Over the years Twitter has come in for a lot of flak for the level of abuse that runs rife on the social network. Now the site is taking action by making improvements to the existing blocking features as well as refining the harassment-reporting facility. With the likes of #gamergate and various other high profile cases, Twitter users have found themselves on the receiving end of vitriol, hatred and abuse.

Today's updates aim to clamp down on these activities, making it easier for users to report problematic tweets and easier for Twitter to respond quickly to problems. There is a particular focus on making life easier to users of mobile versions of Twitter, and the blocking feature is now more prominent in apps.

On the heals of Amazon shipping its Fire Stick, a new HDMI dongle that provides similar capabilities to the previously released Fire TV, the market for streaming devices has continued to grow. And it's also getting more competitive, as each company improves its offerings.

A new study published by Parks Associates shows that a record ten percent of US households now own a streaming device. That still seems a small number, but perspective is needed. First, it's growing, and second, some people just aren't going to buy in to this technology -- my parents wouldn't know what a Roku was, nor what to do with it.

Global law enforcement agencies and the airline, travel and credit card industries have joined forces in a major concerted action to combat online fraud.

The operation, organized via three coordination centers at Europol, in The Hague, Interpol in Singapore and Ameripol in Bogota, and involving over 60 airlines and 45 countries at more than 80 airports across the world, saw 281 suspicious transactions reported and 118 individuals arrested.

One of the current challenges for a business IT team is supporting a variety of desktops, laptops, tablets and mobile end user devices for employees. This task can be a considerable overhead in terms of time, resource and cost. Physical desktops are not only expensive, insecure, and maintenance heavy, they are also not necessarily a good fit for an increasingly mobile and demanding workforce. The groundswell of Windows 7 migration plans, an expanding virtual workforce, the growing popularity of mobile devices, and tighter IT budgets each point to the need to re-evaluate desktop strategies.

While virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) seems like a promising alternative to managing physical desktops and mobiles, in reality, it’s too costly and complex for most companies to implement successfully. Cloud services, however, are helping to mitigate many of the challenges of traditional VDI implementations. Cloud based virtual desktops deliver benefits around centralized management and simplified deployment without the high costs, limitations, or difficulties of VDI.

Many of us own multiple devices that charge or are powered via USB. Even though many PCs come with at least two or four USB ports these days, and USB charging adapters that plug into wall sockets are commonplace, that may not be enough. In other words, you may occasionally find yourself needing to charge something, without a spare USB port, or a cable for the task -- especially if you live in a house with teenagers. If all devices used Micro USB life would be simpler, but sadly, they do not.

This is where Hub It comes in. It's a powered sync and charging station that can power/charge up to seven items simultaneously, and includes connectors for all of your devices, including smartphones, tablets, iPhones and iPads, and digital cameras.

TeamViewer GBMH has released TeamViewer 10, its free-for-personal-use remote control software for Windows, Mac and Linux. Also available in portable form for Windows users, the new app boasts a host of new features, improvements and a redesign for good measure.

Chief among the changes are performance optimizations designed to take full advantage of multi-core processors. These include the promise of faster login times, better HD voice transmission quality and improved performance overall.

When you are issued a business laptop from your employer, it is often clunky and ugly. Of course, it gets the job done, but it is depressing to use a boring machine in the office, but then go home to use a nicer one. In other words, business-class laptops can be yawn-worthy, but they do not have to be.

Luckily, HP subscribes to this way of thinking. Yes, the firm also produces clunky business laptops, but today, it is announcing a machine that we have been waiting for. The all-new EliteBook Folio 1020 is both the thinnest and lightest business-class laptop in the world.

Bare metal recovery (BMR), restoring a machine with no requirement for operating systems or software to be present beforehand, isn't always seen as a reliable technique.

To look at how successful it really is, cloud backup and disaster recovery specialist Zetta.net has released the results of a survey looking at companies’ real world experience of BMR.

Left, or right? Chicken, or fish? Where are we going next?

Life is full of decisions. Some you’ll want to think about, carefully evaluate and discuss. But if they’re not so important -- or you’d just prefer a more surprising life -- then you could let your phone choose the outcome, with a little help from Certified True Randomizers.

Meeting the needs of employees to access systems is an important consideration for any modern business. Now, cloud-based call enter systems provider TCN is making its technology accessible for the visually impaired.

Its Platform 3 Vocal Vision product is optimized to work with Job Access with Speech (JAWS) technology and allows visually impaired call center agents to effectively navigate TCN's cloud-based contact center suite, helping to improve agent productivity while also creating new employment opportunities for the visually impaired.

Chinese smartphone vendor OnePlus just launched its One flagship in India, where it is available to purchase exclusively through the local arm of retailer Amazon. Prospective buyers are only able to scoop up the top-of-the-line 64 GB version of the smartphone, as the lesser 16 GB model is nowhere to be seen at this stage.

OnePlus appears to be committed to the Indian market, as it says that it has already set up a service network of 25 walk-in centers for its prospective local customers. Speaking of customers, the number of local buyers who will be able to buy One is still controlled by OnePlus, as the company is continuing to enforce its invite-only system.

A number of unreleased movies, as well as some confidential data, has been leaked online following a massive hack at Sony Pictures that happened last week.

In the Reddit thread covering the issue it says that, movies aside, confidential data including visa and passport information of cast and crew members working on different Sony projects, email inboxes and other important documents were leaked.

Ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe, when I worked for him 20 years ago, taught me that we tend to over-estimate change in the short term and under-estimate it in the long term. So it can be pretty obvious what is coming but not at all obvious when. And what we know about the when of it is that making money from new technologies is often a matter of investing right before that bend upward in the hockey stick of exponential change.

We all know television is bound to enter a new era sooner or later. Heck, I’ve written dozens of columns on the subject over my 17 years in this job. But this is the first time I feel confident in saying when this TV transition will take place. It already has. Forces are already in motion that will completely transform TV over the next 24 months. Come back two years from today and it will all be different with at least a few new leaders and a few icons gone bust. Get ready for TV 3.0.

Adobe’s Encapsulated PostScript (EPS) is a powerful graphics format which first appeared almost 30 years ago, so you might have expected there to be plenty of viewers around by now. But no: it’s so horribly complex that most image viewers either ignore the format entirely, or offer basic support, but with very unreliable results.

There are specialist tools which claim they’re different. The free EPS Viewer not only displays EPS/ PS files, but can also convert them to a few bitmap formats (JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIFF). Is it really better than the leading image viewers, though? We grabbed a test copy.

Storing your data in the cloud requires you to place trust in a company and its service. Whether you're talking about Dropbox, Google Drive or an enterprise level solution, security is of paramount importance. There have been numerous high profile cases in recent months in which data breaches have occurred and private data has been accessed by unauthorized people -- including the NSA et al. It's little wonder that many people are wary of moving entirely to the cloud.

But Microsoft Research may have a solution. A small team of researchers came up with the idea of Haven, a cloud system that introduces the idea of shielded execution. This is a platform designed not just for storing data, but also to securely run cloud-based applications, including those based on legacy code.