Latest Technology News

A perfect storm of social and technological circumstances has forever changed the way we do business. Lockdowns and evolving guidelines throughout the pandemic forced most organizations to quickly adopt hybrid and remote working business models. And advancements in communications and other innovative technologies have not only ensured the success of such a transition, but have made hybrid working models the preferred choice for many organizations moving forward.

Digital transformation spending is estimated to exceed $1 trillion by 2025, according to Finances Online, making it clear that businesses will continue to look to cutting-edge tools, like artificial intelligence (AI) and automation, to fuel performance and drive outcomes. However, a July 2022 Emergn survey, titled The Pursuit of Effective Workplace Training, of over 1,200 business leaders and learners found that the paradigm around IT initiatives has shifted over the few years. Sixty-four percent of respondents said that their organizations’ IT initiatives have focused primarily on providing better support for remote work, followed by implementing technology to increase the speed and productivity of teams (63 percent) and migrating applications to the cloud (37 percent).

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Continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) are critical to achieving DevOps success across organizations -- offering the ability to get software changes into production safely, quickly, and sustainably. By reducing the time between when code is written and deployed, while allowing developers to maintain high quality and minimize risk, CD enables teams to release new features quickly.

However, for CD to be a success, speed cannot come at the detriment of security. By building security validation into the CI/CD pipeline, developers will see benefits in productivity by reducing time to market and build consumer trust by developing more secure apps and data.

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A new survey of 1,000 cloud developers from Civo finds 47 percent have seen an increase in their year-on-year spending on Kubernetes clusters.

Of those who have seen costs rise, the majority saw a rise of up to 25 percent in year-on-year spend, and a significant group (10 percent) had seen a more than 50 percent increase. This is partly a result of increased adoption as 57 percent of respondents have seen an increase in the amount of Kubernetes clusters running in their organization over the last year.

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A quarter of US organizations were victims of ransomware attacks over the past 12 months, a steep 61 percent decline over the previous year when 64 percent fell victim.

In addition a new report from Delinea finds that the number of targeted companies who paid the ransom declined from 82 percent to 68 percent, which could be a sign that warnings and recommendations from the FBI to not pay ransoms are being heeded.

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Microsoft has revealed details of its latest foray into the world of artificial intelligence. Billed as a "neural codec language model", VALL-E is an advanced AI-driven text-to-speech (TTS) system that the developers say can be trained to speak like anyone's based on just a three-second sample of their voice.

The result is an incredibly natural-sounding TTS system that takes an entirely different approach to existing systems. Able to convey tone and emotion better than ever, VALL-E sounds realistically human, but there are concerns that it could be used for audio deepfakes.

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If you have been keeping up with Windows news, you will probably be aware that today is the day that Microsoft finally ends support for Windows 7. This means that after today there will be no further updates, even for anyone paying for Extended Support Updates -- but 0patch is willing to help out.

Any company that does still have Windows 7 and is paying for ESU should install today's cumulative update, as well as any others that may have been missed. And there's a nice surprise: Microsoft has added support for Secure Boot to Windows 7, but has kept quiet about it.

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One of the IT sector’s great strengths is its ability to embrace innovation and new services. As we enter the new year, this trait will be called upon -- with IT departments under more strain than ever. 

A combination of sky-high expectations for digital services from users and customers, as well as skilled professionals like software developers in short supply, means IT teams are feeling the pressure. To continue to meet soaring demand, while streamlining workloads, IT teams are exploring new technologies and working methods. 

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Open source video broadcasting, recording and streaming tool OBS Studio 29.0 has been released for Windows, macOS and Linux.

With this release, the Windows build now supports AV1 encoding on both AMD (Radeon RX 7000 upwards) and Intel  (Arc Graphics) chipsets in addition to prior support for NVIDIA. Support on Linux is expected to follow in a future release.

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The current economic downturn has meant significant budget cuts for many enterprises. But cyberthreats continue to escalate and businesses need to take them seriously.

This means that more than ever CISOs must prove the value of their cybersecurity programs to senior management. But how can they do this effectively? We spoke with Tim Erlin, VP of product innovation at SecurityScorecard to find out.

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Many of the changes introduced by Microsoft in Windows 11 have been controversial. This is perhaps not entirely surprising as change has a tendency to upset, but some things have proved rather more unpopular than others -- in particular changes to the Start menu.

While users have long viewed the Start menu as a way to launch app and navigate Windows, in recent times Microsoft has used it as more of an advertising platform. The company has used the iconic feature of its operating system push (or "recommend", depending on your point of view) apps and websites, but now it has performed a U-turn and scrapped at least some of its recommendations.

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It is now widely understood that automation can offer huge benefits to the business world. And yet, for every story of a company successfully leveraging automation to streamline its operations and boost productivity, there seems to be another example where it has failed to deliver on initial hopes.

In 2022, I had the privilege of chairing an OpenOcean roundtable on automation with a robust line-up of leading thinkers and business leaders. One of the central takeaways from the event was that stories of automation and AI’s failure are very often the result of the same mistakes in implementation being made repeatedly. However, there are a few key areas that organizations need to focus on to ensure they can avoid these common pitfalls and introduce automation successfully.

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We've already written about Microsoft completely ending support -- even paid-for options -- for Windows 7 and Windows 8, and as part of this, the company will also stop releasing security update for its Edge browser on these platforms.

There are large numbers of both home users and businesses that are opting to stick with these operating systems, or have little choice for one reason for another. As far as Microsoft is concerned, Edge 109 is the last version of the browser that will be released for these OSes, and as of January there will be no more security update released. Thankfully, 0patch is here to save the day again, with the company announcing that it is "security-adopting" Microsoft Edge on Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2012.

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Five-hundred-and-twenty-four in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.

Microsoft released the first Windows 11 development builds of 2023 this week. The company removed two features that it tested in development versions: website recommendations in Start and the Bing Search suggested action.

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Today's software customers have varied requirements about how that software is deployed and how they pay for it. So how can software companies provide high-value offerings that support customer retention?

As software suppliers offer a mix of monetization and deployment models, they need clarity into how their products are being used. We spoke to Vic DeMarines, vice president, software monetization product management, at Revenera, for insights into current trends and best practices in software monetization.

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We're less than a week into the new year, but Microsoft has already started to push out new software. Having released a new build of Windows 11, the company has also rolled out a significant PowerToys update.

With the release of PowerToys v0.66.0, Microsoft has added a self-contained .NET 7, eliminating the need to add .NET as part of the installer. In addition to a batch of significant fixes, this latest update also includes new options and settings for the Quick Accent and Text Extractor modules.

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