Tech Spite

Zoom has announced that users will need to keep their software more up-to-date more frequently. In an update to its support page , the company set out the oldest version of software that a user can use to sign in and join meetings, known as the minimum version.  The video conferencing software provider has announced that it will update this minimum version every 90 days (approximately 3 months), which it says is, “in line with industry practices”. Zoom updates Users on older build numbers will be unable to use the desktop client, and will be instead forced to update or use the web client. Right now, Zoom’s minimum requirement is 5.3.0 for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices. Read more > We've collected the best online collaboration tools > Zoom is about to get a lot more useful and powerful > Zoom for Mac users should update now to fix a massive security flaw If you’re already using the Fast Track auto-update version, you will likely be on the late...

Despite having tiny arthropod brains, spiders in a new experiment showed some complex cognitive calculations. from Wired https://ift.tt/QPex2sY

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere. Siri, Alexa and Google Assistant have become indispensable to millions of users. Tesla Autopilot has the potential to change driving forever. And IBM Watson took a new job providing big data solutions to corporations after its first job was in jeopardy. Those are just the most prominent examples. Helpful applications of AI are being deployed in a broad spectrum of industries, but AI also has the potential to be misused. About the author  Jason Egnal is Chief Marketing Officer at Zenfolio . His background spans a variety of industries, including SaaS, AI, Fintech and Consumer Electronics.  Zenfolio, the website builder and photo sharing site , recently introduced technology that applies AI to assist photographers in selecting the best photos from the thousands of shots typically taken during a photo session. The advanced image recognition technology is tremendously powerful and can make photographers more efficient than th...

Nvidia’s RTX 4080 has popped up at retailers with one graphics card showing at the MSRP in the US as we near the official on-sale date – but the news isn’t so good in the UK sadly (or elsewhere in Europe). So, the official MSRP in the US is $1,199 for the GeForce RTX 4080 (16GB version – which is the only variant now, of course, since the 12GB spin was canceled ), and we’ve also seen that it will retail in the UK at an MSRP of £1,269 (we’ll come back to that). This is the price Nvidia will sell for, but third-party custom versions of the RTX 4080 will command more of a premium in some cases, but not in every instance, and we’ve seen that illustrated with a PNY graphics card that has the official MSRP pinned to it. As Tom’s Hardware highlights, this is the PNY Gaming Verto RTX 4080 which is priced at bang-on $1,199 and might be up for pre-order before long, bearing in mind the 4080 isn’t officially on sale until November 16, just over a fortnight away yet. There’s also the faste...

If you're an avid practitioner or just like spooky kittens, this set of cards and guidebook are for you. from Wired https://ift.tt/9JFU836

We're not even a week in from Elon Musk becoming the owner (or 'Chief Twit' as he calls the position) of Twitter , and already his plans for overhauling the verification process sounds like a terrible idea. According to The Verge , Musk is planning to raise the monthly price of Twitter Blue, which gives you the ability to edit tweets , as well as get custom icons and exclusive features, from $4.99 / £4.99 / AU$5.99 to $19.99 / £19.99 / AU$20.99. By subscribing, Twitter Blue users will also now be verified, which gives them a blue tick next to their username - something that was once limited to verified users, such as notable public figures, politicians and members of the media. Users who are already verified will have a 90-day window to sign up for this new plan, or they will lose their blue tick. This could already be a fatal decision for the platform, especially when this could allow trolls with few followers to pay to get verified, making the blue tick system irrelev...

While we wait patiently for The Witcher season 3 , there's some good news and some potentially bad news for fans of the fantasy series: Netflix has renewed the show for a fourth season, but star Henry Cavill won't be returning as Geralt of Rivia. As per the Netflix announcement , Liam Hemsworth – perhaps best known as Gale Hawthorne in The Hunger Games series – will be stepping into the role. That casting change is just about the only information we have on season 4 at the moment. "My journey as Geralt of Rivia has been filled with both monsters and adventures, and alas, I will be laying down my medallion and my swords for Season 4," said the departing Cavill in a statement. "In my stead, the fantastic Mr. Liam Hemsworth will be taking up the mantle of the White Wolf." "As with the greatest of literary characters, I pass the torch with reverence for the time spent embodying Geralt and enthusiasm to see Liam's take on this most fascinating and nu...

When the brain encodes memories as positive or negative, a small peptide called neurotensin determines which way they will go. from Wired https://ift.tt/cA31SWe

From templates to online hosting, these services help show potential employers just how great you are. from Wired https://ift.tt/xpfRUiZ

The Google Pixel Tablet is taking its time on the journey between the first reveal of the device (May 2022) and it actually being available to buy (sometime in 2023), and that means a wide window of opportunity for leaks and rumors to appear. As spotted by the team at 9to5Google , we may have been given our first look at the software running on board the Pixel Tablet, via a blog post on keyboard shortcut updates that are coming to the Google Keep app on Android. It's difficult to know for sure, but it makes sense that Google engineers would already be using the tablet internally, and the size of the GIF scales up to the expected Pixel Tablet screen resolution of 2560 x 1600 pixels. Details, details The animated image doesn't tell us too much about how the Pixel Tablet is going to look in terms of its software, but we can see a docked row of icons along the bottom of the screen, and the familiar Android status bar along the top. That status bar is bigger than it would no...

It’s the early 2010s, and Mohit Lad and Ricardo Oliviera are working well into the evening, developing their internet monitoring software ThousandEyes in their startup’s first office in San Francisco. The city is energy conscious enough that the lights in the building will go off at 6pm on the dot, and it takes a phone call and a passcode to get things back up and running. Oliviera has had enough of this, and has written a script using Twilio, which offers APIs to automate phone calls. This works for a week, until the lights turn off of their own accord again. After frantically debugging the script in the dark, the founders realize that their script is absolutely fine. The problem is that Twilio is hosted on an Amazon Web Services (AWS) data center on the other side of the country, which has been brought down due to a storm. As he speaks from Austin, Texas in 2022, Lad thinks this was a prescient moment to describe the way the internet works today. The changing internet “Every t...

Gaming laptops are a great way to play the latest games when you're away from home, and they are increasingly powerful enough to make great desktop PC replacements for many gamers. It's no wonder then that gaming laptops are some of the most popular deals during Black Friday , especially because many of the best gaming laptops are also fairly expensive. This is even more true for laptops with RTX 3080 GPUs or high-resolution and high-refresh displays from top brands like Razer, Gigabyte, and Alienware. But with some good Black Friday gaming laptop deals , these laptops can see some dramatic price cuts, sometimes by more than $500/£500. But even if you're looking for something more in the midrange or budget category, there are still going to be some great cheap gaming laptop deals , and in many cases, you'll be able to find plenty, like the HP Victus 15 , that won't force you to sacrifice too much when it comes to hardware or performance. There are some laptop ...

What's next for the social network is anyone's guess—but here's what to watch as you wade through the privacy and security morass. from Wired https://ift.tt/eFc1TrC

Intel has announced plans to make a “meaningful number” of layoffs as part of wider cost-cutting measures. The chip giant says its expense reduction plan is set to slash costs by $3 billion in 2023, which it predicts will grow to between $8 billion to $10 billion in yearly cost reductions by the end of 2025. Intel chief executive officer Pat Gelsinger said the announcements were the results of “difficult decisions” but that the company needs “to balance increased investment in areas like leadership in TD, product and capacity in Ohio and Germany with efficiency measures elsewhere". What’s driving the layoffs? Intel's third-quarter revenue of $15.3 billion was down 20% year over year (YoY), while net income at the company nosedived 85% to $1 billion. Not all parts of the business were impacted equally, Intel’s driver-assist subsidiary Mobileye performed remarkably well, with revenues jumping up 38% to $450 million. The company’s data centre and AI division was not so luc...

Google is rolling out Version 107 of its Chrome browser which adds a variety of under-the-hood additions and makes some important tweaks to better protect you on the internet. Because of the 14 individual security fixes included in Chrome 107, we strongly recommend that you download the update as soon as it’s available to you. The most important one revolves around a zero-day vulnerability called CVE-2022-3723 . It's  a Type Confusion flaw affecting Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine. As it’s described by cybersecurity company Avertium , the flaw allows bad actors to “trick” the browser into running malware and making users think it’s legitimate data.  Avertium states that while Chrome V8 engine attacks are uncommon, they are among the most dangerous. And it appears this is the third time Google has patched a Type Confusion bug this year. One occurred back in March and the other in April .  As for the rest of the security patch , things aren’t as severe. You see fixes for...

Discord, Mastodon, and other services are bustling as Twitter fans make backup plans for their online social lives. from Wired https://ift.tt/AVOidb6

The metaverse could be used not just to facilitate crime in the physical realm, but could also be used for various other dangerous forms of cybercrime, as well, a new  warning from Interpol has warned. Interpol’s executive director for technology and innovation, Madan Oberoi, explained that member countries are growing increasingly concerned about possible metaverse crime and are already coming up with possible remedies. There are multiple ways the metaverse could be abused for crime, he said: "Some of the crimes may be new to this medium, some of the existing crimes will be enabled by the medium and taken to a new level."  Phishing evolved One of the most popular fraud methods - phishing - could take on a whole new meaning when virtual reality and augmented reality are thrown into the mix, Oberoi stated. What’s more, the question of child safety cannot be understated.  There are also ways for threat actors to use virtual realities to plan and practice future physic...

Apple has unveiled a new security hub and an upgraded bounty hunting program as it looks to improve the way it discovers, and remedies, different flaws and vulnerabilities in its ecosystem.  “Our groundbreaking security technologies protect the users of over 1.8 billion active devices around the world. Hear about the latest advances in Apple security from our engineering teams, send us your own research, and work directly with us to be recognized and rewarded for helping keep our users safe,” the new website reads.  The company's bounty system has been upgraded, Apple said, claiming it improved its response time, and simplified issue reporting and communication.  Tracking progress “First, we’re responding much more quickly. At times we received many more submissions than we anticipated, so we’ve grown our team and worked hard to be able to complete an initial evaluation of nearly every report we receive within two weeks, and most within six days,” the company explai...

Windows 11 has got a nifty new feature that allows for much more conveniently hooking up your PC to a mobile phone with the latter acting as a Wi-Fi hotspot, although the functionality is just in testing for now, and only works with Samsung smartphones . The ability to instantly access your phone’s hotspot is facilitated by the Phone Link app (formerly Your Phone), and it’s introduced in preview build 25231 in the Dev Channel (early testing channel for Windows Insiders). Instant hotspot means you can very swiftly connect to your handset’s hotspot just by clicking a button – assuming the device is in range – without having to touch your phone or mess around with any hotspot settings, typing in passwords and so forth. (Image credit: Microsoft) As mentioned, you need a Samsung device – running One UI 4.1.1+ to be precise – and your PC must support Bluetooth. You also need to be running the new preview build 25231 of Windows 11, of course, and have the Phone Link desktop app ...

Just when you thought your wallet was safe from a dangerously tempting new tech purchase, DJI casually drops a new teaser for what appears to be its next drone –and the rumors suggest its 'Explore Vivid' event will see the arrival of a cheaper version of its flagship DJI Mavic 3 . The launch of the so-called DJI Mavic 3 Classic is scheduled for November 2 at 9am EDT / 1pm GMT (which works out as 12am AEDT on November 3). And the big clue that it could be a new Mavic is that camera lens in the teaser.  It looks identical to the Hasselblad camera on the DJI Mavic 3, only without its telephoto lens and branding. And this tallies with some recent leaks , plus an FCC filing, that suggest a DJI Mavic 3 Classic is en route to give drone fans a more affordable way to own a flying Micro Four Thirds camera. As a DJI Mini 3 Pro owner, this concerns me. Not because my compact drone and a DJI Mavic 3 Classic would in any way be direct rivals – the Mavic series is now DJI's premium ...