Amazon has announced that it is ending its Trade-In program in the UK. What's that? You didn’t know about it? You're not alone, and this could well be part of the reason for the closure; it was hardly a well-advertised operation.

As you'd guess from the name, the Trade-In program gave people the option to exchange games, consoles, accessories, and books they no longer wanted for Amazon gift cards. Very little notice has been given as the program is set to close on 31 August 2015. If you are one of the people who has been making use of Amazon Trade-In, you need to act quickly so you don’t miss out on your earnings.

Parallels IP Holdings GmbH has released Parallels Desktop 11 for Mac, a major new release of its market-leading virtualization tool.

The app, which allows users to run virtual versions of Windows, OS X and Linux in a virtual environment, adds full support for Windows 10 while readying itself for El Capitan’s imminent release. It also promises significant performance improvements.

"Wintel, Wintel – why hast thou forsaken us?"

It's a sad day for early adopters of Microsoft's touch-first OS strategy. Customers who bought some of the first examples of Windows 8.x hybrid systems -- the HP Envy x2 and ElitePad G1, Dell Latitude 10, Lenovo ThinkPad Tablet 2 and Miix series, ASUS VivoTab, et al -- will not be able to reliably run Windows 10 because the powers-that-be are refusing to release a compatible video driver. In fact, anyone with an Intel Atom z2760-based PC is fresh out of luck when it comes to Windows 10 support. As far as the hardware vendor community is concerned, the demise of Windows 8.x signals End of Life (EOL) for your systems.

As promised by Gabe Aul just over a week ago, Microsoft today releases Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3. One of the biggest new additions to this build is native support for Windows Server Containers, Microsoft's take on Linux containers.

Developers have been begging for container support in Windows Server for some time now, and the introduction of this feature could be the start of Microsoft offering up some serious competition to Linux server software. This is not the only new feature to be found in Windows Server 2016 Technical Preview 3, there's also software-defined datacenter enhancements and new Nano Server functionality.

When Tomb Raider was released in 1996, the heroine, Lara Croft, was a sex symbol for computer nerds. While the graphics were archaic by today's standards, the well-endowed character looked real enough for gamers. Heck, Angelina Jolie eventually played her in the film.

Today, Square Enix announces that Lara Croft will be titillating mobile gamers on iOS, Android, and surprisingly, Windows Phone too. Will you buy the all-new Lara Croft GO game?

They say lightning never strikes twice, but they're wrong as Google reports that it's lost some data after the power grid serving one of its European data centers suffered four consecutive lightning strikes last Thursday.

Google Compute Engine (GCE) disks in the europe-west1-b zone data center, located in Belgium, suffered I/O errors in the strikes and 0.000001 percent of disks suffered permanent data loss. GCE allows customers to run virtual machines and store data in the cloud.

Lenovo has issued a BIOS fix for some of its machines, thus preventing a vulnerability which could allow potential hackers to gain control of a desktop or a laptop computer from the manufacturer.

In a press release published on the Lenovo website, the company has urged consumers to manually update their BIOS. Newer machines will have the fix by default.

The rise of BYOD offers businesses improved flexibility and employee productivity, but those things come at a price. BYOD can lead to extra costs such as needing to reimburse staff for air time.

Mobile platform provider Syntonic is launching DataFlex, an operator-independent split billing solution designed to cost-effectively deploy, operate, and manage BYOD usage for businesses of any size.

Microsoft is pushing Bing heavily in Windows 10. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, and while you can change this to Google (or any other choice), the process of doing so is far from intuitive -- you can’t simply pick "Google" from a list of options.

Cortana, Microsoft’s built-in personal assistant, is powered by Bing too, which means when you ask her a question she doesn’t immediately know the answer to, she’ll open up your default browser and display a list of results sourced from Microsoft’s search engine. There is a way to get her to use Google instead though, but you won’t find this in any Settings.

Under a new program designed to protect children from seeing adult content, YouTube and VEVO have announced new age ratings for music videos in the UK.

It is the first initiative of its kind, which will block videos that show inappropriate content. Musicians like Miley Cyrus, Rihanna and Robin Thicke have irked parents with the lack of clothing and rather provocative music videos released on the web.

There are significantly more spoken languages than countries, but the problem is that the internet frequently doesn't speak them all, leaving many users out in the cold. There are some ways around that, as both Google and Bing will try and translate things for you.

Now Google News is expanding its language options to become accessible to more of the world. Available languages will now include Bahasa Indonesia, Bengali, Bulgarian, Latvian, Lithuanian and Thai.

Video streaming is one of the quickest ways to max out a data plan. This is especially true for high-definition videos, which are the commonplace on websites like Netflix and YouTube and, understandably, the obvious quality choice for many mobile viewers. Since not everyone can afford or have the option to use an unlimited data plan, we often have to sacrifice how much content we watch to not pass the traffic limit.

However, an update to Opera Max for Android promises to let us watch more videos without sacrificing much in terms of quality. The app can achieve such results through compression, and the feature is now enabled for Netflix and YouTube.

Chrome users who rush to install the latest build of Windows 10 have found that their favorite browser is broken. Build 10525 of Windows 10 prevents Chrome from working properly -- launch the browser and you'll be greeted by a series of notifications saying that plugins have crashed.

Additionally, when attempting to visit any website, all that is displayed is an error message that reads "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. Closing the apps and tabs that you don't need may help by making more memory available". The compatibility issue has been reported to Google so a patch will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime you can use this workaround.

For those of you that have been living under a rock for the past few years, two-factor authentication is something that you use to re-verify your credentials to log into a particular site or service. This authentication is typically completed in the form of text message, a phone call, or a notification on your smartphone.

Although 2FA is extremely secure, it is also slightly annoying to have to open up a secondary app to authenticate yourself again. A couple of researchers from Switzerland want to make that process even easier and less annoying. So, the researchers want to get rid of the text-based bits and use ambient sound instead.

A new survey of security executives at large companies in the US reveals that many don't have confidence in their enterprise security posture. Less than a third of these executives are confident in their organization's security position, and only slightly more than a quarter feel that their communications on security to senior management are effective.

The survey commissioned by Raytheon|Websense shows that many still rely on technology aimed at preventing breaches but do little after one has occurred. Yet 9 out of 10 of the organizations represented in the survey have had at least one breach involving a loss or compromise of data in the past year.