Archive for December 2020

As 2020 draws to a close, here is look back on some of the biggest tech stories and issues in the year that was dominated by the effects of a global pandemic. Disastrous The shocking death toll and infection rates, the lockdowns, hardship, and job losses for large numbers of the population, huge pressure on…

Microsoft has announced that its new Authenticator App will also work as a password manager which will allow passwords to be synced across desktop and mobile devices (iOS and Android) as well as Edge and Google Chrome browsers. Free Authenticator The free Microsoft Authenticator app is currently only available as a public preview version in…

It has been reported that Facebook’s WhatsApp will be introducing voice and video calling to its WhatsApp Web desktop version next year. Pandemic Boosted Demand WhatsApp, which has around 2 billion users globally, is currently used mainly for personal calls in addition to text chat, sending videos and photos. The need for businesses to enable…

A survey commissioned by PCI Pal® shows that Christmas online shoppers appear to be more concerned about prices and the speed and cost of deliveries than the security of their personal data. Priority Ranking The survey asked 2,002 online shopper adults aged 18-65 in the UK to rank purchase factors such as the price of goods,…

In Windows 10, using Microsoft Edge, here’s how you can block annoying autoplay ads and videos on a web page: – Click on the 3 dots (top right) and select ‘Settings’. – Select ‘Cookies and site permissions’ (middle of the left-hand menu). – Scroll down to ‘Media Autoplay’ and set to ‘Limit’. – Refresh the…

Doubt has again been cast on the effectiveness of HMRC’s IR35 tax status checker tool after news that it failed to provide a response in nearly 20 per cent of cases. IR35 The IR35 tax reform legislation that is designed to stop tax avoidance from ‘disguised employment’, which occurs when self-employed contractors set up their…

South Korean car manufacturer, Hyundai Motor Group, has agreed to buy a controlling stake in robot maker Boston Dynamics. Boston Dynamics Boston Dynamics, which is currently owned by Tokyo-based multinational conglomerate holding company Softbank Group Corp., is an American engineering and robotics design company founded in 1992 as a spin-off from the Massachusetts Institute of…

Google’s DeepMind AI machine learning program has solved a genetic protein challenge, the result of will dramatically change biology and could bring many medical benefits. The Challenge Proteins are the building blocks of cells and, for more than half a century, scientists have been trying to find a way to accurately predict the 3D shape…

If your computer’s getting a little slow and you would like to save time by having a faster computer startup with Windows 10 by trimming down the number of programs that try to load on startup, here’s how: – Go to Settings > Apps > Startup. – Look at the list of programs, whether they’re…