Supposedly Free VPN Service Between February 2016 and October 2017, Facebook, along with subsidiaries Facebook Israel and Onavo, offered the Onavo Protect app to Australians for free. Users could download the software application for free to “keep their personal activity data private, protected and secret”. The VPN service was available through Google Play and Apple’s App Store for a year and a half. In reality, Onavo Protect did not do what it promised at all....

The partnership will see IonQ and Accenture join forces to help other businesses assess how quantum computing could help improve their outcomes. With Accenture’s client list spanning 120 countries and more than three-quarters of the Fortune Global 500, this could go a long way towards bringing quantum computing further into the mainstream. Accenture works with C-suite executives to assist them with their digital transformation goals. Those goals are now more likely to include the adoption of quantum computing to address various mission-critical business problems in industries like life sciences, financial services or supply chain management....

The main problem that our customers are facing today is that about 80% of the most sensitive or private files reside within applications like CRM, ERP, online services, corporate bank accounts, job recruitment services, warehouses, or any other data source being used by the organization, regardless of their location. So with 80% of sensitive business data residing in those applications, users continue to be the weakest link, not because they are malicious, but because they are negligent....

Executives from Agora and dozens of others spoke at the company’s RTE2021 conference this week, touting the ways real-time engagement technology has gained prominence, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. With millions stuck working and learning from home, Agora said there had been an explosion of interest in using real-time engagement for everything from healthcare services to gaming, educating and even working. The technology’s growth in usage has coincided with the emergence of metaverse tools that seek to create digital worlds where people anywhere can congregate, share and collaborate online....

According to reports on the Outages list, which is the central mailing list for ISP and network operators to report and track major internet connection problems, and numerous Reddit threads, the major Content Delivery Network (CDN) Akamai is the root of the problem. Specifically, people are reporting that when they try to reach sites that use Akamai to host their DNS CNAMEs they can’t reach them. The sites are fine....

Citing an unnamed source, City.am said on Monday that the project was “pretty much ready to roll” and its creation had come from the top – from former chief executive Jeff Bezos himself. It was added that the tech giant was also investigating the potential of developing its own token. At the time of writing, 1 BTC is worth $37,259. In May, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said the company would stop accepting BTC due to its high energy requirements, causing the price of the coin to crash....

Echo Show can be mounted on a wall and used as everything from a shared calendar to kitchen TV or a hub for the home. A new user interface revolving around widgets adds weather, to-do lists, keep an inventory of devices and monitor lamps, security cameras and other items. Key items include: Echo Show 15 uses AZ2 Neural Edge Processor. Computer vision workloads can be handled on device. Personalized experiences via visual ID based on an individual....

Google first announced Android 12L in October. When it launched the first beta in December, Google partnered with Lenovo to bring the test build to the Lenovo Tab P12 Pro tablet. The new OS brings changes to the home screen, lock screen, notification shade, device set-up screens and settings. The changes are largely designed to give users more information on the screen. For instance, with a two-column layout, users will be able to make changes to features in Settings without having to go in and out of each section....

Well, those abandoning the Android platform and switching to iPhone helped. Here’s what Apple CEO Tim Cook had to say during the earnings call that followed the release of the third-quarter results: “Turning to iPhone. We set a June quarter record for both revenue and switchers to iPhone.” “Switchers” are what Apple calls those moving to the iPhone from another platform. And since the death of the Windows Phone platform, these switchers are coming from Android....

A software update for the iPhone will enable the feature, but users will also need to use a third-party app. Apple announced that Stripe will be the first payment platform to work with Tap to Pay for iPhone through the Shopify Point of Sale app this spring. Apple also noted that other payment processors and apps will follow later this year. To be clear, Tap to Pay for iPhone isn’t limited to only accepting payments from other iPhone users....

See also: The 4 best iPad models of 2022 iPad owners should see the update available as iPadOS 16.1 but Apple rather confusingly has announced it as iOS 16 since this is its first release after Apple delayed the operating system update in order to make improvements to Stage Manager. So, this release is the first official version of iPadOS 16 and comes a week after Apple unveiled new M2 iPad Pros and the 2022 entry-level 10th Gen iPad....

After using the M2 MacBook Air daily for over two months, I can confirm that the midnight black finish is indeed a fingerprint magnet – although the fingerprints easily wipe away. I’m also happy to assert that the extra $200 is well worth the performance boost, for those who need it. The M2 MacBook Air also includes a host of other refinements that combine to make this one of the most impressive laptops ever made....

I am of the paranoid sort, and online advertising never fails to set my suspicion on high alert. But I do get it… companies have to keep the lights on, and ads have always been the easiest (although not always most successful) means of monetizing just about any online thing. However, recent news about the Android lock screen concerned me more. Let me explain. There’s a mobile ad company named Glance (a subsidiary of InMobi), which is a mobile marketing platform based in India....

ARK Invest defines “disruptive innovation” as the introduction of a technologically enabled new product or service that potentially changes the way the world works. ARK focuses solely on offering investment solutions to capture disruptive innovation in the public equity markets. ARK released their annual BIG IDEAS 2022 research report centered around the belief that five innovation platforms are evolving and converging at the same time: Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, Energy Storage, DNA Sequencing, and Blockchain Technology....

Neil Thompson, an MIT research scientist at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and the Sloan School of Management, recently sounded a warning about the waning of Moore’s Law, and how it may hold back innovation in critical areas. “We are already seeing increased interest in designing specialized computer chips as a way to compensate for the end of Moore’s Law,” he says. “But the problem is the magnitude of these effects....

The request for an appeal was denied as Assange’s application did not raise “an arguable point of law”, according to a court spokesperson. The 50-year-old Wikileaks founder has been wanted in the US since the early 2010s for his role in publishing thousands of classified documents on the WikiLeaks website. Assange faces an 18-count indictment from the US government that accuses him of conspiring with former US Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning to hack into US military databases to acquire sensitive secret information and publishing the unredacted names of sources in Iraq and Afghanistan that provided information to the US....

“Because we can,” two sociologists tell Kate Crawford in Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence, by way of acknowledging that their academic institutions are no different from technology companies or government agencies in regarding any data they find as theirs for the taking to train and test algorithms. Images become infrastructure. This is how machine learning is made. Everyone wants to talk about what AI is good or dangerous for – identifying facial images, interpreting speech commands, driving cars (not yet!...

On the connections front, the company said it now sat at 4.9% of NBN market share. The telco said it reached almost 401,000 customers overall, an increase of 7.4% over 3 months, which consisted of 363,000 residential lines, 35,400 business connections, and 2,100 white label and wholesale lines. The company said it has also begun to break out white label and wholesale customers as it expected it to be a source of growth....

If you’re in the market for a laptop able to handle today’s resource-heavy games, we at ZDNET have found a deal on a gaming notebook worthy of consideration. The Acer Predator Triton 300 gaming notebook, available at US retailer B&H, typically costs consumers around – or over – $1,500. However, B&H is currently offering a discount of $270, bringing the price down to $1,312. The thin and light Acer Predator Triton 300 gaming notebook has a 16-inch WQXGA (2560 x 1660) IPS display with an impressive refresh rate of 240Hz....

According to a press release, travel spending increased almost 120% year over year, with retail and food spending also seeing growth. Credit card spending as a whole increased 28%. Consumer spending was up 24% over pre-pandemic 2019 levels, and a total of $3.8 trillion was made in payments in 2021. The company said this is an indication that the economy is in a good position going into 2022. Air travel was up 160% over the previous year, and November and December 2021 both saw record spending around the holidays....