Showing 1 - 10 of 37
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".
Connectivity conundrums
Life, James Hein, Published on 18/06/2025
» I'm travelling as I write this, so I thought it would be a good time to cover things like connectivity and the kind of issues I face even in 2025. Connectivity will typically revolve around your smartphone and I recommend you prepare for this in advance. Option one is a new sim card that you put in when you get to your destination.
Turning smart glasses into surveillance tools
Life, James Hein, Published on 23/10/2024
» I'm sure most readers are familiar with the Apple Vision Pro, and may have also been witness to someone wearing one out in the real world, because I have. Since then, there has been a new version of the Meta Ray-Bans that look like a pair of nerd glasses from the 1970s. The latter have turned into something from the TV series Person Of Interest by a couple of Harvard undergrads. The pair, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, are known for their punch-activated flamethrower. This time they built a system that allows the Ray-Bans to scan faces of people in view, pass this to an AI system that scans the internet for identification, and builds a dossier that is passed back to the glasses. It's called I-XRAY and challenges the concept of privacy because, if available, it will even provide details like address and social security number.
Bill has ways of forcing updates
Life, James Hein, Published on 22/05/2024
» If you are a Microsoft user, private or business, there is a site you should keep an eye on. Search "Microsoft end of life dates" and then select the result with the heading "Overview – Product End of Support and Retirements", associated with learn.microsoft.com. On the left-hand side there are years. Click on 2025, for example, and you will see that Office 2016 and 2019 products will no longer be supported after Oct 14 of that year. On that same date, Windows 10 will be retired. For both of these there will be no new security updates. For some, this will not be an issue, but organisations will need to take note as it means their security will be potentially compromised after a while. Even with Windows 10 still outselling Windows 11, Microsoft will be pushing people to upgrade over the next 18 months and for many, this will no longer be free. People and organisations tend to stick with what works and Microsoft doesn't like that, so it stops supporting older products. The site will tell you when you will start to be at risk and after that you can decide what to do.
Q&A, truth, lies, the web and you
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/04/2024
» The online world is changing and not necessarily for the better. I'm old enough to remember what you were looking for came up as the first search result, when there was a search facility, that is. The old Bulletin Boards kept their subject matter to the topic of the board with opinions kept to opinion sites. Sites on science were not one-sided as they presented the facts along with the supporting data for checking and verification. If people disagreed, they also brought their data along to challenge a thesis and a healthy and often robust debate followed. That was then.
Advertising ruins everything
Life, James Hein, Published on 28/02/2024
» Remember this day because I have a prediction. Recently, for the first time, I had two ads appear when watching a Rumble video. Rumble is a YouTube alternative that until now had been ad free. The platform allows those banned by YouTube for political reasons to make their presentations, along with anyone else who wants to post videos. My prediction is that the current ads, currently 30 second ones you can skip after a few seconds that appear at the start of your video, will gradually become more prevalent and longer, without being able to skip, and eventually will become as annoying as Facebook.
Graphene semiconductors mark new start
Life, James Hein, Published on 17/01/2024
» We have just started 2024 and there are already exciting announcements. The clever people at Georgia Tech in Atlanta have built the first scalable semiconductor using a graphene base. Graphene, a wonder product, is not a scalable semiconductor on its own, so they bonded silicon carbide, or what we call carborundum, to a layer of graphene creating the necessary bandgap to have a working switch. A switch means binary and from there they can make wafers like those currently used in the chip manufacturing process to make CPUs and other devices.
The World Wide Web turns 30
Life, James Hein, Published on 10/05/2023
» The public version of the World Wide Web turned 30 recently. Back in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee proposed a global hypertext system called Mesh. The next year he added a hypertext GUI browser and editor and called the result the WorldWideWeb. Inside CERN, people loved it and by January 1993 the world had around 50 HTTP servers. By February, the first graphic browser appeared known as Mosaic and by April of that year, CERN decided the project belonged to humanity and the public domain version of the WWW was born. The rest and billions of web pages later, is history.
Fact-checking AI content... Is it possible?
Life, James Hein, Published on 26/04/2023
» Everywhere I turn these days, there is another comment or opinion on artificial intelligence or AI. Digging a little deeper, it would appear the concerns are for what comes after GPT-4.
Reddit trumps Google search
Life, James Hein, Published on 15/02/2023
» Since my last column Twitter has had a number of technical issues, but I also found out that many of the problems I wrote about last time stem from the Content Management Head, not from Elon himself. Musk is putting in some very long days to try and get things sorted out at Twitter so it looks like he is nothing like the old boss in that respect. There remain a lot of traps in the code he inherited that will take time to sort out and may need a complete rewrite to address.