Author: Mike

Providing IT support and solution to small and medium businesses. Servicing Edinburgh, Livingston, Fife and surrounding areas. Responsive, Flexible, Professional and friendly local support.

Facebook … Face Recognition Woes

Facebook is in the news yet again, this time for having to face a class action lawsuit for allegedly gathering biometric information without users’ explicit consent, via facial recognition technology. What Facial Recognition Technology? A facial recognition technology feature in Facebook’s platform suggests who might be present in uploaded photos, based on an existing database…
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Google, The Law and Your ‘Right To Be Forgotten’

A businessman has won the “right to be forgotten” by Google after taking his case to the High Court, because he wanted a past crime he had committed to be removed from Google’s search engine results. What Crime? The (un-named) businessman was hoping to remove details from Google of a conviction from 10 years ago,…
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Tech Tip – Emails: ‘Undo Send’ … !

If you use a Gmail account, and if you’ve ever sent an email and then experienced the terror of immediately wishing that you hadn’t, you could find the ‘Undo Send’ feature very useful. The Undo feature allows you to set a buffer / cancellation time period between the time that you hit the send button…
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Facebook Notifies People Affected By Scandal

Facebook has begun notifying any of those users whose data is known to have been harvested and shared with data mining firm Cambridge Analytica. On Your News Feed If you are one of the 87 million people whose data has been shared, 1 million of whom are in the UK, when you log into your…
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Apple Claims 100% Renewable Energy At All Data Centres

The latest energy report from Apple has stated that the company has hit a new milestone in green energy usage by making all of its 43 data centre sites across the world operate using 100% renewable energy. Not Quite What It Seems Although the effort is admirable, the claim that has led Apple’s CEO Tim…
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Digital Number Plates

Dubai is once again in the news for being an adopter of new technologies after an announcement that it will be hosting a trial of digital vehicle number plates next month. Smart Plates The ‘smart plates’ will have digital screens, GPS and transmitters, and according to the head of the Vehicle Licensing Department at Dubai’s…
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1 In 10 Fooled By Social Engineering Attacks

A new report by security firm Positive Technologies shows that 1 in 10 employees would fall for a social engineering attack. What Is A Social Engineering Attack? Social engineering cyber-attacks rely upon the element of human error e.g. convincing / fooling a person into downloading malicious files, unwittingly corresponding with cyber-criminals, sharing contact information about…
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Killer Bot Boycott

Reports that the state-run university-based ‘Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology’ (KAIST) has been working on military robot research with defence company Hanwa have resulted in threats of a boycott by more than 50 AI researchers from 30 countries. Killer Robots? Although the threat of the boycott of KAIST appears to have been effective…
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Tech Tip – Identify Objects In Your Phone Photos With Google Lens

If you’d like a handy way to search your photos and identify important buildings / landmarks, places, names, Wi-Fi passwords and other valuable contextual information depicted in them, Google Lens may be for you. For example, take a photo of a router’s password sticker and you’ll automatically connect to that network, take a picture of…
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Wearable Tech Could Help Solve Murder

Police in Australia are reported to be using data recorded by a murder victim’s Apple smartwatch to help catch her killer. Murder The victim and owner of the smartwatch was Grandmother Myrna Nilsson, who was found dead in the laundry of her Valley View home in Adelaide’s north-east in September 2016. The prime suspect in…
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