Can the two ideas live side by side? It's a tricky balancing act, but many people turn to VPN tools to increase their security and privacy online.

Opera is the first web browser to bundle a free VPN tool as standard (with unlimited VPN data, no less), and it's hard to imagine that the competition won’t follow suit. Nothing has yet been announced, but the appearance of versions of Chrome or Firefox with integrated VPN would hardly be a surprise -- or would it? And how would you feel about a VPN tool supplied by Google?

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Not everyone wants or can afford a premium smartphone and Chinese makers have been busy carving out a niche at the lower end of the market with a whole raft of models that provide smartphone features at dumbphone prices.

Launching next week the Oukitel C3 is the latest entry into an increasingly crowded market. What makes it stand out is that unlike most cheaper phones which rely on older versions of Android, the C3 runs the latest 6.0 Marshmallow.

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StableBit CloudDrive beta ($34.95) is an interesting tool which creates a secure virtual drive on your PC, and stores the data on your choice of local, network or cloud storage.

The program currently supports Amazon S3, Box, Dropbox, Google Cloud Storage, Google Drive, Microsoft Azure, OneDrive and OneDrive for Business accounts.

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Free Wi-Fi hotspots are the biggest security threat for mobile workers, according to new reports.

The recently released iPass Mobile Security Report says that 62 per cent of organizations are banning their mobile workers from using free Wi-Fi hotspots, with another 20 percent planning on doing the same in the future.

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New research by business organization the CBI in conjunction with IBM shows that a digital divide is opening up across the British economy, with just over half (55 percent) of 'pioneer' firms adopting digital technologies and processes, while the remaining 45 percent are falling behind.

Despite the UK taking top place globally for e-commerce and fifth place for the availability of technology, it ranks only fourteenth in the world for company-level adoption of digital technology, with many companies struggling to digitize their businesses at the rate of peers in other countries.

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Once again, as it has done in the past, Google makes the classic monopolist defense for its competitive—or anticompetitive, depending on perspective—behavior with respect to Android. Today, the European Union's Competition Commission formerly charged Alphabet and its major subsidiary, which has 12 weeks to provide satisfactory legal response before the Commission issues corrective sanctions.

Simply stated, the EC finds that the company abused its dominant position, in part by contracts compelling Android licensees to preload Google apps and related services, including search. Microsoft ran into similar bundling headaches starting in the late 1990s with respect to Windows. Responding today, Kent Walker, Google general counsel, claims that licensees and consumers can choose to install third-party apps. Microsoft made like-claims during its antitrust defense here and in Europe; they fell flat.

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Want to watch some pornography on your phone but can’t be bothered to actually search for it? From today you can receive links to free adult content just by texting an emoji.

Pornhub’s new "Emoji 4 Porn" service offers a selection of 30 public emoji (plus an unspecified number of secret unlisted ones to find) that you can use to request whatever sort of pornography you’re into. Send them a taco emoji, for example, and you’ll receive Latina videos. A camcorder emoji will give you links to amateur content. You can probably work out what sort of videos you’ll get if you send them a melon.

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