Showing 1 - 10 of 11
Microsoft put on the naughty step by Aussie regulator
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/11/2025
» Microsoft has been at it again. The Competition & Consumer Commission in Australia has started a legal process against the Redmond giant for apparently misleading users of the policies for its Microsoft 365 bundle. Microsoft advised users with a Personal and Family plan that "to maintain their subscription they must accept the integration of Copilot and pay higher prices for their plan, or, alternatively, cancel their subscription".
A new low in online scams
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/07/2024
» According to the Australia's Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), scammers are now targeting scam victims with fake offers to help them recover from scams. The con is to use information from those scammed in the past and approach these people with an offer to recover the funds they have lost for, of course, an up-front fee.
Microsoft gets more invasive
Life, James Hein, Published on 05/06/2024
» Microsoft Windows has added a new feature that will record everything you have ever done on your computer. It does this through a new AI feature called Recall for Copilot+ that allows Windows 11 to take screen snapshots every few seconds. Allegedly these are encrypted and saved to your hard drive (filling it up?). No, this is not a new episode of Black Mirror, but a disturbing change in Microsoft's attempt to track everything you do and fill up your hard drives. It may do this for your Zoom calls and meetings (it will record other people on the other end of a call without their permission). This may also include capturing the data you enter into secure forms, including passwords.
Prediction hits and misses for 2021
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/12/2021
» It is time once again to look back at 2021 to see what happened and how my predictions panned out.
Samsung again pushing foldables
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/08/2021
» Samsung is betting on foldables. The new Galaxy Z Fold 3 will come with IPX8 water resistance, support for the S-pen and an under-display selfie camera. It will be interesting to see how they solved the clarity issue Apple faced with that last one. The front screen will be an adaptive 7.6-inch 120Hz.
Big firms fuzzy on their AI thinking
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/10/2020
» Everything you see these days is AI enabled in some way, or according to the marketing they must be. Software, fridges, cancer detection and lots of other examples are all based on some kind of AI implementation. Google, Microsoft and all the big players are heavily invested in at least the buzzword, but the proof of delivery as promised is elusive.
Change is nigh?
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/10/2020
» A long-awaited US congressional report into Apple, Amazon, Facebook and Google has been published. The surprise for some is that this report from the Democrat-run House Judiciary Committee concludes that the online giants are monopolists that need to be broken up.
World wide the web isn't free
Life, James Hein, Published on 30/09/2020
» The dream of an open, transparent Internet that accepts all and their opinions is all but dead. The story starts on Jan 1, 1983, when the then ARPANET adopted the TCP/IP protocol and then really started to take off in 1990 after Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. It began like most things, simply, with topic driven bulletin boards and online forums, then it moved to personal websites and the first blogs. At the turn of the century this morphed into the Web 2.0 where social media platforms were developed and started to grow and opened up the world and different countries to each other at the personal level.
More data, more problems
Life, James Hein, Published on 01/01/2020
» It's time to make some predictions for 2020. A number were made by others a while back, most of which did not eventuate, like a Japanese base on the Moon, flying cars and a Beijing to London rail link. I'll try for a bit more realism.
AI deserves our human paranoia
Life, James Hein, Published on 14/08/2019
» For most of my IT career I have seen promises of the "silver bullet" application. The modern iteration of this is the overused promise of Artificial Intelligence. Every man and his dog are jumping onto this marketing bandwagon and Microsoft has been no exception making it part of their database offerings.