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In light of potential delivery delays, new stay-at-home orders, and potential restrictions on our high streets, it’s worth ticking off items on the Christmas shopping list slightly earlier this year – if at all possible – and there are some great technology gifts and gadgets out there worth considering. The holiday season may not be full of cheer; however, there are some cool and useful tech gifts available – and some of them might tempt the gift-giver, too....

The upcoming California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) is considered a pioneer in data privacy and it strengthens the current California Consumer Privacy Act with stricter rules. Enforcement is also beefed up with the creation of the California Privacy Protection Agency (CPPA) plus the ability of individual Californians to file suits against companies for non-compliance. The law was passed November 2020 and it applies to any company of sufficient size that does business in California which includes online sales without requiring a physical location....

Right now the cuckoo is the Australian government, and boy are they ramping up the rhetoric. Last Thursday, Prime Minister Scott Morrison and two other senior ministers called on the tech giants to identify their users, telling them that if they didn’t do so then they were no longer platforms, immune from prosecution. They would be publishers, subject to Australia’s tough defamation laws. Social media is a “coward’s palace”, Morrison said....

The Jerusalem Post and Haaretz reported that Benbenisti decided against replacing current CEO Shalev Hulio after the US Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security added NSO Group to the Entity List “for engaging in activities that are contrary to the national security or foreign policy interests of the United States” last week. NSO Group did not respond to requests for comment, but it did confirm Benbenisti’s decision to Haaretz....

“In two years, models got a thousand times bigger and they required a thousand times more compute,” says Andrew Feldman, co-founder and CEO of AI system maker Cerebras Systems, summing up the recent history of neural nets in an interview with ZDNet via Zoom. “That is a tough trajectory,” says Feldman. Feldman’s company this week is unveiling new computers at the annual Hot Chips computer chip conference for advanced computing....

It was just a couple of months ago that we reviewed the Swift X, a svelte notebook that packed performance thanks to AMD’s Ryzen 7 processor and Nvidia discrete graphics. Now Acer is adding new versions with Intel instead, specifically the just-launched 12th-generation “Alder Lake” Core processors. The 14-inch SFX14-51G is the Intel analogue to the AMD version we previously looked at, while the SFX16-52G adds a 16-inch edition to the Swift X family....

The UX9702 is able to handle at least 30,000 folding cycles, according to Asus. Under the display, the foldable has Alder Lake U-series silicon with Iris Xe graphics, a pair of Thunderbolt ports, 5MP camera, and a 75Wh battery. Without its Bluetooth keyboard, the device weighs 1.6kg, and is 8.7mm thick when unfolded. The Intel Evo-compliant Zenbook will be available in the middle of the year. Asus also decided to create the Zenbook 14X OLED Space Edition UX5401 because it’s been 25 years since one of its P6300 laptops spent 600 days on Mir without failing....

Such a situation was pointed out by Can I Phish CEO Sebastian Salla who scanned 1.8 million Australian domain records in search of email security snafus. The mistake Salla was looking for was within SPF records, which handles individual IP addresses, but also IP ranges. If an organisation had entered a wide IP range, and had their email infrastructure sitting on a cloud provider, which reuse IP addresses unless an organisation pays extra for a dedicated IP address, there could be scope to take over an address covered by someone else’s SPF record....

Be it reading material, entertainment, love or merely food, an app will make the longing go away. As the pandemic has continued to change human behavior, the fast-food business has barely believed its good fortune. For a long time, many restaurants were closed. The likes of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Chick-fil-A had ready-made drive-thrus. They could satiate those ready to salivate. For some, though, this brought an unexpected customer problem....

The two new features are aptly named Energy Saver and Memory Saver, and should make the most popular browser a more efficient application on Windows, MacOS and ChromeOS. Users can turn each of the efficiency modes on via Settings in Chrome under Performance. The Energy Saver setting is intended for situations such as traveling, where you’re likely to be disconnected from a power source for extended periods. Google notes that Energy Saver can impact gaming and video performance....

CISA has re-added the Windows flaw CVE-2022-26925 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) Catalog and has told federal agencies to patch it by 22 July. The bug is in Windows Local Security Authority (LSA), which “contains a spoofing vulnerability where an attacker can coerce the domain controller to authenticate to the attacker using NTLM.” SEE: Best Windows laptop 2022: Top notebooks compared NTLM or NT Lan Manager (NTLM) is a legacy Microsoft authentication protocol for Active Directory that was implemented in Windows 2000....

The Cybersecurity And Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added three batches of must-fix bugs to its catalog of known exploited software vulnerabilities this week. The first covered 21 bugs, the second 20 known exploited bugs and the third covers a further 34. US federal agencies are required to patch the flaws by CISA’s deadline. Not all of these flaws are at the cutting edge of technology: this lot of patches also includes very old bugs in software like Microsoft Silverlight, which reached end of support in October 2021, and Adobe’s dead Flash Player plugin....

As usual, the big three dominated cloud infrastructure spending, accounting for 61% of the $53.5 billion in Q4 2021, according to analyst Canalys. SEE: Cloud computing is the key to business success. But unlocking its benefits is hard work Growth followed the standard order, too: though still a loss-making part of Alphabet, Google Cloud revenues grew fastest at 63% year on year, followed by Azure’s 46%, and AWS’s 40%. Signaling the industry’s maturity, cloud infrastructure spending year-on-year growth has slowed from 2018 levels of around 50% to this quarter’s 34%....

Sung Rhee, CEO of Switchup’s parent company Optimal, said his team analyzed data from LinkedIn to see which coding bootcamps had the highest number of alumni employed at the Big Five and how they compared to those with four-year degrees. Of all the bootcamps, Code Fellows topped the list, with 11.15% of its graduates working for one of the Big Five. Hackbright Academy, Hack Reactor and Product School were the next three bootcamps on the list, each hovering around 4% of 5% of graduates securing positions at the Big Five....

If you love doing jigsaw puzzles, then you know the feeling of satisfaction when you finally complete one. But it’s even more exciting to finish a puzzle knowing that you are guaranteed to win a cash prize, possibly as much as a million dollars. And that’s precisely what you might win with The 2 Million Dollar Puzzle. MSCHF, which gave you The Million Dollar Puzzle, has brought you two more chances for an enormous win....

Consider these recent developments: We could toss in a few other examples, such as AT&T separating from its media business too. The rationale for these conglomerate breakups is pretty straightforward. These giants became large and cumbersome and were weighed down. By splitting up, these companies’ offspring can perform better with more focus. When the growth goes, so does the rationale for a conglomerate. The argument for conglomerates–the idea that magic management can run any business – fades away....

Total revenue for the 12 months was AU$377.6 million, down from last year’s AU$417 million. Of that, managed services accounted for more than half, coming in at AU$237 million. This was followed by sales of goods including hardware, software, enterprise network solutions, network infrastructure, system devices, and lighting equipment, which earned the company AU$68 million during the financial year. The remainder was other services and professional services. The Australian arm of the Japanese conglomerate took nearly AU$442 million from customers, slightly lower than the AU$475 million during the 2020 financial year....

Most of us know the frustration of finding that information we need for a document is buried inside a PDF. And even if you don’t need to convert PDF files into other formats very often, it’s still inconvenient to have to go searching for a free online PDF converter every time. Fortunately, if you’re looking for ways to reduce stress in your life, a lifetime license for PDF Converter Pro lets you convert all the PDFs you like forever....

Coming on the heels of the Mac’s rebirth as the iMac, the iPod marked a new era for Apple, one that would eventually shift the bulk of its business to pocket-sized products and lead to it dropping “Computer” from its name. Even though the non-iOS iPods were discontinued in 2017, the iPod name has lived on in the iPod touch, the least expensive gateway to Apple’s mobile app ecosystem long positioned as an inexpensive device for pre-teens for mobile games and, of course, music....

On Thursday, Checkmarx security researcher Paulo Silva revealed the discovery of multiple security failings in the Coursera online learning platform, which caters to millions of learners, both at home and in the enterprise. The company collaborates with over 200 universities and companies, including Stanford University, Duke University, AWS, Google, Cisco, and IBM. Courses on offer range from degrees in the STEM field to shorter classes in health, the humanities, and languages....