Latest Technology News

Earlier in the week there was a serious Skype outage. Users around the world found they were unable to connect, unable to communicate, throwing many people into confusion. Yesterday, Microsoft issued an apology -- but it’s simply not good enough.

The new Microsoft, under the direction of Satya Nadella, has been banging the "mobile first, cloud first world" drum, and this means being connected. The company might well be "extremely sorry for any inconvenience caused to our users", but it shouldn’t have happened in the first place.

Continue reading →

Laptops are designed to be portable, but you are crazy to carry it under your arm or in a chintzy bag. You paid good money for the thing, so you should protect it. While backpacks are the most logical choice for comfort and weight distribution, they are not exactly stylish (you will look like a high-school student). Carrying a messenger bag is surely the more trendy option, if that sort of thing matters to you.

Today, booq announces an all-new notebook messenger bag called 'The Shadow'. Not only is it stylish (for both men and women), but it will accommodate 15 inch laptops and smaller, plus additional accessories too.

Continue reading →

A company creating cameras and software capable of filming 360-degree videos has just gotten a significant money boost, which signals that the era of virtual reality movies is almost upon us.

The company, called Jaunt, has received $65 million (£42m) in series C round of funding. In investment was led by The Walt Disney Company, together with Evolution Media Partners -- a partnership of CAA-backed Evolution Media Capital, TPG Growth and Participant Media; and China-based China Media Capital (CMC).

Continue reading →

Visit just about any website and you’re pretty much guaranteed to see a Twitter button of some sort. Just as here at BetaNews, you’ll be offered the chance to follow the author of the article you’re reading (or the site’s Twitter feed), as well as being given the opportunity to tweet about the page you’re looking at.

Now this familiar page furniture is about to get a new look. From next month, a new set of buttons is rolling out with a fresh, flat, modern look. It’s a redesign that will please minimalists, but there are important API changes coming that will annoy some developers.

Continue reading →

As the digital world expands with more and more connected 'things' from computers, tablets and smartphones to gaming systems, thermostats, cameras and smart TVs, many people feel less secure.

As a result consumers are looking for uncomplicated security solutions from their Internet Service Provider (ISP).

Continue reading →

As has become the norm after a new iOS launch, Apple has been keen to crow about the high adoption rate for iOS 9. The company recently claimed that in just three days, more than half of iPhones, iPads and iPod touches had iOS 9 installed. Seems a little high? You're not alone in feeling that way. Has Apple massaged the figures about iOS adoption rates?

While there are many reasons to make the upgrade to iOS 9, the 50 percent figure is not in line with measurements from other sources. It's fair to say that only Apple has access to the real raw data, but Crittercism suggests that on the measurement date of 19 September used by Apple, adoption of iOS 9 was possibly less than half of what's been claimed.

Continue reading →

The online gambling industry is big business, estimated to be worth over $40 billion this year. But its success makes it a target for extortion and for DDoS attacks.

DDoS can prove particularly harmful for this type of site as around 60 percent of transactions are carried out in real time and are therefore sensitive to latency.

Continue reading →

Belgian Privacy Commission (BPC) said during a court hearing earlier this week that Facebook is spying on its users in Europe. The American social media company is allegedly violating privacy laws, monitors information of non-users and logged-out users, all for the purpose of placing ads, IB Times just wrote in a report.

This is a developing story which started in April this year, when the Centre of Interdisciplinary Law and ICT at the University of Leuven in Belgium claimed the social network’s privacy policy violates European Union laws.

Continue reading →

Companies are increasingly required to retain, quickly search and produce, as well as supervise electronic communications to meet regulatory compliance and e-discovery obligations.

To help businesses deliver on these requirements, hosted archiving specialist Smarsh -- not a villainous organization from a Bond film, honest -- is launching an enhanced version of its cloud-based Web Archiving solution.

Continue reading →

October is National Bullying Prevention month in the UK, but the problem of cyberbullying is one that pays no regard to national boundaries. To help raise awareness of the issue, Vodafone has launched a set of anti-cyberbullying emoji, as voted for by thousands of teenagers.

Celebrities such as Alan Cumming, Monika Lewinsky, Caprice, and Dancing Man are getting involved, tweeting using the #BeStrong hashtag. For every retweet, Vodafone is making a donation to anti-bullying charities, and the telecoms company has also drawn inspiration from Jimmy Kimmel's 'mean tweets' as part of the campaign.

Continue reading →

When Google unveiled its latest Nexus smartphone last year, many were disappointed that the search giant didn't announce a new version of the beloved Nexus 5. Yes, Nexus 6 was there to take its place, topping its predecessor in just about every regard, but the phablet was just too big for plenty of folks. So sales of the aging Nexus 5 continued until mid-March 2015, if only to just keep fans happy.

This year, however, Google will announce the real successor of the Nexus 5 we know and love. And, courtesy of Amazon India, who listed the smartphone ahead of time, we now know its main hardware specifications.

Continue reading →

Taking notes and making lists is something almost everyone does, and lists can become almost compulsive. For the task you need a good tool. Preferably one that works everywhere -- yes, paper covers that, but this is the technology era.

Evernote is one of the most popular alternatives to paper, as it runs on just about any platform, be it a computer or mobile device. While it all works well together -- create a shopping list on your PC, have it appear on your phone while you're in the store -- the company wanted to clean things up and modernize a bit. It has been working on an update and it's now ready for beta testing by Windows and Mac users.

Continue reading →

The complexity of the systems needed to handle it is often a major barrier to companies setting up big data projects.

A new release from big data platform BlueData aims to simplify things by offering a turnkey, purpose-built big data infrastructure solution for enterprises to accelerate their deployment times.

Continue reading →

IObit has released IObit Driver Booster 3, the latest edition of its one-stop driver updater for Windows XP and later.

A larger database -- 200,000 drivers and counting -- means the program can handle even more hardware.

Continue reading →

Ah! The joys of living on a tropical island. The sun. The sand. The surf... ing the web with high latency on a clogged Internet connection while paying through the nose for capped bandwidth. Yes, it truly is "paradise" -- unless, of course, you’re a seasoned Industry Analyst trying to get some work done over said connection. Which is why the latest bit of Windows malware to grace the PCs of my bandwidth-hungry teenagers has me absolutely livid.

Dubbed the "Massive Payload Virus" (MPV) by experts, this malicious code is designed specifically to cripple metered Internet connections by plastering any fully-activated Windows 7 or 8 system with gigabytes (over 3GB per PC, in my case) of data. The enormous download (which also appears to be code of some kind) is then spooled into a single, cleverly named folder in the PC’s root directory, where it lies dormant until triggered by an as yet undetermined external event.

Continue reading →