The latest information technology news from around the world. Covers computers, tips and tricks, operating systems, company announcements, product reviews, and much more.
- Krebs On Security
- Computer World
- IT Business Edge
- BBC News
- Windows Central
- Windows Report
- MSFT
Google’s dominance in the search arena has given rise to two major antitrust lawsuits from the U.S. government, which allege that the company has manipulated the market to maintain that dominance, to the exclusion of its competitors and the detriment of the public at large.
The first lawsuit, targeting Google's search business, kicked off last week, and a second trial against the tech giant, focusing on advertising, is scheduled for next year.
The cases heavily echo the turn-of-the-century Microsoft antitrust case in several respects, not least of which is the fact that Google faces the possibility of being broken up by regulators if it is unsuccessful in its legal battles.
Microsoft’s M365 Copilot will be made generally available to business customers beginning Nov. 1, the company announced Thursday.
Microsoft first unveiled plans to embed the generative AI assistant into its M365 collaboration and productivity apps — including Outlook, Teams, Excel, and PowerPoint — earlier this year. The M365 Copilot, built using gen AI models codeveloped with OpenAI, can automate tasks and create content, potentially saving users time and enhancing productivity.
Workflow management software provider ServiceNow has embedded a chatbot for assisting customers with most of its products.
ServiceNow’s new Now Assist tool is an expansion to its AI-powered Now Platform, and is available in its Vancouver software release for IT Service Management (ITSM), Customer Service Management (CSM), HR Service Delivery (HRSD), and Creator workflow application.
The EU Chips Act has officially come into force today, putting in place a comprehensive set of measures to shore up the European Union’s semiconductor supply chain resilience and reach its target to double its current global market share to 20% in 2030.
The act is made of three pillars, the first of which is a Chips for Europe Initiative, a program that aims to bridge the gap between research and innovation by promoting advanced semiconductor technologies by European businesses.
Mac adoption in the enterprise isn’t just about giving employees hardware options, according to Cisco CIO Fletcher Previn. It's a business imperative — and many companies agree.
Previn spoke at this week's Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC), where he explained that migrating to Apple hardware boosts productivity, enhances security, and can trim ownership costs. And he has the evidence to back the claim up.
If we're gonna have an honest discussion about email, we need to get a few tough truths out of the way first. Think of 'em as ground rules for the conversation we're about to embark on:
Email is atrocious. It's a soul-sucking hell-hole that steals hours of your day and never lets up. Most modern email tools fail to create a fully effective framework for navigating the deluge of email we busy professionals find ourselves facing on a daily basis — a truly inspired system for taming the madness and keeping our inboxes organized (ideally while keeping our sanity at least somewhat intact). Email is also unavoidable, and when handled properly, it can be an absolute asset for practically any business or professional purpose.Now, if you don't agree with any of those points, let me save you some time: This article isn't for you.
Four years after it started life as a white paper, the UK government’s controversial Online Safety Bill has finally passed through Parliament and is set to become law in the coming weeks.
The bill aims to keep websites and different types of internet-based services free of illegal and harmful material while defending freedom of expression. It applies to search engines; internet services that host user-generated content, such as social media platforms; online forums; some online games; and sites that publish or display pornographic content.
Sales of augmented and virtual reality (AR and VR) headsets continue to decline sharply due to weak economic conditions and aging product lines, according to IDC. But upcoming device launches from vendors such as Meta and Apple could help drive a rebound later this year and into 2024, the analyst firm predicts.
Global shipments for AR/VR devices fell 46% year on year in the second quarter of 2023, according to IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Augmented and Virtual Reality Headset Tracker, with commercial shipments falling in line with the overall market (44.4%). This amounts to the fourth successive quarterly decline in shipments, and follows another steep drop-off in the first quarter (54.4% year on year, according to IDC figures from June).
Imagine running fleets of iPhones that alert you when unexpected security-related incidents take place, or when otherwise legitimate service requests arrive from devices at an unexpected time or location. Imagine management and security software that not only identified these kinds of anomalies but gave you useful advice to help remediate the problem.
This, and more, is the kind of protection Jamf hopes to deliver using generative AI tools.
Generative IT for Apple adminsJamf believes generative AI can be a big benefit to tech support and IT admin, and talked about its efforts at the end of an extensive Jamf Nation User Conference (JNUC) keynote. Akash Kamath, the company's senior vice president, engineering, explained that just as the Mac made computing personal, genAI makes AI personal.
Manufacturing firms are already investing in a range of technologies that could serve as the building blocks for the industrial “metaverse,” but the end of goal of fully interconnected, immersive environments is likely to take longer to realize.
The metaverse concept has been used in recent years primarily to describe the development of a 3D internet, referring to virtual environments used mostly — so far — for entertainment. The concept has gained traction in the industrial sector specifically, where it’s used as an umbrella term for various existing technologies that can be combined to digitally replicate real-world objects and processes.
The idea is that accurate simulations of factory equipment, for example, would allow manufacturing and other industrial firms to optimize operations without disruption, improve collaboration for staff and external partners, and enhance frontline employee training. As with the consumer vision of a 3D internet, the industrial metaverse concept is a work in progress.
Google's Pixel Fold and Pixel Tablet may not look like siblings, but the two 2023 flagship Android offerings actually have a surprising amount in common.
And i's not just that they're the first Pixel devices in their respective categories of folding phones and tablets, either. Nope: When you use the two products side by side, you quickly realize that they share plenty of DNA within the evolved Android setup they showcase and the overall user experience they provide. And that extends all the way to their relatively unusual unlocking mechanisms.
Google today announced it is embedding its conversational,Bard chatbot into many of its most popular apps, allowing users to get human-like responses to questions, summarize Gmail messages, and search Google Docs and Youtube.
Bard is in heated competition with other top generative AI technologies, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing conversational AI tool (which is also based on ChatGPT). Microsoft has added ChatGPT functionality to its suite of Microsoft 365 business productivity and collaboration apps through its own Copilot chatbot assistant.
Google has once again sought to overturn a €2.4 billion ($2.6 billlion) fine imposed by the European Union in 2017 after it found the company had violated antitrust rules by using its dominant position in the search engine market to illegally promote its comparison shopping service.
Google originally appealed the fine the ruling in the General Court — the EU’s lower court — in 2021, but the decision was upheld. The company has now again sought to challenge the fine, this time in Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), arguing that the EU had failed to demonstrate how its practices were anticompetitive.
Work management software company Smartsheet unveiled its next-generation platform today, debuting features designed to provide users with new generative-AI powered capabilities at scale.
Work in the Smartsheet platform centers around “sheets” that contain information relating to a particular project or projects, within which users can include a variety of details such as a description, status, due dates, and which workers have been assigned to complete a task.
“Our goal is to make our platform not only powerful, but intuitive, beautiful, and delightful to use. And with this announcement, we're giving customers more and better ways to visualize their work in Smartsheet,” said Ben Canning, senior vice president of product experiences at Smartsheet, during a press conference. The company is taking a very practical approach to AI, he said.
Now in its 14th year, the world’s biggest event for IT admins who manage Apple hardware, the Jamf Nation User Conference kicks off today in Austin, Texas with Apple-related insights from Cisco, Google, Microsoft, and other big names in tech management and integration.
MacPaw, Okta, Mac Stadium, and many other important vendors in the space are also on tap at the hybrid show.
Companies are increasingly using role reassignments as a strategy to sidestep expensive layoffs, according to some tech industry experts. But they see it as generally short-sighted and likely to do a company more harm than good.
As with last year's 'quiet quitting' trend, quiet cutting appears to be a concept originally coined in the media — in this case, by The New York Times. The practice involves reassigning workers to roles that don’t align with their career goals to achieve workforce reduction by voluntary attrition — allowing companies to avoid paying costly severance packages or unemployment benefits.
The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has warned about the potential risks of artificial intelligence in its newly published review into AI foundation models.
Foundation models are AI systems that have been trained on massive, unlabeled data sets. They underpin large language models — like OpenAI’s GPT-4 and Google’s PaLM — for generative AI applications like ChatGPT, and can be used for a wide range of tasks, such as translating text and analyzing medical images.
Apple once again appears to have upsold the world to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, and while demand once again exceeded supply when orders began Friday, somewhere in Cupertino the bubbly was likely flowing as the company's initial stockpile of the iPhone Pro Max sold out in minutes.
The Windows 11 2022 Update has been released, but behind the scenes, Microsoft is constantly working to improve the newest version of Windows. The company frequently rolls out public preview builds to members of its Windows Insider Program, allowing them to test out — and even help shape — upcoming features.
The Windows Insider program is divided into four channels:
The Canary Channel (new in March 2023) is where platform changes (such as major updates to the Windows kernel and new APIs) are previewed. These changes are not tied to a particular Windows release and may never ship at all. Little documentation is provided, and builds are likely to be very unstable. This channel is best for highly technical users. The Dev Channel is where new features are introduced for initial testing, regardless of which Windows release they’ll eventually end up in. This channel is best for technical users and developers and builds in it may be unstable and buggy. In the Beta Channel, you’ll get more polished features that will be deployed in the next major Windows release. This channel is best for early adopters, and Microsoft says your feedback in this channel will have the most impact. The Release Preview Channel typically doesn’t see action until shortly before a new feature update is rolled out. It’s meant for final testing of an upcoming release and is best for those who want the most stable builds.The Beta and Release Preview Channels also receive bug-fix builds for the currently shipping version of Windows 11. See "How to preview and deploy Windows 10 and 11 updates" for more details about the four channels and how to switch to a different channel.
ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and other public-facing generative AI chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) are nice enough, but they’re general-purpose and not well integrated into enterprise workflows. Employees either have to go to a separate app, or companies have to spend time and effort adding the functionality to their applications via application programming interfaces. Plus, in order to use ChatGPT and other genAI chatbots well, employees have to learn prompt engineering.
Though technology companies announced massive layoffs last year, 2023 has been much worse. Layoffs have far outpaced last year's cuts, as tech giants including Amazon,Cisco, Facebook parent company Meta, Microsoft, Google, IBM, SAP, and Salesforce — as well as many smaller companies — announce sweeping job cuts.
The problem: Big Tech went on a hiring binge during the pandemic when lockdowns sparked a tech buying spree to support remote work and an uptick in e-commerce, and now they face revenue declines.
Continuing supply chain issues, inflation, and the war in Ukraine are also having an impact on both business and consumer spending, leading to fears of recession.
Microsoft released 59 updates in its September Patch Tuesday release, with critical patches for Microsoft Office and Visual Studio, and continued the trend of including non-Microsoft applications in its update cycle. (Notepad++ is a notable addition, with Autodesk returning with a revised bulletin.) We've made "Patch Now" recommendations for Microsoft development platforms (Visual Studio) and Microsoft Word.
Unfortunately, updates for Microsoft Exchange Server have also returned, requiring server reboots this time, too.
The team at Readiness has created this infographic outlining the risks associated with each of the September updates.
Low-code software company Airtable announced its second round of job cuts in nine months, laying off around 237 people, or approximately 27% of the company.
The cuts are part of a plan to focus the company on winning large enterprise clients and getting spending under control, CEO Howie Liu told Forbes, which first reported the layoffs. They follow job cuts made by the company in December 2022 that saw 254 people laid off.
What’s up with the iPhone radiation story? On the eve of Apple’s big iPhone 15 reveal, France demanded the company remove iPhone 12 from sale in that country because it said the product radiates too much.
Now that demand seems to be spreading across Europe.
What’s happening here?
The story so farANFR, the French agency that regulates these things, claims that certain iPhone 12 models emit unacceptable levels of electromagnetic radiation. The regulator subsequently ordered Apple to halt all sales of that model as of Sept. 12, pending a fix. Apple denied the claim, citing numerous radiation studies of its own, and now promises a software patch to bring the device into line with French regulations. But questions are now being asked across the EU, with Italy, Germany, and Belgium demanding a similar software patch.
Amazon has launched a new generative AI tool that creates copy listings for users selling items on the company’s e-commerce platform.
Designed to simplify the selling process, the new tool reduces the need for sellers to enter many pieces of specific product data when generating product descriptions. Instead, users can now enter a brief description of the product they are listing for sale – Amazon said this can be a few words or sentences – and the tool will generate the necessary copy, which sellers can then review and refine before uploading their item to the Amazon catalog.
These days, a relatively clean and uncomplicated Windows 10 or 11 system disk might be home to more than 250,000 files and 90,000 folders. A more complex, application-heavy system disk might contain between half a million and a million files. My Windows 11 production PC has over 970K files and 275K folders, for example. That’s a lot of stuff!
Indeed, all those files need not necessarily be kept around. That’s why it’s a good idea to practice regular disk hygiene. This is exactly what is explained and explored here, with plenty of examples and screen shots to illustrate the cleanup process. Best of all, the tools that help you tidy up won’t cost you a dime.
The iPhone has come a long way since its arrival in 2007.
First iPhone
IDG / Apple
After months of rumors and speculation, Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone on Jan. 9, 2007. The device, which didn’t actually go on sale until June, started at $499 for a 4GB model, $599 for the 8GB version (with a two-year contract). It offered a 3.5-in. screen, a 2-megapixel camera and won plaudits for the then-new multitouch features. Critics, however, said the phone was too expensive to do well in the market. (See iPhone launch story.)
The year’s most hotly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) in tech opened at the starting bell this morning, with ARM Holdings’ (ARM) stock beginning the day on Nasdaq at $51 per share. That’s the cost per share for the 10% of the company (95.5 million shares) Softbank is putting up for auction so far, aiming for a roughly $54 billion valuation on the stock.
The European Union is reportedly planning to move forward with a formal complaint against the way Microsoft sells Teams, even though the company publicly announced in August it would start unbundling the collaboration app from Office and Microsoft 365 packages in Europe.
Under the proposed plan, Microsoft would separate out Teams and sell its 365 application suites to customers within in the EU for a discounted annual rate, starting October 1.
“These changes … are designed to address two concerns that are central to the Commission’s investigation: that customers should be able to choose a business suite without Teams at a price less than those with Teams included; and that we should do more to make interoperability easier between rival communication and collaboration solutions and Microsoft 365 and Office 365 suites,” Microsoft said in a blog post announcing the changes.
Smartphones are arguably more powerful than PCs. Consider that the iPhone 12, at 11 teraflops, outperformed the Cray 2 supercomputer by over 5000 times. And that’s a now-three-year-old phone.
Even Samsung argues that modern smartphones are more powerful than PCs. Even if that isn’t true for high-end PCs, the performance of the two classes of devices is very close between top-end smartphones and high-volume PCs with integrated graphics.
What do you think about when you hear the words “the future of finance?” For most people, images of mobile payments, online banking, and other cutting-edge technologies come to mind. But what about decentralization? If you’re unfamiliar with the term, decentralized finance (DeFi) is a subset of blockchain technology that focuses on financial applications powered […]
The post How DeFi is Reshaping the Future of Finance appeared first on IT Business Edge.
While financial markets have rallied in recent weeks, there are still many enterprise software companies that are trading at depressed levels. It’s common for there to be losses of 50%+ for the past year. Just a few include Okta, Twilio, and DocuSign. This has also put tremendous pressure on funding for startups. During the second […]
The post Enterprise Software Startups: What It Takes To Get VC Funding appeared first on IT Business Edge.
RPA Tools automate repetitive time consuming tasks using machine learning (ML) and AI. Compare RPA Software now.
The post Top RPA Tools 2022: Robotic Process Automation Software appeared first on IT Business Edge.
The enterprise landscape is changing, and along with it cybersecurity needs. Employees are increasingly remote, applications are moving to the cloud, and IT infrastructure is becoming more complex, with IoT and mobile devices and branch offices among the many connection points outside of traditional firewalls. To keep up with all these changes, enterprises need a […]
The post Top Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Solutions appeared first on IT Business Edge.
In a world where data breaches are becoming increasingly common, it’s essential to take steps to protect enterprise information. That’s where data loss prevention tools come in. These tools can help companies protect their data from hackers, accidental deletion, insider threats and more. Businesses need to ensure the tools they use are practical and effective […]
The post Best Data Loss Prevention (DLP) Tools appeared first on IT Business Edge.
Analysis of data fed into data lakes promises to provide enormous insights for data scientists, business managers, and artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms. However, governance and security managers must also ensure that the data lake conforms to the same data protection and monitoring requirements as any other part of the enterprise. To enable data protection, data […]
The post Data Lake Governance & Security Issues appeared first on IT Business Edge.
Last year, Match Group – which operates online platforms like Tinder, Match.com and Hinge – shelled out $1.725 billion to acquire Hyperconnect. This was a play on the metaverse. Unfortunately, Match had challenges in making the strategy work. In the latest shareholder letter, Match CEO Bernard Kim noted: “I’ve instructed the Hyperconnect team to iterate […]
The post Metaverse’s Biggest Potential Is In Enterprises appeared first on IT Business Edge.
Keeping up with the ever-changing IT needs of a growing business can be a logistical nightmare. That’s why so many organizations have outsourced IT management to managed service providers (MSPs). Managed services continue to grow at a steady pace, boosted by remote work and the challenges of staffing an IT team with talent in high […]
The post Top Managed Service Providers (MSPs) 2022 appeared first on IT Business Edge.
The metaverse can be an intimidating term conjuring up visions of some futuristic virtual world, but it’s perhaps best viewed as virtual experiences brought to the internet, something akin to an interactive video game. There are huge obstacles to creating a larger world that spans individual virtual platforms, so for now it’s perhaps best to […]
The post The Value of the Metaverse for Small Businesses appeared first on IT Business Edge.
Mark Zuckerberg introduced Facebook’s rebranding to Meta at the company’s annual Connect event last year to reposition the company for the “new internet,” the metaverse. The metaverse has been around for some time as a kind of urban legend, perhaps aptly described in the 2011 science fantasy book Ready Player One. That was until some […]
The post How Revolutionary Are Meta’s AI Efforts? appeared first on IT Business Edge.
If you use Hyper-V to run your virtual machines on your Windows 11 computer, you may want to change the display resolution for one or two VMs. In this guide, we will cover simple methods with step-by-step instructions to adjust and optimize the display resolution in a Hyper-V environment. How do I adjust the screen […]
The post How to Change the Hyper-V Display Resolution [Windows 11 Guide] appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
Sometimes, you will see that your computer says everything is fine, but, at the same time, it just cannot recognize whether there is any internet connection. If you’re lucky, internet access for some websites will work normally, but this will be short-lived. You need to get to the root cause of the problem and address […]
The post Fix: No Internet, Secured Error on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
If you want to convert a dynamic disk to basic in Windows 11, you should first create a backup because the process will wipe all the data from it. Why convert dynamic disk to basic in Windows 11? According to Microsoft, dynamic disks have been deprecated from Windows and are not recommended anymore. Plus, Windows […]
The post How to Convert Dynamic Disk to Basic on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
A while ago we spoke about what you can do to fix a Kindle Book that won’t download. Now it’s time to speak about another problem, that is – the Kindle Book being unable to open. I went ahead and analyze all the solutions and grouped them by complexity. Basic Kindle Troubleshooting: 1.Check Internet Connection: […]
The post Kindle Book Won’t Open: Comprehensive Guide to Fix appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
It’s the era of Virtual Machines, and Hyper-V is often the preferred option amongst users, given its wide array of customizations and user-friendly setup. But accessing data on USB storage, or passthrough, remains a problem in Hyper-V on Windows 11. This is all the more important considering how common VMs are, be it for performance, […]
The post Set up Hyper-V USB Passthrough on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
It’s possible to adjust the number of processors in MSConfig, but changing this value will most likely cause stability issues on your PC. In today’s guide, we’ll answer if this feature improves performance and whether you should enable it on your PC, so without further ado, let’s get started. What is the difference between logical […]
The post Should I Change The Number of Processors in Windows 11’s MSConfig? appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard for digital design, loved and used by the online community daily. However, when keyboard shortcuts stutter or fail altogether, it can significantly slow down any project or your overall productivity on Windows 11. Whether you’re a seasoned designer or just dabbling in photo editing, these glitches can be more […]
The post Fix: Keyboard Shortcuts are Not Working in Photoshop appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
Windows 11 came with stringent requirements, and it would be a bummer to lose your hard drive and data after struggling tooth and nail to acquire that storage. Well, we come with good news that can help cushion you from a hard drive failure. With built-in Windows tools, you can copy all your data from […]
The post How to Setup RAID 1 on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
Windows 11 brings a fresh and elegant design to the forefront; the modern interface allows you to personalize & change the finest details, like window borders. In this guide, we will discuss step-by-step instructions to help you create an environment in the Windows operating system that reflects your style. How do I change the window […]
The post How to Change Window Border Settings on Windows 11 [Color, Size] appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
When you right-click an image or a video file, a context menu with a handy list of options appears, but sometimes it has unwanted options like Edit with Clipchamp. If you want to remove it to declutter the user experience on Windows 11, this guide can help! We will discuss three methods with step-by-step instructions […]
The post How to Remove Edit With Clipchamp From Context Menu on Windows 11 appeared first on Windows Report - Error-free Tech Life.
