Latest Technology News

On stage at Apple WWDC, CEO Tim Cook has just announced the latest iteration of its mobile operating system. He began, as you’d expect, with some impressive statistics. 800 million iOS devices have been sold to date, a figure made up of 100 million iPod touches, 200 million iPads and 500 million iPhones. He also noted 130 million customers were new to Apple in the last year, and many were switchers from Android.

To the surprise of no one, iOS 8 builds on the design of iOS 7. Following Cook on stage, Senior Vice President of Software Engineering, Craig Federighi walked through the improvements and new features and apps. These are some of the highlights:

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As the American tech press turns to San Francisco and Apple's developer conference, the real world looks to Taipei and Computex. There you see the Android Army's march against iOS. ASUS announces new Android tabs, HP takes the wraps off a laptop running the operating system, and Samsung serves up a phablet so large it crosses category boundaries. In literature, they would call this foreshadowing. Do you see how this story will unfold -- as Android manufacturers and Apple engage like factions from the Divergent series.

Android accounted for 39.7 percent of device shipments -- hybrids, PCs, phones, and tablets -- during 2013, according to Gartner. Apple's iOS and OS X: 10.4 percent. Forecast for this year puts Android at 47.2 percent and the fruit-logo platforms at 11.5 percent. That's context for today's announcements from the East and West. As I write, Apple's announcements dribble (iOS 8 and OS X 10.10) out of Worldwide Developer Conference 2014, so this post focuses on what the Android news means.

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Solid State Drives (SSD) are all the rage nowadays and for good reason. They are very much faster than their HDD counterparts and use less energy too. However, the benefits come at a cost -- higher prices per gigabyte and smaller storage sizes. Plus, SSDs are relatively unproven for longevity. Over time, they lose speed and, even worse, can potentially fail faster than a HDD.

It is for those reasons that historically SSDs are not widely used in data centers. Instead, HDDs still reign supreme for their lower cost and perceived life span. Samsung is aiming to change this, with the all-new 845DC EVO -- a SSD that the company hopes can supercharge data centers.

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XCopy is one of the most useful Windows command line tools, an easy way to copy files, folders, folder trees and more. There’s support for copying only files which have changed, and if a network connection fails then XCopy can even resume later, just where it left off.

The program is still a little basic, but if you need more power then there’s always XXCopy, a free-for-personal-use tool which supports all the usual XCopy features, and then adds a whole lot more.

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Back at the end of March we reported that ripping your CDs and DVDs for personal use was about to be made legal in the UK.

Well, today's the day. You're now free to make backup copies of your discs and digital media such as MP3s, upload them to a personal cloud service like Amazon Cloud Player, or put material onto a portable player without fear that the authorities are about to come knocking. Welcome to the twenty-first century.

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Digital photos often include metadata, hidden tags which hold more information about them: camera name, model, date taken, maybe the place (if the camera was GPS-enabled), the flash mode, ISO speed, image thumbnail and more. Add others – title, author, comments -- and these can be a great help when organizing and searching for photos later.

These tags also increase your image size, of course (if only by a few bytes), and can include personal information. If you’re thinking of sharing any photos with others then it could make sense to remove them with JPEG & PNG Stripper, first.

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Proving who you are online is usually a matter of entering passwords or other codes. Which means if your information falls into the wrong hands someone else would have no problem pretending to be you.

IBM has been working on this problem and has patented a technique that analyzes online behaviour to work out if you really are who you say you are.

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Internet heavyweights such as Reddit, Imgur, BoingBoing and the WikiLeaks Party are joining forces to encourage internet users to take control of their privacy. Reset The Net is a campaign that flips the virtual bird at the NSA by inviting people to make use of privacy and encryption tools to keep themselves protected online. Also involved are such names as Greenpeace, Amnesty International and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the campaign is gathering momentum as internet citizens find themselves increasingly disillusioned by the post-Snowden world.

We have already seen an upsurge in the use of online encryption, but this has been largely employed by those who are more technically minded. The Reset the Net website asks web users to make a pledge: "On June 5, I will take strong steps to protect my freedom from government mass surveillance. I expect the services I use to do the same". Reset the Net is not an end in itself, but more of an awareness-raising campaign that aims to educate people as much as send a message to the NSA and its ilk.

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There are certainly hazards to bear in mind when it comes to a computer desk job. Okay, so maybe those dangers aren't on the scale that an oil rig roughneck faces, or a lion tamer -- but they're still there. Computer workstation hazards include the likes of eyestrain, a sedentary lifestyle and general lack of fitness therein, and of course repetitive strain injury (RSI). It's the latter we're examining here, and coping strategies to help avoid the dangers of RSI.

RSI is a blanket term that describes pain, aches or general discomfort experienced in muscles, nerves, or tendons in the human body; it's an umbrella term that covers a lot of specific conditions, for example carpal tunnel syndrome. As the name states, a repetitive strain injury is caused by repeatedly carrying out the same task over and over again, day in, day out.

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You may not be aware of it, but technology fair Computex kicks off tomorrow, in Taiwan. And, as we have come to expect from companies attending such events, many products are already announced come opening day. Local player ASUS is among the early birds, as today it takes the wraps off a slew of Android slates, among other products like monitors and routers.

Perhaps the biggest news is that ASUS has made the jump to 64-bit processors across the new models, using the Intel Atom Z3745 in the MeMO Pad and Transformer Pad lineups, and the Atom Z3560 in the Fonepad series. Android 4.4 KitKat is the operating system of choice which runs on these slates.

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The best way to keep data from emails and attachments from falling into the wrong hands is to use some form of encryption. But it needs to be easy to use if it's going to be effective.

Systems integrator and network consultancy BrightPlanIT has announced a partnership with DataMotion that will see it reselling cloud-based solutions for secure email, file transfer, customer contact and forms processing.

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Samsung is pushing the size boundaries of phablets with a new device it unveiled today, called Galaxy W. The handset rivals small tablets, like the Google Nexus 7, in the display department, yet has the necessary hardware to work as a phone. Is it still a phablet though?

Thanks to devices like the Galaxy W, phablets and small tablets are two categories that clearly overlap when it comes to display size, and since there is no clear distinction between the two, other than, perhaps, the ability to make phone calls, it is difficult to define what the Galaxy W exactly is. But, before you go about answering that question, look at the marketing image Samsung provides for the Galaxy W. Next to one's ear it looks almost as big as that person's head. It seems to look far more natural in the hand, as a tablet.

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At the cheap end of the laptop market, there isn’t really all that much choice at the moment. Chromebook has the bargain basement side of things covered, but this is not an OS that works for everyone. Android is, by quite some way, the most popular operating system on phones and tablets, so it makes sense that it should also prove popular on a laptop, right? This is what HP is hoping, at least, as it launches its new SlateBook, a 14 inch, touchscreen laptop that runs Android.

Launching July 20, the SlateBook has a price tag of $399 and includes a full-sized keyboard in addition to a 1080p touchscreen. As this is a device running Android, it should perhaps come as no surprise that battery life is fairly high. The quoted nine hours is fairly impressive and this is being touted as an entertainment device. To back up this claim, in addition to the longevity of the battery, four speakers from the Apple-acquired BeatsAudio provide what is described as "the best-sounding, richest audio on a notebook".

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We reported last week on how misconfigured apps are likely to account for many security breaches. This is a particular problem for companies that allow BYOD as it may put corporate data at risk.

Cloud-based mobile security specialist Mojave Networks has a solution in the form of a new application reputation feature to provide enterprises with detailed insight into the applications that are being run on employee mobile devices.

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Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference kicks off today, with the big keynote speech scheduled for 10am PST/6pm BST.

Among the highlights we can expect to see OS X 10.10, which might, possibly, be called 'Yosemite' (the OS X banner showing at the Moscone Center in San Francisco has the famous California national park in the background), and iOS 8, plus new versions of existing hardware, and maybe a few surprises.

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