A jungle out there When company calls Scam calls have become such a scourge that many consumers now don’t answer their phones unless they recognize the caller. A few months into the pandemic, T-Mobile rolled out Scam Shield, a set of services to help protect callers from potential fraud. However, consumers’ wariness has also gotten in the way of companies contacting consumers with updates on topics they care about, such as, for example, an appointment or reservation opening....

These courses offer accelerated and flexible schedules and give you the chance to show your mastery of a subject. Here, we examine the benefits of online tech courses and credentials and highlight some of the best options available. Quick look at free online tech course providers Why take a free online class that offers a certificate? The free online courses with certificates below may provide numerous benefits. Learners can find courses for the easiest programming language to learn and the most difficult....

Inkscape 1.0 is packed with new features and is now available in 20 languages with numerous performance improvements that should make it run noticeably more smoothly. Inkscape offers designers, artists, and scientists a free alternative to Adobe Illustrator. SEE: Digital transformation: A CXO’s guide (ZDNet special report) | Download the report as a PDF (TechRepublic) This version brings native MacOS support, meaning users no longer require XQuartz for Inkscape to work if they’re running El Capitan or newer....

On Thursday, the trade watchdog said the order will stop the San Jose, Calif.-based hardware giant from entering into exclusive deals that prevent television and internet service providers (ISPs) from shopping elsewhere for key components. The FTC’s complaint was first announced in June this year. According to the agency, Broadcom has “illegally monopolized markets for semiconductor components used to deliver television and broadband internet services through exclusive dealing and related conduct....

To be headed by Junichi Arahori, the new office will focus on implementing ethical measures related to the research, development, and implementation of AI and other machine learning applications. “This marks the next step in Fujitsu’s ongoing efforts to strengthen and enforce comprehensive, company-wide measures to achieve robust AI ethics governance based on international best-practices, policies, and legal frameworks,” the company stated. But Fujitsu is not the only Japanese tech giant thinking about AI applications....

Many remote workers need to keep office files on their home computers. Travelers are thrilled to take off once again, and they’ll likely capture storage-hogging images and videos with their new phones and packable drones. Everyone needs storage and backup for their critical and irreplaceable files. Fortunately, you can now make your life immeasurably easier with a lifetime of automatic backup and 10TB of storage from Degoo Premium. Better yet, you can use coupon code SAVE20NOW to score this plan for only $79....

The “Ethical Hacking with Metasploit: Exploit & Post Exploit” course is a crowd favorite, with students rating it an impressive 4.8 out of 5 stars. It’s offered by Oak Academy, which was founded by a group of tech experts who offer constantly updated courses specializing in critical skills such as coding, cybersecurity, IT, mobile, app monetization, game development, and more. You’ll learn Linux commands, penetration testing, and much more. Find out how to detect, prevent and combat security threats and improve IT security overall in “Cyber Security Analyst & Enterprise Architecture”....

The smart aspect of this air quality monitor also lets you enable routines with other Alexa-connected devices with the app, so you could, for example, turn on a fan when the temperature reaches 76F or turn on a dehumidifier when the humidity goes up. With the Echo device included in this bundle, you can ask Alexa to tell you the current indoor air quality, and you can assign different monitors to different rooms for better monitoring....

You may have managed to build a fantastic website without a line code, but now you have to create enough high-quality content to ensure its visibility in search rankings. That’s why it’s so satisfying to find all the tools you could need for fast, smart content creation with Autowriterpro. Autowriterpro has helped thousands of writers improve the speed and quality of their content, which has proven to be a great way of avoiding writer’s block....

There are all manner of reasons you might find yourself without power in your home. Unusually bad weather could do it, brownouts could turn into blackouts, and even equipment maintenance and repairs in your neighborhood could cause your electricity to go out for who knows how long. If you have devices, home appliances, or machinery that absolutely must have electricity at all times, then you need an emergency power supply....

GitHub Copilot, an AI pair-programming service, was made generally available a month ago at a cost of $10 per user per month or $100 per user per year. It’s an extension to Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code editor that suggests to developers code that they can accept, reject or edit. The code suggestions are generated by the natural language AI model based on OpenAI’s Codex, itself a version of GPT-3, and was trained on billions of publicly available lines of source code, including code published on GitHub....

MVSP was developed and backed by Okta, Slack and more. Google vice president of security Royal Hansen said it was “designed to eliminate overhead, complexity and confusion during the procurement, RFP and vendor security assessment process by establishing minimum acceptable security baselines.” “With MVSP, the industry can increase clarity during each phase so parties on both sides of the equation can achieve their goals and reduce the onboarding and sales cycle by weeks or even months,” Hansen said....

Not surprisingly, there’s been a subtle change in tone. Google has not necessarily abandoned the “Run like Google” messaging – something that’s always been core to the appeal of Google Cloud. “Run like Google” still comes out when Google discusses its approaches to zero-trust security, AI, and the global backbone that carries its traffic. But it’s also increasingly about meeting enterprises where they live, along with applying a touch of Google automation – such as the recently-introduced database migration service that makes lift and shift migrations of MySQL and PostgreSQL more of a pushbutton experience compared to similar services from AWS and Azure....

As Google Cloud’s Director of Global Gaming Solutions, Buser will report to VP of Industry Solutions Lori Mitchell-Keller. His first day in the new role will be September. 13. Buser’s new role sheds light on the evolution of Google’s gaming strategy, as it puts more focus on serving as a platform for third-party game publishers and developers. It also cements gaming as a crucial category for Google Cloud, putting it on par with a handful of other key verticals like healthcare, retail and manufacturing....

Google also confirmed the company’s commitment to supporting Matter, a new smart home standard that streamlines and improves the entire smart home experience, from setup to managing your devices. Here’s a quick rundown of everything Google announced, starting with new hardware. Available starting today: Nest Doorbell Wired Last year, Google’s Nest smart home brand revamped its entire home security camera lineup. At the time, Nest unveiled a smart doorbell that was either battery-powered or hardwired....

Having up-to-date information about tolls could be a major bonus for Google Maps users, allowing drivers to be more selective about which routes to take and helping them decide the trade-off between time savings and toll charges. Android Police reports that a member of Google Maps preview program was asked to take a survey to inform Maps developers how users would like to see the feature implemented. Reportedly, the feature will display toll prices, and perhaps even total toll charges along a given route, before the user selects it....

Users began reporting that while you could still get text directions, reviews, and recommendations, you couldn’t get the directions on the maps themselves. The problem, by the reports on Google Maps Platform Status Dashboard, is with the directions and several other Maps-related application programming interfaces (APIs). As of 3 PM Eastern, all these services were in a Service Outage state. Shortly, thereafter, Google announced, “Multiple Geo Enterprise services [were] experiencing high rates of error....

The app, 2FA Authenticator, was discovered by the Pradeo security team. According to a cached version of the app’s page on Google Play, the developer said the software provided a “secure authenticator for your online services, while also including some features missing in existing authenticator apps, like proper encryption and backups.” Update 8.57GMT, 5/2: The malicious app, 2FA Authenticator, is not the same and should not be confused with 2FA Authenticator (2FAS), which is available on Google Play....

The issue that Chrome update 103.0.5060.114 for Windows addresses is a “heap buffer overflow in WebRTC”, referring to when the buffer allocated in the heap portion of memory can be overwritten for nefarious means. WebRTC is the open web standard for building video and voice applications for real-time communications (RTC). It’s enabled by JavaScript in the browser and the standard is supported by all major browser vendors. SEE: These hackers are spreading ransomware as a distraction - to hide their cyber spying Google hasn’t offered any details on the bug, other than it’s been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-2294, has a “high”-severity rating, and that Jan Vojtesek of the Avast Threat Intelligence team reported it to Google on July 1....

That choice is provided by Google Cloud Platform, which unveiled a new parallel database, AlloyDB, today at Google’s I/O 2022 virtual conference. AlloyDB is built atop the popular open-source PostgreSQL DB that has been a standard choice for developers for more than three decades, so the new database could be both familiar and brand new to a good portion of its users. According to Gartner Research, 75% of the world’s databases are expected to be run in the cloud this year....