Archive for November 2022

Following announcements that Twitter under Musk will generate revenue by blue tick subscriptions, we look at what this means and at the blue tick chaos that followed the announcement. What Is this ‘Blue Tick’ ?  Twitter’s paid-for Blue service, launched last year, is a subscription service – $7.99 (£6.99) per month in the US, also…

Meta has announced that it is laying off a masive 13 per cent of its workforce globally in re-structuring market uncertainty about the Metaverse vision. Losses Lead To Layoffs  Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, announced the 11,000-employee layoff from Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, after Reality Labs, the division building the metaverse,…

Amazon is reported to be testing the machine learning ‘Sparrow’ robot arm that could handle 65 percent of its 100+ million diverse parcels. Challenge  Although Amazon already uses robot arms called ‘Robin’ and ‘Cardinal’ to re-direct boxed-up pre-delivery items around its warehouses, the challenge has been to create a robot arm that can detect, recognise,…

Zoom has announced that its new (beta) productivity tools, Zoom Mail and Calendar (clients and Services), combined with its existing features will mean that workers will have everything they need in one app. Give Workers A ‘Toggle Tax’ Break  Zoom says that the new productivity tool, working together with existing features within Zoom, such as…

Check Point’s latest Global Threat Index has highlighted how three particular malware families (info-stealers) made up approaching a fifth (16 per cent) of global detections in September. These are AgentTesla (RAT malware) that affected 7 percent of organisations, SnakeKeylogger, a Modular .NET keylogger and credential stealer that affected 5 per cent of organisations, and the…

Privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch has filed a complaint to the ICO that the face recognition search engine PimEyes may be unlawful, plus it could be enabling surveillance and stalking. What Is PimEyes?  PimEyes is a search engine that uses facial recognition technology to provide a reverse image search tool, and a photo search…

Meta’s WhatsApp has announced the global rollout of it ‘Communities’ feature along with in-chat polls, 32-person video calling, and groups with up to 1024 users. Communities  The Communities feature, for iOS and Android, allows users to connect multiple groups, e.g. schools, local clubs, non-profit organisations, and businesses together under one umbrella to organise group conversations…

In this insight, we look at how you can use voice commands to carry out tasks in Windows, plus how speech recognition technology can be used for voice control of different systems and devices. How Does Speech / Voice Recognition Work?  Voice commands can be used to carry out tasks in Windows, plus Android and…

Here we look at what Matter 1.0 is, its advantages for the IoT and setting up a smart home (or office), and what its current limitations are. What Is Matter?  Released just recently this October, Matter 1.0 is the new open standard that resolves interoperability and connectivity issues between all the IoT devices in smart…

Avanan researchers have warned that threat actors could send a phishing email through Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Voice CRM tool. This could be done by disguising it as an important voicemail from the customer where the “Play Voicemail” button redirects the victims to a phishing landing page. The advice to users is to look carefully…