Articles about 2016

Five percent of all small and medium-sized companies in the entire world were victims of a ransomware attack in 2016 alone, with the money paid out to reclaim data reaching new highs, new research has revealed.

Datto's new State of the Channel Ransomware Report found that an estimated $301 million (£222 million) was paid to ransomware hackers from 2016-2017.

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Ransomware attacks aren't new, but 2016 saw them increasing in frequency and sophistication as cyber criminals see a lucrative revenue opportunity.

UK-based Technology Services Group has produced an infographic that looks at ransomware’s rapid rise.

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There are lots of really successful paid apps, but which one generates the most net revenue? According to a Sensor Tower report, Spotify comes out on top overall in 2016. The music streaming service only led the pack on the App Store, but that was enough to push it all the way to the top. On Google Play, it was messaging service Line which took top honors in this category.

Line actually came second overall, and in third place on the App Store. It is interesting that Spotify managed to come out ahead despite the fact that it is nowhere to be found in the top ten grossing apps on Google Play. This suggests that iOS users spent far more than Google Play users did on Spotify subscriptions.

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It only takes one successful cyber-attack to seriously hurt a company, so it’s shocking to see that UK businesses suffered, on average, almost 230,000 cyber-attacks in 2016.

This is according to Beaming. The ISP says a third of attacks was targeting company databases, but two thirds were, in fact, attacking connected devices, such as security cameras or building control systems. Such devices can be controlled remotely, through the internet.

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Today is New Year's Eve, and while all the cool kids are out partying, I am sitting here reflecting on my favorite tech products of the year. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

Believe it or not, 2016 saw me getting deeper into Apple's ecosystem (I still love Linux and Windows 10, though). I continue to love the iPhone 6s Plus, iPad mini 4, and Apple TV I bought in 2015, but this year, I added AirPods and a MacBook Pro. One of those Apple products was quickly returned, while the other is my overall favorite. Can you guess which is which?

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2016 was a bad year in lots of ways -- loads of celebrity deaths, plus Brexit and Trump (depending on your point of view of course) -- but a good year for new tech.

Rather than just looking at what exciting new products made it on to the market in 2016, I’ve decided to take a look at the items that have become part of my digital life in the past 12 months.

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Welcome to this special episode of best Windows 10 apps. This article looks back, and lists the best games released for Windows 10 in 2016.

I went through all "best of Windows apps" post of the year, cross-referenced the popularity of apps on Windows Store, and read user comments to create this list.

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A third of the people who read this column don’t live in the USA so maybe this prediction isn’t interesting to them, but I think Apple will buy Dish Network, the American direct satellite TV broadcaster. It’s the only acquisition that will give Apple the kind of entry point they want into the TV business, allowing Cupertino to create overnight an over-the-top (OTT) Internet streaming video service -- effectively an Internet cable system.

Buying Dish would be a bold move for Apple because all the benefits Cupertino seeks aren’t obviously available. True, Dish has 14 million U.S. subscribers (I am one of those) who get 100+ channels of TV from the sky. True, Dish has an existing OTT streaming service called Sling that already offers a subset of the company’s cable channels. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that Dish could simply transfer its satellite content to the Internet, at least beyond what it does already with Sling.

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It seems as 2016 will be the year of the SSD (solid-state drive), with more and more IT decision makers saying they’re looking to use the advanced storage technology within their organizations.

This is according to a Spiceworks Voice of IT survey, done by Crucial, which asked 306 IT decision-makers in Europe and North America about their storage plans.

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I know I promised that my next 2016 prediction would be Apple’s big acquisition, and I will publish that prediction soon as my #10, but right now I just have to say what a perilous position Intel is in. The company truly risks becoming irrelevant, which is an odd thing to say about a huge, rich outfit that would appear from the outside to pretty much dominate its industry -- an industry the company created. Intel won’t go away, I just think there is a very good chance it’ll no longer matter.

We’re approaching the end of the closed, proprietary, single source technology era. ARM processors are freely licensed, more open, and much more cost competitive than similar products from Intel or AMD. If you need 10 million chips for your next product do you buy them from Intel? Or do you get a license from ARM and hire a foundry to make them for you?

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At least one reader pointed out that I somehow missed 2016 Prediction #4, so let me throw something in right here. Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview will shortly return to Netflix worldwide!

Our movie was on Netflix in the USA and Canada for a couple of years (it’s still streaming on Netflix in the UK) but the North American deal ended sometime in November when rights reverted from Magnolia Pictures back to John Gau Productions. The film had already disappeared from iTunes and Amazon, etc., but we hadn’t noticed because, well, Magnolia didn’t bother to mention it and we’re only pretending to be movie producers.

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If my last prediction about the Internet of Things becoming a security nightmare seemed a no-brainer to half of my readers, as some commenters suggested, this prediction that Apple won’t buy Time Warner will probably be a no-brainer for the other half, simply because it is always easier to say an acquisition or merger won’t happen than that it will. But I think there is something to be learned from why I don’t think this acquisition will take place -- something that says a lot about Apple as a company.

That this topic comes up at all is because, as frequently happens these days, activist investors are trying to bully Time Warner into selling all or part of itself, this after having already bullied the company into spinning-off its cable TV operation and then its print publishing operation. So now what’s mainly left at Time Warner are cable TV networks, TV and film production and distribution, and a modest online operation. All of this, but especially premium cable channel HBO, is supposed to appeal to Apple’s eye for quality.

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This one is simple -- a confluence of anti-hacking paranoia combined with the Internet of Things (IoT), which will lead to any number of really, really bad events in 2016.

Remember how the CIA or the NSA or whatever agency it was hacked a few years ago the Iranian nuclear centrifuges making enriched uranium? The centrifuges updated their software over the Internet, loading doctored code that eventually caused the machines to overspeed and shake themselves to pieces, putting the Iranian nuclear program months or years behind.

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With security breaches and controversies over encryption, thinking about securing the data inside organizations is in the spotlight. How best to store and manage data is on the minds of most CIOs as they head further into the New Year.

Here’s what to watch for in 2016

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When it comes to predictions it is often easiest just to take some really popular new technology and point out the obvious time it will take to be actually adopted. You could say I’m doing that here with drone deliveries and driverless cars, but I like to think my value-added is explaining why these will take so much longer than some people expect.

Amazon.com has been making a lot of noise about using small helicopter drones to deliver packages. I’m not here to say this is an impossible task or that drones won’t at some point be used for this purpose, but what I am saying is that it won’t happen this year, won’t happen next year, and in any true volume won’t happen even five or 10 years from now.

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