Latest Technology News

The development of PowerToys for Windows 10 has been impressive, with Microsoft continuing to add new utilities all the time. Now the company is looking for feedback from users to help decide just what it should focus on next.

Specifically, the development team says that while it currently has ideas for three new PowerToys, it only has time to work on two of them next year. Rather than making the decision itself, power users are being asked to vote, choosing between a Gif/Video screen recorder, the ability to adjust font rendering, and a tool called "Mouse without borders".

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Many organizations struggle to develop education, training and awareness initiatives that are impactful, engaging and resonate with the audience. Typically, a lack of funding forces organizations to run plain, dull, repetitive awareness campaigns, or they just do enough to meet regulatory requirements. This approach to changing security behavior is fundamentally flawed -- however, there are several cost-effective approaches that organizations can use to change, promote and sustain good security behavior.

Firstly, the idea of 'blanket awareness' is dead -- all content needs to be tailored and contextualized to specific role requirements. For example, a senior executive will not experience the same threats as a marketing manager, so why should they both have to complete the same training course? Each employee should be equipped with the necessary knowledge and skills to identify and respond appropriately to role-specific threats. Security mentor schemes are particularly helpful in upskilling movers and joiners, and a robust threat intelligence and incident management capability can help inform awareness campaigns of emerging and common threats that each role is likely to experience.

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Data is among an enterprise's most valuable assets, no matter where or how it's stored, having visibility and unified access control is essential.

Mohit Tiwari, CEO at Data Store and Object Security (DSOS) company Symmetry Systems, left a professorship at the University of Texas in Austin to start the business and develop a new approach to data security in the form of Symmetry DataGuard which maintains authority over data even when all else fails. We spoke to him to find out more.

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New research out today finds that 36 percent of companies weren't prepared to support the large-scale and abrupt transition to a remote workforce forced by COVID-19 measures.

The study, from managed cloud provider Navisite, of more than 100 executives and IT professionals in the US reveals that, as a result, 51 percent experienced IT pains during the transition process, with 29 percent reporting that they are still facing issues.

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Technology’s grip on modern-day life has tightened over the last decade, especially in the world of manufacturing. Innovation, efficiency, safety and hygiene have been the order of the day for quite some time, with the latter gaining more spotlight due to the coronavirus pandemic.

With production lines in many industries, such as pharmaceutical, food and beverage to the automotive industry, needing to work around the clock to support the US economy and beyond, innovation -- and the use of technology -- in factories and warehouses must continue well past the point a vaccine is found for the virus. Today, we look at how the evolution of technology has benefited the manufacturing sector so far and what the future looks like in a post-pandemic world.

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Here on BetaNews, some of our most constantly popular posts relate to Windows 10's 'secret' screen recorder that is part of the Game Bar tool.  Seemingly aware that people are keen to be able to create video of on-screen activity, Microsoft is now working on a dedicated screening recording app.

Currently known as Video GIF Capture, the tool is being created by the PowerToys developers and it promises to give people the ability to record what is happening on their screen and save it as an animated GIF or video file.

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Popular ebook management (and creation) tool Calibre 5.1.0 has been released, just one week after version 5.0 made its debut. The open-source tool, which is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, fixes several bugs while adding a couple of minor new features.

The main highlight is the ability to use templates in search expressions, while a new checkbox gives users the ability to disable automatic update of lookups when text changes in the Viewer lookup panel. The Viewer also now supports the skipping of a confirmation when the remove highlight button has been used in the popup bar.

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According to FLEXERA 2020 State of Tech Spend Report, the top three IT investments that organizations of all sizes are considering in the current scenario are digital transformation, cybersecurity, and cloud migration. Another report from Research and Markets says the global cloud computing market is expected to grow from USD 371.4 billion in 2020 to USD 832.1 billion by 2025. There are multiple reasons why organizations are considering and prioritizing cloud adoption. While cost optimization is one of the key reasons, it’s not the ONLY reason.

Businesses know that they’ll have to accelerate their digital strategy to ensure growth in the coming years. Moving to the cloud will provide them the much-needed elasticity, agility, flexibility, and security to achieve and sustain that growth. The COVID-19 pandemic has also brought to the forefront the need for a robust remote workforce -- and that’s another reason cloud readiness has gained additional importance.

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For organizations across the globe, the journey to effectively manage, and extract value from, sensitive data in the cloud isn’t a new one. IT and security professionals have long struggled with challenges to the easy adoption of cloud technologies, and the question of how to ensure that data, including personal identifiable information (PII) or sensitive data, stays safe and compliant with regulatory requirements, without sacrificing data utility, remains a top challenge.

In 2020, the ongoing global pandemic increases this obstacle as remote work drives businesses to move more activity to the cloud quickly. A cloud usage survey released in May found organizations had already surpassed their 2020 cloud spend budget by 23 percent -- highlighting the question of how well data is being protected during this shift to home offices.

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Historically, one of the most popular tools used to connect remotely to a corporate work environment has been a virtual private network -- VPN for short. A VPN enables corporate users to send and receive data across public networks such as the internet through a secure encrypted tunnel, providing something akin to a direct, private connection to the corporate network.

However, VPN technology was introduced at a time when business IT environments reside on business premises, and did not include distributed elements that are now commonplace, such as cloud computing, mobile devices, and flexible remote work policies. Even as VPNs have adapted to stay relevant to some of the changes in how people now work, they have struggled to keep up with the modern threat landscape.

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

Microsoft unveiled the Surface Laptop Go on October 1, 2020, a more affordable version of the Surface Laptop. The cheapest version offers 4 Gigabytes of RAM and 64 Gigabytes of storage, and is available for $549.99.

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The rise of remote working and the growing complexity of securely managing multiple types of end user devices has seen 77 percent of businesses intending to increase spending on identity and access management solutions.

A study by ESG Research, sponsored by directory platform JumpCloud, finds an additional 20 percent plan to keep their IAM spending at existing levels, and 49 percent of respondents say they plan to consolidate IAM controls, using fewer security vendors.

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Today is Friday, meaning later this afternoon, we will officially be starting the weekend! Woo-hoo! Unfortunately, due to COVID-19, many of us will be spending our weekend downtime indoors once again. Sigh. The weekend is far less exciting when you've been self-quarantining for months due to a pandemic.

Thankfully, we can all still have plenty of fun while indoors thanks to the internet. Not only can we stream video and music, but we can play online video games too. If you are a computer nerd, however, I have a much better suggestion -- install the new Ubuntu Beta! That's right, Linux fans, Ubuntu 20.10 "Groovy Gorilla" Beta is now available for download. This doesn't just include the "vanilla" GNOME version either, but other variants like Kubuntu and Xubuntu as well.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has seen large numbers of people adapting to new working patterns and ways of interacting.

AI-based transcription platform Otter.ai has seen a fivefold increase in demand in recent months and has transcribed 750 million minutes from over 25 million meetings. We spoke to Otter's founder Sam Liang to find out more about how it's helping to shape the future of work and education.

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Updates to Windows 10 have become renown for introducing just as many problems as they aim to fix. Recent updates led to problems with Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) displaying an "Element not found" error, and there were also various problems with internet connectivity.

To address these issues, Microsoft has now released the "non-security update" KB4577063. The patch also fixes a number of other problems Windows 10 users have been experiencing.

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