Latest Technology News

The year was 1985 -- a-ha were racing to the top of the music charts with their smash-hit "Take on Me", Roger Moore was appearing in what was to be his final outing as James Bond, and a young high-school teenager inadvertently stumbled across time travel with his much older scientist friend.

This year of course marks the 30th anniversary of Back to the Future which, as we all know, is one of the most iconic and celebrated films of the 20th Century. Starring Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly and Christopher Lloyd as Dr. Emmett Brown (or Doc for short), the film was celebrated for its ingenious and fun take on time travel and later went on to spawn two sequels. Most notable was the 1989 follow-up Back to the Future II in which our plucky heroes travel to the year 2015 in a world which is dominated by hoverboards, self-tying shoes and tablet computers -- remarkably all of which have come to fruition (sort of). Naturally some of the films’ more outlandish predictions haven’t yet left the realms of cinema imagination, like flying cars and power clothing, but nonetheless these are still some amazing technological advances that have helped shape the world we live in today.

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The internet has turned us all into sharers. If you find something interesting online, be it a photograph, video, or an article, there’s a good chance you might share it with people via Facebook, or Twitter.

Microsoft wants Skype to become another way of easily sharing content, and so has introduced a new Share button which will let you quickly forward content on to people you know. "Effortless sharing that sparks richer conversations", as the Skype team describes it.

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Artificial intelligence researchers at Facebook are set to unveil a new system that can identify objects in photographs. While this is not an entirely new idea, Facebook's AI Research (FAIR) team says that it has reached a new milestone, meaning that recognition is now much faster and requires less training.

Any AI-driven recognition system is built on sample data which can be used as a reference point. FAIR's new system needs just a tenth of the amount of training data than other systems, and operates 30 percent faster. But the team's progress doesn’t end there -- great strides have also been made in natural language understanding and predictive learning.

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Google Chrome browser has become widely popular thanks to its high speed, elegant, minimalistic interface, and in-built translator; and, well, it is a Google product after all. Thanks to its fame and tons of users, the number of available extensions to improve the usage of this web browser is constantly growing and the quality of the offered apps is increasing as well.

You’ll be surprised by the many extensions that can help you to do so much more than just regular browsing. If you select effective and useful extensions they can increase your productivity online considerably. As we don’t want our favorite readers to spend too much time on trying out the extensions in an attempt to find the worthy ones, we’ve reviewed the top Google Chrome extensions for better browsing.

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It’s been around for almost 40 years, yet the arcade classic Space Invaders is still hugely popular, the inspiration behind an array of new games on every possible platform.

This isn’t always a good thing. Many games use the name, but don’t bear any resemblance to the original. Others require bulky installations or "in-app purchases" before you can really get started.

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Premium exploit acquisition platform Zerodium has announced that the bounty hunt for an iOS 9 zero-day vulnerability has expired, and that it has one winning team who managed to hack into Apple’s mobile operating system.

The winning team has thus won the main prize of $1 million.

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AVAST Software has unveiled its 2016 product range, including Avast Free Antivirus 2016, Avast Internet Security 2016 and Avast Premier 2016.

The highlight is Avast Passwords, a new password manager available in every edition (yes, even the Free build).

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Major global IT vendors -- including leading hardware, systems software, eCommerce, big data, cloud, network, telco and systems integrator companies -- have little wisdom, advice or vision to offer their customers and prospects when it comes to blockchain technology.

This is the result of a survey entitled Searching in Vain for The Block Chain, conducted by enterprise IT specialist consulting firm Lighthouse Partners. It is also the main reason this company decided to start offering consulting services on the topic.

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The idea of 'liking' something is synonymous with Facebook. Or at least it was. Now Twitter is trying to get in on the action, renaming Favorites to Likes. As well as a name change, there's also a new icon. Gone is the Favorite Star, replaced with the Like heart.

The move comes just as Facebook is talking about introducing reaction emoji, with a view to giving users of the social network new ways to express how they feel about the content they see. Twitter, however, is moving in the other direction. While 'favoriting' a tweet was fairly non-partisan, 'liking' is an action that is loaded with meaning.

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Gmail might be Google's most well-known email service, but more recently the company has introduced Inbox. Now Inbox gains a new feature -- Smart Reply. The email tool is known for its automation features and Smart Reply aims to cut down the amount of time you have to spend replying to messages in Android and iOS.

Although not entirely automated. Smart Reply analyzes the content of the emails you receive and suggests a number of stock replies that you might like to send. While it is certainly not going to eliminate the need to type out emails entirely, the ability to respond to common types of email with a couple of clicks will prove a real time-saver.

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TeamViewer GmbH has unveiled TeamViewer 11 beta, a preview of its free-for-personal-use remote control package.

Performance enhancements are a highlight, with up to 15x faster file transfers, and a potential 30 percent reduction in data usage.

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Over three-quarters (76 percent) of senior IT leaders in the UK, France and Germany feel more personal risk when making decisions than they did five years ago because of IT’s increasingly central role in businesses, a study commissioned by Colt reveals.

At the same time, 77 percent of chief information officers (CIOs) say that pivotal moments in a business calendar define their career trajectories, and not day-to-day performance. This is compounding the sense of vulnerability felt during key decision-making moments, as highlighted in Colt’s recent ‘Moments that Matter’ study.

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Not all Linux distributions are created equal. The focus of its maintainers can vary wildly, leading to very different experiences. I still insist that there are too many distros, leading to confusion and resources being spread too thin, but c'est la vie.

Today, my favorite Linux distro, Fedora -- which is also the operating system of choice for Linus Torvalds -- reaches a new milestone. Yes, Fedora 23 is finally here and it comes with Linux kernel 4.2. If you are a fan of open source, security, frequently updated packages and free-software ideology, this is the Linux-based operating system for you.

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HTC is just killing me. Last week, I bought a new Nexus 9 tablet from Amazon, thinking: "What a deal!" But every Tuesday, the device manufacturer boasts big 24-hour sale. "What a steal" is my reaction to the weekly price cut, with buyer's remorse. The company sells, today only, the 32GB LTE model for what I paid for the WiFi-only variant: $359. Oh, the pain!

But this story is stranger still. I didn't regard N9 much of a good value when reviewing in May, writing: "I want to love Google-branded, HTC-manufactured Nexus 9. But ours is a contentious relationship". On Oct. 29, 2015, Amazon delivered the new tablet, and the user experience dramatically differs from the previous device—so much I must revise my review. Value is even better, for anyone buying on this November Tuesday and scooping the deep discount.

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Managing development projects across an enterprise can be a complex process, involving tracking multiple phases and teams.

Cloud management company CliQr's latest CloudCenter platform introduces features that help developer and operations teams simplify and streamline deployment of any application to any data center, public or private cloud.

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