PC Pro June 2017

I’M CALLING IT: we’re living in the Nag Age of technology. Half the sites I visit pop up a “Sign up to our newsletter” box as soon as I get there. If I stop for a coffee in the real world, my Android phone asks me if I want to leave a review. An hour later, Google pesters me to add the venue to my timeline. If I buy something from Amazon, an email arrives the next day prompting me to review it. I’d love to leave a huge DO NOT DISTURB sign somewhere in my internet presence, but not only would it do no good whatsoever, it would be like the “little Dutch boy” trying to stop the flood with a thumb. It wouldn’t stop the BBC asking me,…

Sasha Muller A few weeks back, a reader emailed to ask for our 27in IPS monitor recommendations. We set monitor expert Sasha the task. See his verdict on p74 Darien Graham-Smith Darien spent more time than he’d have liked testing AMD’s Ryzen chip, and two PCs that take full advantage. Find out about Intel’s new rival from p54 Brian Horisk In our guest column in Real World Computing, Brian Horisk shares how he helped deliver a new call response system for the Scottish SPCA. See p116 PC Pro readers Simon Mellor, Ryan Thomas and Adrian Ciccantelli are three of the readers who contributed to our Best Free Software feature, from p30…

Background and analysis on all the important news stories THE GOVERNMENT has pledged the best part of a billion pounds towards it, the handset makers are desperate for it, but experts are seeing little appetite among network operators for the much-hyped 5G technology. Although the final standard won’t be ratified until later this year, the International Telegraph Union’s (ITU) specifications have been released and, as always, the headline speed figures are alluring. The specification demands at least a 20Gbits/sec downlink and 10Gbits/sec uplink per mobile base station, and although this is shared bandwidth, it promises potential for a significant speed boost and lower latency for mobile broadband customers. Moreover, Ofcom research even suggests that the technology could eventually exceed a benchmark of 50Gbits/sec. The government announced a £16m 5G test…

1 Google apologises for extremistads Google was forced to apologise to its all-important advertising customers after a series of adverts on Google and YouTube appeared alongside hate videos and extremist-related content. Organisations as diverse as banks, the UK government and M&S pulled adverts over fears that they could be indirectly funding terrorism. 2 US charges Russiansover Yahoohack US officials launched legal action against two Russian intelligence staffers and two Russian hackers, claiming the four were responsible for the massive hack of half a billion Yahoo user accounts, revealed last December. The US will doubtless face a tough battle to extradite the accused. 3 Bumper bonus for bug bounty hunters Google and Microsoft have upped their rewards for hackers who report bugs to their bounty programmes. Google said it was getting…

According to the International Chamber of Commerce, fake goods are worth an estimated $1.7 trillion a year, with phones in particular proving irresistible to the rip-off merchants. Research from the EU Intellectual Property Office shows that counterfeit handsets cost the industry £45 billion a year due to lost sales, with 184 million fewer legitimate phones sold. In all, 13% of handsets sold are fake. It’s easy to assume that the majority of these bogus sales take place in the markets of Bangkok or China, but research shows that the problem is global. THE GLOBAL COST OF COUNTERFEITING This graph shows the percentage of counterfeit sales in each region, and the total cost of the lost sales in that region. So, for example, while counterfeiting remains a huge problem in Africa,…

 THE DEAL THAT gave Google’s DeepMind access to millions of identifiable NHS patient records has become a case study in how not to run a Big Data programme, according to research from the University of Cambridge. The data-sharing was part of a scheme to monitor kidney injury, but instead of sharing information only on kidney patients, the Royal Free trust gave DeepMind an entire data dump of its patients. The deal was rewritten in 2016 after the scope of the data handed to Google became apparent, but experts say the project structure remains flawed and that the same mistakes could be made again. “The ground’s been constantly shifting and the very flawed basis on which the deal was originally struck is a real lesson about how this can happen and…