VPNs, or virtual private networks, are a must to keep you safer online. Over the past few years over a dozen apps and services have sprung up to make using a VPN simpler, but many people still refuse to bother with the extra step. For those people, Opera has created a browser with the VPN built right into it.
The system is a free, no-log, easy-to-use VPN service that is available directly in the Opera desktop browser. The app released 20 September 2016, and the company stated that with this launch, Opera is the first major browser to release a built-in VPN service.
“If people knew how the internet truly works, I believe they all would use a VPN,” says Krystian Kolondra, SVP of Opera browser for computers
“By making our browser VPN free and easy to use, we hope to make it an essential tool, just as the lock and key is to your house”
Once enabled, Opera’s VPN creates a secure connection to one of Opera’s five server locations around the world.
Why do you need a VPN?
The VPN lets people choose where to appear on the internet, giving their online privacy and security a boost while making content easier to access. People can also let the Opera browser intelligently select the optimal server location based on factors such as network speed, latency, location and server capacity.
Not only does the VPN help keep your personal information and IP address masked, there are a few bonuses that many people like to use a VPN for. The first, and most popular reason to use a VPN, is accessing video content that is not offered in your area.
So Canadians or Australians, that use a VPN, could connect to an American server and go to Netflix and find all of our wonderful content waiting for them. Of course many companies try their hardest to prevent you from doing this, so it’s usually a game of cat and mouse between VPN servers and content providers.
With this one account, you can take your settings, preferences and files you have backed up on OneDrive with you across all your devices – and not just Windows devices5. Plus, you’ll only need to remember one user ID and password for all your Microsoft services.
One account for all things Microsoft
Sign in to manage your info, your purchases, your devices, your security and privacy. It’s all tied together with your admin Microsoft account.
Getting around your device in Windows 10
Search with the taskbar or Cortana2 – The easiest way to search the web, search your device and access and share the files on OneDrive is through the Windows search box on your taskbar or by simply asking Cortana.
Get to your settings – Update your settings and personalise Windows 10 the way you want.
Open settings
Touch3 or type
Interact with your device in the way that’s most natural.
Meet Cortana
You now have your very own personal assistant. Cortana2 works across your day and your Windows 10 devices to help you get things done. By learning more about you over time, Cortana becomes more useful every day.
Just talk or type and Cortana will help you Open apps, send emails and play music.
Your Microsoft account unlocks all of these free services, and more.
Terms:
1 Additional software and/or hardware requirements may apply over time for updates.
2 Cortana available in selected markets at launch; Cortana experience may vary by region and device. Some Cortana functionality requires Internet connection.
To use Cortana, your device must have the latest updates for Windows 10. To ensure that your device has the latest updates installed, go to your Start menu and type “Windows Update”, then click on Windows Update and follow the instructions.
3 Hardware dependent.
4 Chat available in selected markets. Free up-and-running phone and chat support available 24/7 in English only; available in most other languages during extended working hours. Fees apply for one-on-one technical support in China.
5 Requires Internet connection to sync.
READ SPEEDS FIVE TIMES FASTER THAN THE BEST MICROSD CARDS
The release of the UFS memory card is here. They come after microSD cards for removable storage.
UFS. Universal Flash Storage.
Samsung Electronics has just unveiled the industry’s first Universal Flash Storage (UFS) memory card that is designed to greatly improve user experiences, especially in high-resolution 3D gaming and high-resolution movie playback.
The company announced the world’s first removable UFS (Universal Flash Storage) memory cards, offering storage capacity of either 32, 64, 128, or 256 gigabytes, and performance speeds that simply blow older formats out of the water.
The UFS cards have sequential read speeds of up to 530 megabytes per second – five times faster than the best microSD cards. That means reading a 5 gigabyte, full HD movie in roughly 10 seconds, says Samsung, compared to a UHS-1 microSD card which manages the same feat in around 50 seconds.
Write speeds are also significantly improved, with rates of up to 170 MB/s. That’s nearly double the performance of the very fastest microSDs (this SanDisk Extreme Pro card, for example, has write speeds of up to 100 MB/s), but seven or eight times faster than the cards recommended to non-professionals.
Samsung says all this power is necessary to keep up with the abundance of high-resolution footage being generated by devices from smartphones to action cams, drones to 360-degree cameras. But while the new UFS standard has appeared as embedded memory in a few devices (notably Samsung’s own Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge), there are no products that yet support the cards as removable storage. We wonder if this is going to become a feature in new phones?
And while the design of the cards looks similar from the front, as you can see from the photo above, the pin configuration on the back is non-compatible. Price and availability have also yet to be announced for the range, so while UFS might be the cleartechnological successor to formats used in microSD cards, the roadmap for how it actually gets into consumers’ hands is less clear.
Still, if any tech company is going to be first to support removable UFS cards, it’s likely to be Samsung. Keep your fingers crossed for the next Galaxy smartphones.
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Google has officially announced that Android N is no longer Android N: it’s Android Nougat! released on June 30th, 2016.
The next trick is going to get people to actually pronounce “nougat” correctly.
Here’s all the official Android nicknames for their Operating Systems we could find:
Cupcake: Android 1.5
Donut: Android 1.6
Eclair: Android 2.0-2.1
Froyo: Android 2.2
Gingerbread: Android 2.3.3 – 2.3.7
Ice Cream Sandwich: Android 4.0.3 – 4.0.4
Jelly Bean: Android 4.1 to 4.3
KitKat: Android 4.4r
Lollipop: Android 5.0 – 5.1
Marshmallow: Android 6.0
Nougat: Android 7
They do keep it sweet – we think it works for them as it will always be easy to remember and a theme OS is like a themed party, much more interesting.
Thanks Android for keeping it simple and sweet!
Get ready for Android Nougat
Google Assistant
The new Assistant software will let you engage in more natural back-and-forth dialogue with the Android device than you can with Now (Google’s current digital and search assistant), in order to get things done, like research a restaurant and make a reservation.
Instant Apps
Timed with the release of Nougat but also available on phones running OS versions as old as Android Jelly Bean, Instant Apps lets you access or use certain apps without having to download and install said apps. This is especially useful for digital payment transactions, where you can pay with Android Pay instead of whatever system the app would have made you use. Again, Android gives you the choice.
Multiwindow
Looking at two apps at once will become standard on Android phones and tablets. With multiwindow, you can see apps in a split screen. This feature has been available on Samsung and LG phones for a few years, and now it’ll come to many more Android devices. It’s also very similar to what the Apple iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 4 and iPad Pro can do, thanks to Apple’s latest OS, iOS 9.
Notifications, night mode, System UI Tuner, and data
One of the most easily distinguishable changes to Android Nougat can be seen in the quick access notification bar and the notification drawer. You can edit the tiles that are visible and choose the ones that you use most often. For example, if you never use the Hotspot tile, just tap the Edit button on the bottom right of the drawer, press and hold the tile and drag it off. You can do the same thing to the other tiles to rearrange their position, and the idea is for developers to make quick access tiles to trigger actions for their own apps – you’ll be able to control them. This is what we love about Android, the control you as a user have over your phone, and not the other way around.
Android Nougat is all about more control — that means changing how your status bar looks.
The status bar is the area you see at the top when in any screen and it displays the icons of your notifications and other important details like your battery status, Wi-Fi and data connection, the time, and more. Android Nougat lets you customize this bar via the System UI Tuner. Simply pull down the notification drawer and tap and hold the gear icon on the top right. After a few seconds, System UI Tuner will be unlocked, and you’ll be able to access it at the bottom of your Settings menu. When you’re in the Tuner, tap on Status Bar and you’ll be treated to numerous toggles for things like Auto-rotate screen, Hotspot, and Volume. Tap each individual setting to remove or place them in your status bar. Don’t want anything but notifications in your status bar? You can do that too.
Battery and time have more customization options — you can choose to always show the percentage of battery you have left, show the percentage when charging, or remove the battery indicator entirely. For time, you can hide it, show the hours, minutes, and seconds, or just show the hours and minutes.
You can set a priority level for every notification that appears on your device. To do this, swipe the notification a little to the right or to the left — don’t let it disappear. You should see a gear icon appear, tap it and you’ll see Importance with a specific level attached.
There are six levels: Level 0 blocks all notifications from an app; Level 1 prevents full-screen interruption and never vibrates or makes a sound; Level 5 always allows full-screen interruption and appears at the top of the notification list; and so on.
So you can swipe the bar all the way to the left for Level 0, and all the way to the right for Level 5 – it all depends on what the app is and how you want to see notifications from it. You can also find these controls and more by heading to Settings > Notifications.
Have a limited data plan?Google wants to help conserve some of the data apps use with a new Data Saver tool baked into Android Nougat. Head over to Settings > Data usage > Data Saver to turn the feature on or off. When you turn it on, it will tell you how many apps are allowed to use unrestricted data when Data Saver is on.
Data Saver essentially limits apps from sending or receiving data when in the background — it doesn’t completely stop them from accessing data, but these apps will do so less frequently. If you’re particularly close to hitting your data limit, this tool could prove useful. You can tap on Unrestricted data access to toggle which apps you don’t want Data Saver to restrict.
Split-Screen, Display Size, Emergency Info & Sharing
Split-screen is one of the core features of the new Android version, and it’s long overdue. Similar multi-tasking features have long been present in smartphones made by LG and Samsung, but Android Nougat is finally baking it into the operating system. To trigger the mode, simply go into an app and press and hold the Recent apps button – better known as the square on the navigation bar. The app you were in will move up to fit the top half of the screen, and you’ll be greeted with a few recently-used apps to set what goes below.
You can move the middle bar to control how much space each app uses, and if you swipe it all the way to the bottom, you’ll exit Split-screen mode and the top app will take over. If you go the other way, the bottom app will stay open. It’s a handy way to work between two specific apps, and you can even drag text between the two.
Rather than pressing and holding the Recent apps button, you can also swipe up on it in an app to launch Split-screen mode. You may need to turn this on in the System UI Tuner > Other.
In Android Nougat, you can also quickly cycle through the two most recent apps you’re using. So if you just left the Dialer app, and are currently on the SMS app – double tap the Recent apps button to quickly switch back.
Change the DPI
Smartphones come in all shapes and sizes these days, and Android N lets you change the display size to your liking. Head over to Settings > Display > Display Size to change the size of all the elements on the screen – not just the fonts. You can go from small to default, large, larger, and largest. It’s a great way to change how your screen looks, whether you needed things to be a little bigger to see them better, or if you are a developer and want to test your app on different display sizes.
Key Technologies helps small and medium Brisbane businesses take back control of their business services, improving accessibility, lowering overheads and refocusing your teams efforts back into building your business rather than investing time and effort (that you don’t have) into facilitating services required to do business.
Most executives consider a disaster a hurricane, tornado, flood or earthquake. The truth is a disaster is any event that prevents your business from accessing the data and systems it needs to operate, including regional power outages, cyber attacks, employee sabotage and hardware failure. Every company faces the risk of IT interruptions that can grind business to a halt.
Downtime and lost data can ruin the reputation of your business, brand and productivity, diminish trust that can result in lost revenue, yet only 35% of small and medium sized enterprises have a DRP in place.
Listed here are 10 reasons your business should have a Disaster Recovery Plan.
1. Mother Nature is unpredictable.
Natural disasters have cost the global economy around $2.5 Trillion since 2000. Almost every area of Australia is subject to some sort of natural disaster. You shouldn’t leave your businesses’ well-being up to chance.
2. Machines break.
You can buy the best equipment on the market but that does not safe guard you from malfunctions, lemons and breaks. 99% of IT professionals have experienced a hardware failure.
3. You can’t afford downtime.
Many businesses experience a disaster (destruction, fire, floods etc.) at some point, and many of those businesses will go under in just over a year. Lost revenue and crippling effects of data loss can be the final straw for many.
4. Your customers and prospects expect it.
In a switched on business world, your customers expect to have access 24/7. Downtime means a lack of availability to your customers and a loss of business in the immediate and possibly long term.
5. Because you spent a lot of time and money building your brand, you need to protect it.
Downtime and lost data can ruin reputation, brand and diminish trust that can result in lost revenue, yet only 35% of small and medium sized enterprises have a DRP in place. Are you rolling the dice with your brand?
6. We live in an always on world that requires ‘always on’ capabilities.
72% of web users report abandoning a company website for a competitor’s due to frustrations with the site.
When a website goes down, online shoppers are not willing to wait for the unknown time at which the site will be back online.
If you aren’t protecting your internet and network you leave the door wide open for your competitors.
7. Compliance and regulations require it.
65% of companies need to produce DR reports for things such as compliance.
Disaster Recovery helps safeguarding data required by HIPAA regulations regarding record keeping & BIA (business impact analysis).
8. Because you can’t predict what data might be lost and the value it had for your company’s well-being.
43% of companies were immediately put out of business by a “major loss” of computer records, and another 51% permanently closed their doors within two years – leaving a mere six percent
“survival” rate.
9. It will save you money.
Are you running duplicate sites, multiple servers, all to ensure if something happens to one you have another?
Consider the cost savings by implementing virtual machines that can recover data in case of disaster. Before virtualization, disaster recovery would have cost at least three times as much because an organization needed to have multiple data centers, specialized software and large network connections.
10. We’re all human.
Humans make mistakes. 80% of unplanned outages are due to untested and ill-planned changes made by administrators and 60% of availability and performance errors are the result of misconfigurations.
Will your business survive a disaster?
We can help put a Recovery plan in place for your data.
The KiloCore can perform many tasks at once while using only a tiny amount of power.
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UC Davis has developed a KiloCore CPU that packs 1000 cores
Useful for parallel tasks like encryption, going through data and encoding videos
Can handle 115 billion instructions per second
Cores transfer data directly among each other, rather than on a shared cache of memory
Each core can shut down when not in use
While only using 0.7W of power
Could run of an AA battery
University had IBM manufacture the chip on a 32-nanometer process
You aren’t about to see mass production of this chip. The university had IBM manufacture the chip on a relatively ancient 32-nanometer process when the industry’s newest processors are usually made using a smaller, more efficient 14nm technique. However, it raises the possibility of many-core processors finding their way into many mobile devices. They’re not universally helpful (many tasks are better-served by a few very fast cores), but they could save a lot of time when your laptop or phone would otherwise churn slowly.
As with most computer science research projects, you shouldn’t be looking for a KiloCore to come to a device near you any time soon. But it’s an interesting look inside the future of computing.
Here’s all the official Android nicknames for their Operating Systems we could find:
Most executives consider a disaster a hurricane, tornado, flood or earthquake. The truth is a disaster is any event that prevents your business from accessing the data and systems it needs to operate, including regional power outages, cyber attacks, employee sabotage and hardware failure. Every company faces the risk of IT interruptions that can grind business to a halt.
