What all this means is that Microsoft is finally getting close to the end of playing catch up on their OS, so people won't feel crippled changing to it from iOS or Android. That's been the biggest issue so far. Someone who hasn't used a newer generation smartphone much would be happy with WP8. (Moving from BlackBerry is easy for example, apart from getting used to an on screen keyboard.) Now there's also much less for the iOS and Android lovers to complain about.This was the long play Microsoft was going for and it's looking like they're on track. An uphill battle, but they're heading in the right direction while enterprise eagerly awaits the fully manageable and integrable mobile device. The International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) says it has come up with a universal laptop charger plug and socket.The standards body said that its proposed design would ensure compatibility between DC-powered notebooks by establishing a common interface – and limit waste by cutting down on the need to bundle new chargers with every product.
However, the blueprints for the laptop tech, dubbed the IEC Technical Specification 62700, will not be published until early next year.The standards group said that in addition to providing a common format for connecting a charger, the tech would also establish improved design, safety and environmental impact standards for external chargers and peripherals such as car adaptors.Efforts to establish a universal format for laptop chargers come in the wake of similar campaigns to develop universal formats for phone chargers. While such plans have garnered widespread support, the absence of key vendors such as Apple has slowed the adoption of a common charger interface and format.The IEC International Standards for the universal charger for mobile phones has been widely adopted by the mobile phone industry and is already starting to help reduce e-waste, said IEC general secretary Frans Vreeswijk.
A single power supply covering a wide range of notebook computers is the next step in lowering e-waste and its impact on our planet.Should major notebook vendors balk at the efforts to establish a common charger interface over their proprietary gear (Apple, in particular, seems quite fond of its MagSafe chargers), the effort is doomed.And as wireless charging boffins have found, any new design will have to compete against USB, which is becoming a global connection standard for juicing batteries in portable kit. Christmas is special. When else will you spending lots of money you don’t have buying things they don’t deserve for people you don’t like?That said, we all grudgingly accept that you may want to buy some presents for people this year – bah humbug – even if you haven’t an earthly what to buy them.It’s utter rubbish, in our view, to assume that parents and other older relatives don’t want new technology. But they will most likely want it to work and to have some useful, obvious purpose.We’d steer clear of deliberately dumbed down senior phones and the like, and simply pay attention to ergonomics and ease of use. And, to make the inevitable phone calls less stressful, never buy your parents a Mac laptop or desktop if you use a Windows machine, or vice versa.
So, what should you buy them? You know when something’s going seriously mainstream when parents ask if it’s worth buying “one of those Tesco tablets”. Such devices are a great way to get them online, whether it’s for the Telegraph crossword, Skyping the grandkids, or reading books. At £120, the Tesco Hudl is indeed great value.For the less connected who still enjoy a good read, check out the Kobo Aura HD for a top-end e-book reader experience at £140 – or the £60 Kobo Mini if you’re after something smaller or cheaper or both.And if you want to persuade parents or other relatives to take a leap into the smartphone world, why not treat them to the new, priced-to-please-the-buyer Motorola Moto G?Old-ish folk already connected may appreciate a digital subscription instead. The Telegraph, for example, could be the perfect gift for a retired uncle who used to be stationed in Kenya, and full website access is just £20 a year. £99 gets him a tablet edition.
A former teacher might prefer The Guardian, at £9.99 per month for Kindle or iPad editions.If you fancy something that’s less hard news and a bit more urbane, how about The New Yorker, at $60 a year?Other options, from our Top tech gifts, include a Tado thermostat to help manage the heating bills, or for those who don't even have a computer, consider the HP Chromebook, so you don't need to worry about updating it.For partners, in crime or otherwise, choosing gifts can be tricky, and we won’t pretend to have all the answers. Only you really know if the recipient is a real tech-head who’ll love something because it’s shiny-shiny or has a fantastic SDK - or someone who’ll need more persuasion.For home-makers or the aesthetically inclined, take a look at Philips’ Hue. This lighting system can be controlled from a smartphone to change the feel of your home. It’s a bit pricey though, at £180 for a starter kit, so a cheaper, DIY alternative is the Wi-Fi lighting controller.
Fitness freaks might appreciate the Jawbone UP, the £99 wristband that will help track workouts, rest and play. For a little more up-front, the new UP24 will work with the latest iPhones and update in real time.Photo fans are spoiled for choice. If you really loved a photographer, you’d probably buy them the new Nikon DF, but it’s a premium product with a price-tag to match. A little more affordable is the Panasonic Lumix GM1, which combines a really compact body with the removable lenses of the Micro 4/3 system.Cache in the Attic If you're lucky, old gear doesn't so much die as get given away or retired. Indeed, some kit is just too quirky to dispose of, even though it gets wheezy whenever you fire up a browser. Forget computing with it though, says Andrew Orlowski, the value can lie elsewhere.Why keep an Apple G4 Cube in the attic? It's not for what it can do, for sure. Today, a £60 laptop from eBay, spruced up a £10 Firewire card, can do almost everything the Cube can. No, the reason I keep one safely wrapped up isn't rational. But it's the same reason people buy and lovingly maintain their DeLorean DMC-12s. The Cube was simply an outlandish, insane design, a one-off. I once speculated it began life when a millionaire had given a mad bloke on a bus an unlimited budget:
Hello. You look like you've done a lot of LSD. Well, here's several million dollars - go and design a computer, any shape you want. Just make sure it hangs upside down.And that's not far off. The Cube was a computer that looked like Buckminster Fuller talked. It was very much a product of a strange man in a strange time: the first dot.com era, when fabulous wealth could be conjured from nothing, and a new long boom of limitless wealth was upon us, we were told. I described my infatuation with it back here at some length.It was only fairly recently - well, less than five years ago - that it was reluctantly packed away. It had been running 10.4 Tiger well, and doing a passable job as an iTunes player via Firewire and a Yamaha Firewire sound card box, attached to the living room hi-fi. Not long before that, a souped-up Cube was my desk machine at the office. But all good things come to an end. The bandwidth limitations of the Cube bus, running at a fraction of the speed of the CPU, and its sheer bulk in a small flat, meant it had to be retired.
A laptop apparently stolen from a top-flight poker pro's hotel room and mysteriously returned while he played in a card tournament was infected by spyware.That's according to security firm F-Secure, which today said it had analyzed the computer, owned by ace player Jens Kyllönen. The Java-written malware on the machine could allow a attacker, perhaps a card-shark, to remotely view screenshots and log activity on the PC.While such spyware is hardly uncommon, the F-Secure researchers were intrigued by the way in which the software nasty was apparently installed.Kyllönen, who rocked up at the antivirus biz's HQ in an Audi R8 with the laptop to inspect, believes the infection occurred while he played in a poker tournament at a resort in Barcelona. He said during a break he returned to his room and found his laptop missing, only for it to be returned later with signs of a possible infection.According to F-Secure, the notebook was in fact infected with a remote monitoring tool that activated upon system startup. Researchers believe that the malware was installed via a USB device and that a similar infection was introduced to the computer of another player staying in the same room.
That poker aces, who win big both on and offline, would be subjected to a spyware installation is no accident, say the researchers. By installing tools to covertly snoop on the screen of high-stakes online players, a rival could gain the upper hand in a game by spying his opponent's hand.This is not the first time professional poker players have been targeted with tailor-made trojans, F-Secure said in its report.We have investigated several cases that have been used to steal hundreds of thousands of euros. What makes these cases noteworthy is that they were not online attacks. The attacker went through the trouble of targeting the victims' systems on site.Such well-targeted, spear phishing operations rely on detailed reconnaissance to gather information about the individual which can be exploited to carry out an attack.It's possible Kyllönen's machine was infected in some other way, but that doesn't marry with his claim that the laptop went missing.In any case, F-Secure suggests that anyone who could be subject to such an attack, be they a poker pro or an executive on a business trip, consider real-world protections for their systems, such as device locks and room safes. If you trust the safe and hotel staff, of course.
Security researchers have confirmed that MacBook webcams can spy on their users without the warning light being activated.Apple computers have a “hardware interlock” between the camera and the light that is supposed to ensure the camera can't be activated without alerting the user by lighting a tell-tale LED above the screen.However Stephen Checkoway, a computer science professor at Johns Hopkins University and graduate student Matthew Brocker were able to circumvent this security feature by reprogramming the micro-controller chip inside the camera.Normally, any program running on a MacBook’s central processing unit that takes images through Apple's iSight camera would turn on the tell-tale light. Brocker and Checkoway's reprogramming tactic allows the camera and it light to be activated independently, so that the camera can be running while the light is switched off.
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