Latest Technology News

So now that a good number of you have installed Windows 10 (obviously a fair few of you will have been Windows Insiders for a while as well), we’d like to hear what you think of it.

The BetaNews audience has never shied away from passing comment on all manner of stories (it’s what we love about you guys) and Windows 10 has divided opinion pretty much from day one. It’s easy to pick holes in a work-in-progress OS, but now that Microsoft has released the completed version, has it changed your view at all? Do you love it, hate it, or sit somewhere in-between?

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Customer identity management firm Gigya has released its Q2 "landscape of customer identity" figures, showing how consumers are using third party identity providers such as Facebook and Google+ to log into other websites.

Facebook continued its dominance, now controlling two-thirds of all social logins, followed by Google+ (20 percent), Twitter (six percent) and Yahoo (four percent).

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Since news and entertainment websites are amongst the most popular on the net, it's not surprising that they're more likely to play host malicious adverts.

A new report by Bromium Labs reveals that more than half of malvertising is unknowingly hosted on news and entertainment websites. 58 percent of online adverts with hidden malware were delivered through news websites (32 percent) and entertainment websites (26 percent). Major websites unknowingly hosting malvertising included cbsnews.com, nbcsports.com, weather.com, boston.com and viralnova.com.

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The new Action Center keeps you informed about what’s going on in Windows 10, providing a single place for all of the notifications from Windows and installed apps, and also informing you about new emails, instant messages, Facebook updates, and much more.

Notifications flash up on screen and come from all sorts of places, and if you’re not careful, you can easily find yourself bombarded with alerts. Fortunately it’s easy to trim down which notifications you see.

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Artificial intelligence is the next step in the world of technology, but some of the leaders and speakers in the industry have asked for more oversight on weapons with AI.

Renowned scientist Stephen Hawking, Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk and co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak have all spoken out in favour of more regulation on AI weapons. In the open letter posted on A Future For Life Institute, which Musk donated $10 million (£6.4 million) to see further research into AI, it asked for governments to not allow offensive weapons manufacturing that uses AI to pick out targets.

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Hooray, Windows 10 has a Start menu. It may not be the Start menu you were hoping for (Windows 7 users I’m looking at you), but it’s there, and easily customized.

You can change the colors, transparency effect, and size and position of the tiles. If you don’t want the tiled interface you can turn this off, and just have a straightforward Windows 7-style menu. Here’s what you can do.

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If you’re the same as me, you’ll resent the idea of having to pay for apps. Fortunately, there are plenty of free gems out there and, since these freebies are available in pretty much every category you could think of, the likelihood is you’ll be able to find exactly what you’re looking for without having to spend a penny.

That’s not to say that they’re all good apps. A lot of them are duds that won’t be worth your while, but there’s no fool-proof way of knowing that until you actually test them. Alternatively, you can just have a look through a list that sifts out the best from the rest. Wouldn’t that be convenient?

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Obviously Microsoft’s Edge browser is the new default choice in Windows 10, and it’s definitely worth giving it a try. I’ve found it to be speedy and surprisingly good. Persevere long enough and you might grow to like it as I have.

That said, if you prefer to use Chrome or Firefox, with all the add-ons and customizations in place, I really couldn’t blame you. Edge isn’t (yet) as flexible, and if you already use Google or Mozilla’s browser for syncing content between devices, then it makes sense to use the same browser in Windows 10. Here’s how to setup a rival browser as the default option.

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Many of the latest cyber attacks focus on mobile platforms as they're often seen as inherently less secure, particularly when handling account logins and important transactions.

Mobile identity solutions company TeleSign is today launching its TeleSign Auto Verify, a new lightweight software development kit (SDK) for mobile app developers that streamlines the account verification process while providing a more reliable and cost-effective method than SMS-based verification alone.

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Windows 10's new modern web browser comes with Bing as its default search engine. This will, of course, surprise absolutely no one. Some people will be more than happy with that choice, but others will prefer to switch to using something different. Like Google.

The process isn’t especially intuitive but it is very straightforward and won’t take more than a few seconds of your time. Here’s how to do it.

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Kaspersky Labs has released its 2016 editions of Kaspersky Anti-Virus, Kaspersky Internet Security and Kaspersky Total Security in Canada and the USA.

The suites now have a "Change Control" system which warns you of attempts to modify your browser home or search pages, install addons or change settings, and allows you to allow or block them.

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Now that Windows 10 is officially available, there’s a good chance you’ll be updating your existing PCs to the new OS. There are reasons for and against doing this of course.

If you’re not quite ready to jump aboard Windows 10, you might want to install it in a virtualized environment instead. This way you’ll be able to try it out -- no Windows key required -- without risking your current setup, and see whether you like it or not. It’s certainly worth playing around with.

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We reported recently on a new system that reduces the risk for merchants in accepting bitcoin payments.

Now there's more evidence that the digital currency is going mainstream with the announcement of a partnership between enterprise bitcoin payments processor, Bitnet and payments platform provider Zooz that will enable merchants to accept bitcoin as a payment method on the Zooz payment platform.

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If you reserved a Windows 10 upgrade, you were probably expecting it to appear this morning. For many people that was the case, but not for all. There are ways around this problem of course -- you can use the free tool Microsoft released today in order to update your PC whenever you like.

However, if you reserved the update, then you probably just want to get your upgrade through that. And rightly so. Fortunately, there’s a simple little trick you can use.

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As more and more of our data gets stored in digital format, keeping it secure becomes a bigger challenge. One possible solution is User Managed Access (UMA) which gives a web user a unified control point for authorizing who and what can get access to their online personal data.

The UMA standard has already received support from major organizations such as Philips and the New Zealand government. Access management company ForgeRock along with a number of open-source technology companies and experts, is announcing a new digital consent and privacy initiative to help accelerate developer adoption of UMA.

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