To help protect you from online dangers, I tested 30+ browser VPNs and shortlisted the best ones that protect your privacy. They all have browser extensions for most browsers that you can turn on or off with one click. However, they will only protect your browser and not your entire device, so take note when using other apps. My favorite browser VPN is ExpressVPN, as its user-friendly browser extensions, fast speeds, and robust security features let you browse safely and efficiently....

At the Enter, the Metaverse conference in London, in December 2021, UK Palo Alto, CA-based Together Labs announced its VCORE ERC-20 token, which will become available to users solely outside of the US and Canada in 2022 via its avatar-based social platform IMVU. The token will allow users to influence the ‘future of the metaverse’. The IMVU platform currently has over 200,000 active creators and over 1,000,000 daily active users, which is available as a desktop experience or via an iOS or Android app....

Whether these employees would actually quit is another matter, but at least when asked by YouGov in a survey commissioned by Microsoft — an advocate of hybrid work — some 51% would quit if the current mix of remote and office work vanished. As Microsoft contends in a blogpost, hybrid work has become a “must-have” as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. SEE: Want to get things done in tech?...

It’s too easy to be mean. It’s too easy to be anonymously venomous. And then there’s government. When has that ever been a vehicle for happiness? Well, except for when it does things we like, or that benefit us. Therefore, I am risen to rapture that a government has taken it upon itself to do citizens an actual favor. Naturally, this gesture of generosity is being enacted in San Francisco....

Security advisory reports on August 24th, 2021 indicated that two security vulnerabilities were plaguing OpenSSL itself, one of which was marked as high-severity. What is OpenSSL? OpenSSL is a ‘library’ that is instrumental to the functioning of internet servers. More importantly, it is used by the majority of HTTPS-enabled web pages. According to the official web page of OpenSSL, “OpenSSL is a robust, commercial-grade, and full-featured toolkit for the Transport Layer Security (TLS) and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocols....

Past the obvious issues, however, you’ll find a powerhouse of personal safety and privacy. The exhaustive set of Blur tools can help anyone secure their personal online browsing experience, so it’s definitely a tool we recommend — as long as it fits your budget. Abine Blur Review: In a Nutshell Unfortunately, Abine Blur Premium is only available in the US, the UK, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. If you want to enjoy all of its features, you’ll need a payment method from one of these countries....

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission’s (ACCC) proposed measures, outlined in a discussion paper [PDF], are aimed at providing new tools to cover anti-competitive conduct, barriers to entry, bargaining imbalances, and insufficient consumer and business user protections. Outgoing ACCC chair Rod Sims said last week the core proposals would take the form of a new code of conduct, comprised of upfront rules, that seek to “prevent the worst abuses of dominance and protect consumers”....

Relying on a strong digital core to adapt and innovate at lighting speed, leaders are growing revenues 5x faster than laggards today, versus only 2x faster between 2015 to 2018, according to Accenture research. The result is a wave of companies racing to reinvent themselves and use technology innovations to shape the new realities they face. The Accenture Technology Vision 2021 report identifies five key trends that companies will need to address over next three years to accelerate and master change in all parts of the business: Here are very interesting and powerful research finding from the Accenture Tech Vision 2021 report that validate the five technology trends which will shape the future: A recent study revealed that digital leaders (the top 10% of companies leading technology innovation) achieve 2-3x revenue growth as compared to their competitors – a widening divide that Accenture calls the “Digital Achievement Gap....

As the technology improves, enterprise investment will surely follow. According to Gartner, AI chip revenue totaled more than $34 billion in 2021 and is expected to grow to $86 billion by 2026. Additionally, the research firm said, less than 3% of data center servers in 2020 included workload accelerators, while more than 15% are expected to by 2026. IBM Research, for its part, just unveiled the Artificial Intelligence Unit (AIU), a prototype chip specialized for AI....

Misconfigurations Afflict Cloud Security Cloud adoption has doubled over the past two years. With this has come an increase in news reports covering data breaches originating from misconfigured cloud-based database servers. Data breaches that have led to large volumes of sensitive and private data being leaked online. Last month, Censys, a security firm specializing in censuses, conducted a scan of various cloud providers. The aim of the scan was to ascertain what types of servers were being left exposed on the cloud....

“AMD is at the forefront of innovation in the PC industry, delivering unmatched experiences for creators, professionals, and gamers,” Saeid Moshkelani, SVP and GM of AMD’s client business unit, said in a statement. “The new AMD Ryzen 6000 Series processors bring remarkable efficiency for impressive battery life, unbeatable built-in graphics and optimized performance to deliver the best AMD has to offer to every type of notebook user.” AMD announced the Ryzen 5000 series last year at CES....

FLYR Labs, makers of the data and AI-driven Revenue Operating System for airlines, travel, and transportation, today announced it has secured $150 million in Series C. ZDNet caught up with Mans to find out more about the investment and FLYR’s product and growth. Software as a Service for the aviation industry “Growth” and “airlines” are hard to use in the same sentence these days. As a recent McKinsey report put it, it’s difficult to overstate just how much COVID-19 has devastated airlines....

TOPG: The best way of handling the problem of native advertising is two-fold. First, education. Many people, if not most, don’t understand what it is (in a nutshell, native advertising is a way of disguising advertising to look like legitimate content – a review, top 10 list, blog post, article, etc). Second, making it clear that it will be called out and not tolerated. I do my best to do this on the comparison chart and my interactions with users....

Google last September introduced Live Caption, Now Playing and Smart Reply as features within Android’s Private Compute Core (PCC), which lives in an isolated virtual sandbox within Android 12 and onwards, shielding PCC and its features from the OS and apps. It also introduced and more recently open-sourced Private Compute Services (PCS), a “private path” to update and improve machine-learning models without trampling on user privacy. Data handled in PCC goes via PCS to Google’s cloud....

Now get this – going forward, the Apache Cassandra project is planning to commit to 6-month release cycles. Hold that thought. The 4.0 release was positioned by the community as a fairly boring release – in that the brunt of the effort was in locking things down to make this the most stable dot zero release in Cassandra history. Pre-4.0, dot zero Cassandra releases would have bugs that would have wound up being patched in subsequent dot releases....

According to a security advisory dated October 5, the bug is known to be actively exploited in the wild. Apache HTTP Server is a popular open source project focused on the development of HTTP server software suitable for operating systems including UNIX and Windows. The release of Apache HTTP Server version 2.4.49 fixed a slew of security flaws including a validation bypass bug, NULL pointer dereference, a denial-of-service issue, and a severe Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerability....

API Announcement Apple and Google announced the system only two weeks ago, but now the proposal for the API has been revised. The Bluetooth-based Covid-19 contact tracing platform works like many of the other tracing apps. Apple and Google will provide the building blocks for an app which should also guarantee privacy and security. Public health authorities can then take these building blocks and build an app. Initial Concerns One of the worries about the initial plan concerned a daily tracing key....

This makes it easy to stay objective about the products I cover, but it also has its downsides. It’s an expensive habit to buy all these Apple products on a yearly basis, although I see it as the cost of doing (my) business. But paying my own way also means that I get to experience every hiccup of being a regular Apple customer on the rare occasions that it happens....

Bloomberg reports that Apple sent a memo to staff on Thursday advising them of the new timetable, which has shifted from early September to October, and now to January 2022. Apple’s plan, once workers are required to return to offices, demands that employees are present at the office Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Remote work will be permitted on Wednesday and Friday. The memo from Deirdre O’Brien, Apple’s head of retail and people, urged employees to get vaccinated – however, vaccination and testing are not currently mandatory....

The attackers used FORCEDENTRY to remotely exploit the target’s device and infect it with the spyware Pegasus. The researchers believe that a client of NSO Group is behind the attack. NSO Group has faced intense public scrutiny for its spyware amid reports of its misuse by NSO’s clients. The exploit has raised concerns over the ease of such attacks, and whether Apple is doing enough to protect its users....