Table of contents for May 2019 in PC Pro

FAREWELL, SWEET FRIEND. I refer to the ViewSonic VP3881, a ridiculous 38in widescreen monitor that I would never have contemplated buying – until it landed in my office for review (see p73). For one thing, it’s huge, dominating even the 1.8m-wide desk I paid almost £1,000 for last year. Second, it costs more than that desk: £1,200 including VAT. But now, having been apart from that beautiful monitor for four days, I’m rethinking my priorities. It’s all about productivity, that terrible and overused word. I found I could sit in front of the ViewSonic for two solid hours without losing concentration. Every piece of information I needed was there, on tap. There was no barrier between my brain and the final result; nothing to get in the way. That’s in…

1 Google on defensive over “hidden” microphone Google was forced to issue an explanation over an “error” that hid a microphone in the company’s Nest Guard home security devices from consumers. The undisclosed mic was discovered after an update enabled voice-controlled features in Assistant for the security device, but the existence of listening tech appeared nowhere in the product’s specifications, sparking outcry from privacy-conscious consumers. 2 Facebook branded “digital gangster” in fake news probe Facebook was labelled a “digital gangster” in a UK parliamentary report following an obstructing the investigation. investigation into disinformation campaigns on the social network. The report called for the company to face urgent statutory regulations in the wake of its failure to clamp down on fake news and accused Facebook of intentionally 3 Microsoft accuses Russian…

Disconnect Disconnect relies on a blacklist of tracking companies to automatically detect when a browser tries to make a connection to anything other than the site being visited, blocking requests from alien sites and tracking companies. Ghostery A stalwart of the privacy brigade, Ghostery blocks adverts, but also blocks trackers on websites to control who can collect data. An enhanced Anti-Tracking feature also anonymises data to further protect privacy. Apple’s Safari ITP 2 Intelligent Tracking Prevention is an on-by-default tracking blocker in Safari that attempts to beat snoopers. Websites can send requests to be allowed to drop a cookie, allowing them to track users with permission. Privacy Badger The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Privacy Badger is a browser plugin created using underlying technology from Disconnect and has many of the same…

@dariengs “My best hope is that soon it will be possible to skip over the dross and waffle, and jump straight to the most relevant parts” I don’t know what I would do without YouTube. Being able to instantly call up any music video you can think of is heaven to a music nerd like me. Add in all the million other sorts of video it hosts, from documentaries to video-game playthroughs, and there’s a case to be made that YouTube is the genuine most important site on the entire internet. Sadly, it’s also responsible for one of my least favourite things about the online age. Back in the Web 1.0 days, if you had something to say, you would type it up and publish it on your blog. Today,…

Visit dickpountain.co.uk “This is the way the world ends Not with a bang but a whimper” TS Eliot’s famous last line hangs on an auditory metaphor, the two opposite ends of a spectrum of disquieting sounds. He wrote The Hollow Men well before the Second World War and the atom bomb; in a 1958 interview, he said he’d not use that metaphor now “bang” had acquired new force. He didn’t live to see the internet, which might have done the same for “whimper”. An equally popular dichotomy is the one between “cock-up” and “conspiracy”. We’re supposed to consider these opposites too, although personally I believe it’s possible to have both simultaneously, in the shape of incompetently executed conspiracies, or a well-executed ones that have unintended consequences. And it’s starting to…

Two of the experts we interviewed had very different views on the use of gamification to heighten cybersecurity awareness. Mary-Jo de Leeuw, director of Cybersecurity Advocacy at (ISC)2, told PC Pro that using tactics such as gamification to heighten interest and trigger a behavioural change is one of the more effective ways to modify attitudes and get individuals engaged in security. Gamification is where cybersecurity is made a competitive process, where best practice results in peer success and reward. Using technology can also help, such as “running spoof phishing campaigns to intercept and highlight users who are easily caught out by these threats”, de Leeuw said, “along with implementing web filtering to intercept and neutralise the majority of deliberate or inadvertent attempts to access compromised websites.” While she admits that…

SSH stands for Secure Shell, a handy service that lets you remotely connect to a Linux system and enter commands as if you were sitting in front of it. It’s particularly convenient for administering “headless” systems, such as a Pi-hole, which doesn’t normally have a keyboard attached. However, SSH isn’t turned on by default. In Raspbian, you have to activate it in the Raspberry Pi Configuration tool (which you’ll find under the Preferences menu); click on the Interfaces tab, then click the Enabled radio button next to SSH, then click OK. The service should start working immediately – but just to be sure, it’s a good idea to test that you can connect before you unplug your keyboard and mouse. For other Linux distributions, check the support documentation to see…

PRICE £200 (£240 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk Motorola’s G range has been the budget phone king since 2013, but the competition is fiercer than ever. Not only does the Moto G7 face an expanded Moto G range – the Moto G7 Play, Plus and the Moto G7 Power – but now a stiff challenge from Honor, too. Motorola’s answer to this in the past has been to bump up the price and the quality of its phones, and the approach is much the same now. Over the next five pages, we review the new crop of Motorola’s budget handsets, starting with the G7. ■ What’s new? The G7’s biggest new feature is its edge-to-edge display. This fills most of the front of the phone and ensures that, despite being 0.5in…

PRICE £124 (£149 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/295play The phrase “last but not least” does not apply here. Despite its playful name, this is an out-and-out budget phone – yet there are still reasons to like it. First of all, it’s hard to argue with the G7 Play’s specifications. The same Qualcomm Snapdragon 632 processor found in the G7 powers the phone, and that provides a big performance boost compared to last year’s G6 Play. In Geekbench 4, it almost doubled the results of its predecessor (1,199 versus 639 in the single-core test, 4,265 versus 2,394 in the multicore benchmark). It’s also a respectable gaming phone, scoring a 20fps on-screen average in Manhattan 3 versus 14fps of the G6 Play. But it ships with a paltry 2GB of RAM, which means…

PRICE £1,542(£1,850incVAT) from scan.co.uk Iwas initially going to write “Nvidia’s RTX chips are an obvious example of jam tomorrow”, but that’s not fair. Really, they’re an example of jam today with cream and sprinkles tomorrow. The jam comes in the form of magnificent gaming performance in modern games; the cream and sprinkles the promise of ray tracing when games start to implement it properly. Even better, we’re now seeing RTX in laptops, and not through the use of desktop components crammed into huge chassis. Nvidia has performed the physics trick of packing even more grunt into the same space, which means a chassis designed for a Max-Q Design GTX 1060 can now include a Max-Q Design RTX 2070 – with all the speed improvements that involves. Just don’t expect identical…

PRICE £667 (£800 inc VAT) from johnlewis.com I’m a fan of big phones; I owned a Samsung Galaxy Note 2 when all my friends were adamant no handset should ever have a screen larger than 4.5in. So when the opportunity to review the 7.2in Huawei Mate 20 X appeared, there was no way I was turning it down. To put that size into perspective, it’s about the same as a Nintendo Switch, minus Joy-Cons. Or think of it as a super-sized version of the 6.39in Mate 20 Pro (see issue 291, p68), and they have much in common. The same processor, the same camera and the same style. For the Mate 20 X is a handsome handset. Available in only one colour – Midnight Blue – the glass back glitters…

PRICE £58 (£69 inc VAT) from store.google.com The 10W Pixel Stand is designed for the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL. Using Google’s proprietary charging technology, it tops up a Pixel 3’s battery from zero to around 40% within 30 minutes. You don’t even need to remove your phone’s case. It also supports Qi wireless charging speeds at a not-so-speedy 5W. My Huawei Mate 20 Pro took roughly twice as long to reach the same battery percentage, for example. Much like the Show Mode Charging Dock for the Amazon Fire HD 8 tablet, it also turns your Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL into a semi-smart screen. In Amazon’s case, that was a cheap Echo Show; here, it’s a slightly cheaper version of the Google Home Hub. Simply ask Google…

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PRICE £5/month (1 PC, Standard edition, unlimited cloud storage); £15/month (5 devices, Pro Suite, unlimited cloud storage) from livedrive.com Next to Acronis True Image and IDrive, Livedrive feels a little basic: it’s a cloud-only backup system, with no option to supplement your remote backups with local ones. Still, the promise of “set and forget” backup with minimal configuration has its appeal, and that’s what you get here. To be protected, all you need to do is tick off a few folders in the uncomplicated interface, and then carry on with your life. You don’t even need to worry about how much space your files take up: your subscription includes unlimited remote storage in the company’s UK-based data centre. For those who want to get more technical, there are a few…

PRICE $5/month (1 PC, unlimited cloud storage) from backblaze.com Backblaze is the cheapest way to get unlimited cloud backup. It costs just $5 per month, or $50 for an annual subscription. Currently that works out to a mere £38. It feels like a cheap product, though. The interface looks like it was knocked up in Visual Basic, and the feature list is pretty minimal. There’s no support for multiple or selective backup sets: your entire system is backed up, with the exclusion of OS files, applications and user-specified files, and the only available destination is Backblaze’s cloud servers. There’s also no way to back up an image of your system disk, although you could upload an image created with a separate tool. Only basic scheduling options are on offer, too:…

PRICE Free (unlimited devices, 15GB cloud storage) from drive.google.com Everyone with a Google account gets 15GB of free cloud storage, so using some of that for remote backups makes a lot of sense. And Google’s Backup and Sync service is very easy to deploy. On installing the client you’re asked which folders you want to be backed up, and whether you want photos and videos to be uploaded at full quality, or automatically downsampled to 16MP or 1080p respectively. That’s an intelligent way of saving space, and Google makes it particularly appealing by offering unlimited storage for smaller items. Next, you’re prompted to set up your Google Drive – which means nominating a separate folder that will be kept in sync across however many clients you install the software on.…

PRICE Free (1 PC) from paragon-software.com Paragon’s commercial Backup & Recovery package is now rolled into its Hard Disk Manager suite, which for £40 combines backup capabilities, partition management and disk clean-up tools. You can still get the free edition, though, which has all the features you need to back up both full-disk images and individual files and folders. As you’d expect, there’s no cloud storage included, but you can create any number of backup jobs, targeting any location with a drive – so not just external drives and NAS shares, but also WebDAV-compatible cloud accounts and FTP servers are on the table. Your username and password are helpfully stored, so you don’t need to manually log in before scheduled backups can take place. While there’s no option for continuous…

At the end of this month’s testing, I was preparing myself to make a humiliating admission: I’ve been guilty of not taking backups as seriously as I should. That’s despite writing about their importance for years. Because, as I suspect 90% of those reading this column will know, setting up a backup regime is very easy to put off. There’s no exciting, transformative impact on your day-to-day life to look forward to. And data disasters don’t – thankfully – happen all that often, so it’s hard to attach much urgency to getting your backups in order. Yet I’m here to tell you that it’s not a big job. This month I’ve installed a dozen different data-protection services, and none was especially painful. Perhaps more to the point, I’ve also uninstalled…

PRICE £1,761 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk Nearly everything about Epson’s mighty WorkForce Pro WF-C8690DTWF is big. With its multiple A3+ paper inputs, it weighs a desktop-bending 57.4kg, and it boasts a huge 75,000-page maximum monthly duty cycle. The model we tested has twin 250-page and 500-page A3+ paper trays, plus an 80-sheet rear tray supporting A3+ stock at weights up to 256gsm. You can optionally add two more 500-sheet trays, and a wheeled floor cabinet to mount it all on. Though the printer itself is hefty, its high-capacity DuraBrite Pro ink tanks deliver small running costs, beating most lasers in this price range. Choose Epson’s XXL cartridges and you’ll be paying just 0.9p for a mono A4 page and 5.1p for a colour one. After downloading the latest drivers and…

PRICE £184 exc VAT from ebuyer.com High-speed business scanners can be bulky things – but with a footprint of just 300 x 103mm, Brother’s ADS-1700W will fit into the smallest of spaces. It offers scan speeds of 25ppm at 300dpi in both colour and mono, and will work over USB 3, wireless or Wi-Fi Direct. While the ADS-1700W is small, it’s not exactly portable: it needs an external power supply and at 1.41kg it’s a tad on the heavy side. Part of that is down to the integrated 20-page ADF, which flips down to protect the scanner’s innards when not in use. Note that there’s no output tray, so you’ll need to leave some desk space in front to catch your documents. Despite the ADS-1700W’s size, Brother has managed to…

Making your website available via https:// is a no-brainer. A few old-timers might tell you that adding an SSL certificate to your site is going to slow it down, and ten years ago they might have been correct, but that’s no longer true. In fact, in some situations https can actually be faster than http! We talk about SSL, and call the things that we install on the server SSL certificates, but SSL has long been superseded because of security concerns. These days https access to a website usually uses the TLS protocol instead. It’s just that nobody calls them TLS certificates. Other old truths no longer hold, either. In the past, every secure site needed to sit on a unique IP address, but Server Name Identification (SNI) changed all…

Increasingly intimate data links between businesses mean that it’s not just business intelligence that gets exchanged, but information about procedures and risks. This sounds like a great thing; the hitch is that any two businesses are likely to have radically different computing histories, especially when it comes to clean-up jobs, breaches and outages. One company’s hard-learned iron rule is another’s passing irrelevance. For example, in preparing this feature, we kicked around some very plausible sounding rules of thumb identifying whole classes of device that might be barred from someone’s network, such as appliances outside of their service contract, Internet of Things-type devices whose firmware can’t be inspected and remote-access facilities that aren’t 100% locked down. All of that might apply to you – it probably won’t. Even so, it’s becoming…

The news that both Facebook and Google have used their enterprise developer certificates to distribute apps outside of their organisations comes as no great surprise to me. First, let’s quickly cover the back story. Apple has cast-iron control of its App Store, priding itself in strict code checking and the imposition of strong security standards on apps submitted to it. This is clearly a “glass half full/half empty” situation for users, depending on perspective. Some maintain this is an entirely unwarranted oversight and control of the choices available to the user; that an app store should be an open place where development can flourish. The flip side is that the App Store has shown itself to be extremely robust and trustworthy for consumers on the iOS platform. And there’s certainly…

One of the things I love about having been part of the PC Pro family for so long is that readers feel comfortable reaching out for help. Okay, I’m not going to lie; workloads and trying to shoehorn in time with my real family means I’m not able to offer free consultancy of the kind some think will be forthcoming. If the complexities of your security situation are such that you need professional help, emailing a magazine columnist with a request for an urgent site visit 250 miles away in return for a cup of coffee isn’t exactly displaying great business acumen. As a member of the family, I feel comfortable enough in suggesting, in the nicest possible way, that “doing one” might be in order. However, I try to…

On sale Thursday 11 April 2019 Workstations With AMD piling the pressure on Intel, this year’s workstations look even more compelling. If you’re serious about computing power, find out which one is right for you next month Subscribe today Start your subscription to PC Pro and claim a free three-in-one USB charging cable, while stocks last. You can read PC Pro in print, on your iPad, iPhone or Android device. See p108 for details FEATURES Alexa, do some work How is Alexa being used in British workplaces? Barry Collins sets to work to find out how the smart speaker has changed everyday tasks Amazon’s box of tricks From fake adverts to devious selling techniques, we reveal the trading secrets that the world’s biggest retailer doesn’t want you to know Pimp…

Darien Graham-Smith Backing up your data may be easy to put off, but with modern services and software it’s also easy to put into action. Darien tests 12 products from p76 Paul Ockenden Before you invest hundreds of pounds on upgrading your wireless network, it pays to understand how the technologies work. Paul explains all from p113 Dick Pountain Dick explains why you shouldn’t fear malevolent robots but rather the slow replacement of helpful humans by stupid AI. See his reasons on p26 Darren Davies If you’ve ever wanted to get more from an old laptop, take a leaf out of Darren’s book – he explains why he often helps clients switch to Linux on p116…

▶ Nokia 9 PureView PRICE $699 AVAILABILITY To be confirmed With five cameras on board, the Nokia 9 PureView is the most interesting phone we’ve seen for ages. They’re not there to help you get a wider angle or a zoomed-in view of your scene, but to boost the dynamic range of the camera. That is to say, the range of light intensities from black to white, an area in which smartphone cameras have traditionally struggled. In fact, every time you hit the shutter button, the phone captures at least one frame with all five of the cameras – that’s 60 megapixels worth of image data – before fusing them all to create one image. Nokia worked with Light (you may remember its crazy L16 camera) on the proprietary chip…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Dell XPS 13 9370 Ultraportable from £1,199 from dell.co.uk This 2018 update to the all-dominant Dell XPS 13 keeps tweaks to the minimum: slimmer bezels, eighth-generation Intel Core processors and the promise of even longer battery life are the most important benefits. Just keep in mind that Dell has embraced USB-C ports at the expense of the old-fashioned Type-A variety. REVIEW Issue 284, p54 ALTERNATIVES Apple MacBook Pro 15in (2018) A machine for true power users with amazing specifications, including that infamous Core i9 – and up to 4TB of SSD storage. From £2,349 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 288, p48 Dell XPS 15 We all know what to expect from Dell’s XPS 15 range, yet it continues to reign supreme – this time thanks to sheer speed, courtesy…

@bazzacollins There’s an old expression: what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas. If only that were true. Because every year when I return from CES, I bring back some ghastly bug – no doubt contracted on the Boeing germ incubator that flew me home. Without diving too deeply into my medical hell, that trip to the States always aggravates another underlying medical condition of mine: eczema. Any sharp change in weather conditions – such as moving from damp Sussex to the dry, massively air-conditioned Nevada casinos – prompts my own skin to start attacking me. Thus, I return to the UK a feverish, itching, bleeding mess. (I know, ladies, form an orderly queue.) I went to the pharmacy to see if I could get the special, more gentle steroid cream…

It was back in 1990 that the five-factor model of personality, also known as “the big five” personality traits, defined the human psyche. The big five are: an openness to experience (the inventive, imaginative and curious type), conscientiousness (the organised, efficient and selfdisciplined type), extraversion (the energetic, outgoing and assertive type), agreeableness (the friendly, compassionate and tolerant type) and neuroticism (the sensitive, nervous or self-conscious type). You will probably recognise yourself in more than one of these categories, but have you ever wondered if your personality type can determine your risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime? Here’s the thing: cybercriminals have and threat methodologies are designed to exploit these emotional triggers. This is bad news for anyone born to be a cyber victim, and bad news for the businesses…

PRICE £224 (£269 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk “I’m a fan of its front-facing 12-megapixel camera, which has an AI feature that can take a photo when it detects a smile” The G7 Plus is the most expensive of the new Moto range, and veers dangerously close in price to a mid-tier smartphone. But do its extra features justify a higher price over the regular Moto G7? And is it really that much better than last year’s Moto G6 Plus? On paper, yes. Besides a larger 6.2in display to the Moto G6 Plus’ 5.9in, the resolution has had a minor boost to 1,080 x 2,270, and there’s a new Qualcomm Snapdragon 636 to replace the 630 found in the Moto G6 Plus – the regular Moto G7 and Moto G7 Power…

Laptops and PCs We run our own benchmarks on every Windows and macOS system we test. These are based around image editing, video editing and multitasking (where we run the video editing benchmark while simultaneously playing back a 4K video). At the bottom of each laptop and PC review you’ll find the system’s score in each of these tests, plus an Overall score. If a laptop scores 70, say, then it’s 30% slower than our reference system – a PC with a Core i7-4670K and 8GB of RAM. If it scores 160, then it’s 60% faster. We test laptop battery life by playing back a full-screen video until the battery runs out. We set the screen brightness to 170cd/m2, or as close as we can get using its settings, and…

PRICE £1,917 (£2,300 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/295rog We’ve seen how fast the Max-Q RTX 2070 graphics can be in the Scan 3XS LG15 Vengeance (see p56), but Asus is more ambitious with its implementation. The ROG Zephyrus GX531GW is a sleek, distinctive laptop, measuring 16mm at its thickest point. Why distinctive? First, there’s stylish gold edging around the lid. Second, the lid’s finish is diagonally split in half, with the top right finished in a plain matte black and the bottom left in a brushed metal design (plus huge ROG logo). Third, the hinge starts an inch from the back, giving the laptop a folio-like look. And fourth, lifting the lid also opens a slim ventilation panel at the back, complete with backlighting. Then we come to the keyboard, which…

PRICE £1,250 (£1,500 inc VAT) from projectors.co.uk We wouldn’t normally dedicate a page to a projector pitched at home cinemas, but the 3,200 lumens Optoma UHD51ALVe is different. Not only does it have a resolution of 4K (3,840 x 2,160) and support the HDR 10 standard, it’s the first projector we’ve seen with Alexa voice control. As with all “cheap” 4K projectors, the imaging engine isn’t native 4K. You only get that with much pricier projectors such as the Sony VPVW270ES; instead, the tiny mirrors on its DLP projection chip refresh the image four times per frame, each one slightly offset from the other to give the impression of true 4K. The system works well, however, with the BenQ TK800 using the same technology – yet costing only £960. With…

PRICE £108 (£130 inc VAT) from scan.co.uk There are two types of people who will appreciate this keyboard. The first is the competitive gamer who wants to bring their own high-performance keyboard to events, with Cooler Master even including a velvet-esque carry pouch in the box. I weighed the SK630 at 521g, so you’ll barely notice it in your bag. Just remember to sling the braided, 1.8m USB-C to USB-A cable in there with it. It will also appeal to anyone who’s desperate for a proper mechanical keyboard but has limited space on their desk. Or perhaps they just like clean, minimalist lines. With the backlights switched off to accentuate the brushed aluminium base, this board would look amazing in a Habitat catalogue. “With the backlights switched off to accentuate…

PRICE £35 (1 PC, Standard edition); £35/yr (1 PC, Advanced edition, 250GB cloud storage); £70/yr (1 PC, Premium edition, 1TB cloud storage) from acronis.com Acronis True Image is arguably the first name in PC backup – and not just alphabetically. The suite has been around since 2002 (the name hearkening back to its original incarnation as a disk imaging tool), and during that time it’s been a regular presence on the PC Pro A-List, largely thanks to its unbeatable feature set. This new 2019 version is the most multitalented yet, with a lineup of truly distinctive features. Before we get to those, though, let’s review the basics. Acronis True Image comes in two formats: the standalone Standard package, which you can buy for £35, and the cloud-enabled Advanced and Premium…

PRICE £36 (1 PC) from oo-software.com The clue is in the name: like Acronis True Image, O&O DiskImage started out as a hard-disk imaging tool, with a focus on backing up entire drives rather than individual items. Unlike Acronis, it retains that emphasis today, and when the software’s Start page appears, you’re presented with seven large grey buttons, five of which relate to whole-disk operations. That may make you question whether this is the right tool for your everyday backup needs, but it warrants consideration. Sometimes disasters come in the form of a lost or corrupted file, but plenty of problems are down to Windows itself getting screwed up. The ability to rewind your system to the state it was in yesterday, or last week, is sometimes just what you…

PRICE $6/month (1 PC, unlimited cloud storage) from carbonite.com Carbonite was the first backup service to offer unlimited online storage; nowadays that’s far from unique, but the service still has other things going for it. Admittedly, the front end is hardly fancy. A single window lets you configure backup settings on the left-hand side, and browse backed-up items via a link on the right, with a restoration button in the middle. By default, all personal files on your computer are automatically selected for backup; if you prefer, you can choose to start with nothing selected, and add locations manually. Whatever you choose, your protection status is never in doubt, thanks to Carbonite’s trademark feature: small green and yellow dots, overlaid onto the Explorer icon of every file in your backup…

PRICE £48 (1 PC, Home edition), £95 (4 PCs, Home edition) from macrium.com Open up Macrium Reflect and you can see right away that this tool is designed primarily for backing up entire disks and partitions, rather than individual files and folders. As with O&O DiskImage, however, it’s possible to create an image file containing only your selected items. And you can store it more or less anywhere: no cloud storage is included, but external drives, WebDAV locations and even UNC paths can be nominated as backup destinations. That inclusive approach sets the tone, as Reflect is well loaded with techie options and features. For example, its retention options are among the most flexible of any package we’ve tested this month: for each backup set, you can specify how frequently…

PRICE $6/month (unlimited devices, 150GB cloud storage) from spideroak.com With Backblaze and Livedrive both promising unlimited cloud backup for $6 a month, you might wonder how SpiderOak expects to get away with offering only 150GB for the same price. The answer is that, unlike those services, SpiderOak One isn’t locked to a single PC. You can use your allocated storage to back up as many devices as you like, running Windows, macOS or Linux. Unusually, to help you make the most of that space, SpiderOak employs deduplication, effectively a form of block-level differential backup. This allows it to store unlimited historical versions of your files, without wasting large amounts of storage (although if things get tight, you can purge old versions manually). Another thing that sets SpiderOak apart from the…

Multifunction printers (MFPs) are ideal for small businesses. Not only are they space-efficient, they can help you streamline your management processes, reduce your environmental impact – and save money, compared to separate printing and scanning devices. Some of the biggest advantages of MFPs are to do with efficiency. Today’s models make it easy to share documents over the network and send them directly to many popular cloud storage providers, saving time and reducing consumable costs. By centralising document printing and processing in a single place, an MFP also makes it a lot easier to manage resource usage. Many businesses are already seeing the benefits of the multifunction approach, and consistent demand has helped drive costs down to the point that a fully featured colour MFP is an affordable option for…

PRICE £225excVATfromokidirect.co.uk Oki’s MC363dnw is a bona fide multifunction printer that costs no more than many single-function lasers. It may not be a winner in the design stakes, but this chunky desktop unit can print, scan, copy and fax, with competitive print speeds of up to 30ppm in mono – and it gives you the choice of Ethernet, Wi-Fi or USB connection. As you’d expect, the feature set isn’t quite as rich as some rivals’. For one, the 50-page ADF is of the simplex variety: when you scan a double-sided document, each page gets fed through the scanner twice, which slows things down considerably. The lack of a touchscreen is also a shame. The 9.5cm flip-up mono display makes it easy enough to find your way around the various settings,…

PRICE £323 exc VAT from ebuyer.com Buffalo Technology is best known for its NAS appliances, but it’s recently staked a claim in the SME networking market with the launch of no fewer than 13 products. The range starts with simple Gigabit Ethernet switches with a choice of port densities, and extends up to managed PoE+ models – of which the BS-GS2024P is the top dog. The basic specs are simple: you get 24 standard copper Gigabit Ethernet ports, along with a pair of SFP fibre uplink ports. The latter are of the dual-personality variety, which means they share a connection with the last two copper sockets. In addition, there’s full PoE+ support. The BS-GS2024P’s power budget of 180W isn’t enormous, but it should more than satisfy most medium-sized offices. Although…

Consumer-grade wireless mesh networking has really taken off recently, but the technology isn’t that new. Mesh Wi-Fi has been around for decades, but couldn’t previously be found on the shelves at your local electrical store. Mesh networks have mostly been used in the enterprise or to provide public Wi-Fi at events and across city centres. But now all the big manufacturers seem to have at least one domestic mesh product, and some have several. Even companies such as Google and Sky have jumped on the bandwagon. Some technical snobbery is creeping into this area. Whenever I write about products offered by mainstream manufacturers, people ask why I haven’t mentioned certain alternative, niche players. There’s an easy answer: I’ll happily write about those smaller companies when their products start to offer…

Easy to manage is a holy grail of networking. The sheer horror of coming up to a vital, high-end, rare device and not knowing how it’s configured is a thrill stronger than any rollercoaster ride or shoot-em-up. Most of these have cute-looking web interfaces, but a common trait among anything useful is that the settings you tick in those web pages are essentially petitionary, not orders. Some might work: others might not. The purpose of the web pages is to produce little temporary scripts that are left to run, and then you’re left to figure out what state that inscrutable machine is now in. At this level of complexity, it’s far too easy to put these devices into an internally incompatible state. It’s true. The high priests of communication technology…

Most Brits are concerned that self-driving cars aren’t safe and don’t believe they’ll arrive within the next couple of years, despite hype and promises from the industry. That’s according to research from Thales, delivered at a roundtable event I attended with the engineering firm – the roundtable was in fact four arranged in a square, but close enough. The panel of speakers, which included experts from academia and industry, found those results surprising and disappointing, but I’ve never been so pleased with the British public. We’re told that driverless cars are worth the effort because of safety, with more than a million people killed on roads globally each year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). That, we’re told, will be practically eradicated with the advent of this technology. Except…

The news has broken that Google’s Nest Secure home security system has a microphone hidden within it, and that Google can now enable it to work with Google Assistant. Some users were annoyed to discover that the microphone was fitted to the product, but that there has apparently been no mention of it since the product launched 18 months ago. There’s an argument that functionality can and should be part of a longer term development plan, and that fitting a mic up front, even if it isn’t used, is a good thing in the long run. There is minimal production cost in doing this, and you can bring the capability to users when it’s ready. The other view is that there has been an undeclared microphone in a product in…

CLICKING ON JUST one link could see UK citizens imprisoned for up to 15 years under changes to anti-terror laws. As part of the Counter-Terrorism and Border Security Bill draft, web users were expected to have wiggle room in case they visited web pages accidentally, with a “three strikes and you’re out” system. However, the legislation quietly came into effect with that key clause removed. The changes update the existing offence of “obtaining information likely to be useful to a terrorist”, both widening the scope of what constitutes a crime and increasing the potential penalty from seven to 15 years. “Instead of three strikes, even one instance of accessing the material is sufficient for an offence to be committed – it’s a one-click offence,” said Neil Brown, of internet and…

The demise of the Do Not Track (DNT) standard is a tale of “cynical” behaviour from advertising companies that fought hard to undermine the standard, yet the growing mistrust of media platforms could yet see consumers given tools to fight back. Apple’s decision to remove DNT from its Safari browser is widely seen as the end of the standard that allowed browsers to send a notification to websites and advertising partners requesting that users are not tracked. In theory, it was the privacy tool that should have given consumers power to reduce intrusive cross-site data mining – but it was never widely adopted by the advertising firms. “The biggest issue for DNT was that it was not selfenforcing and had no regulatory teeth,” explained Alan Toner, a data protection special…

If you’ve ever played a game such as Grand Theft Auto, you’ll know how unrealistic the road traffic simulation is. Cars are spaced uniformly at traffic lights, they stop dead on the lines, they wait patiently for jams to clear. It’s about as lifelike as Fireman Sam. That’s slightly jarring in a computer game, but it could be lethal when it comes to training automated vehicles. Self-driving car manufacturers can’t just put their prototypes on the roads and hope for the best. Instead, they have to spend millions of compute hours training algorithms to react to road conditions in simulators. But if the other “drivers” in such simulations don’t behave in the same erratic, unpredictable way as human drivers would, that’s a complete waste of everyone’s time. Enter Latent Logic,…

@njkobie The death of email is frequently heralded, and it’s no surprise why people hate their inboxes overflowing with work, spam and annoying forwards from relatives. But I’m starting to lament the shift from email to instant messaging. Don’t get me wrong: my inbox is also congested with utter garbage. I have, at time of writing, 5,554 unread messages in the Gmail account that hoovers up both my work and personal emails, making it impossible to reach inbox zero without starting a new account. It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve ditched an email account, leaving it sitting unmonitored but active on a server for years. I was recently sifting through emails in an older account, set up in my university days back in Canada; it’s so retro it’s an…

Let’s face it, integrated graphics aren’t up to much. If, like the vast majority of laptops sold, your notebook is using Intel HD graphics or their equivalent, your gaming ambitions shouldn’t stretch much further than Football Manager. Minecraft might run at modest graphics quality – and those retro 8-bit-alike indie titles you can buy on Steam shouldn’t cause it any great distress – but if you’re thinking about dabbling with Grand Theft Auto V, Fortnite or Red Dead Redemption 2, drop that idea now: your laptop just isn’t up to it. At least, not by itself. In this article, we’re going to explore the different options for bringing a run-of-themill laptop up to full gaming speed. We’re going to examine both local and remote hardware that can deliver top-end gaming…

If you want to see how susceptible you might be to the persuasive methods that online threat actors use, this psychometric test developed by researchers at the Universities of Cambridge and Helsinki only takes five minutes to complete. It measures personality traits such as the ability to premeditate, consistency, openness to experience, self-control and the need for similarity, as well as measuring your attitude towards advertising, cognition and risk. The answers, which are all anonymised, are then compared against a large dataset to return a written indication of your chances of becoming a victim. The researchers behind this test found that the strongest personality trait was the ability to premeditate: those people least likely to weigh the possible consequences of any particular action are most likely to be fooled by…

Pi-hole is a perfect fit for an old computer that’s otherwise gathering dust. But if you don’t have a spare machine knocking around, you can build a brand new dedicated Pi-hole server very cheaply indeed: the tiny Raspberry Pi Zero W has all the power and networking capabilities you need, and can be bought for just £9.30 (pcpro.link/295pi). You will, however, require a few accessories, starting with a microSD card to install Raspbian and the Pi-hole software on. An 8GB card is ample, and you don’t need a superfast model, so you can buy this for less than a fiver online. We’re assuming that you already have a monitor and keyboard that you can use to set up the server, but you might need adapters to plug them into the…

PRICE £149 (£179 inc VAT) from motorola.co.uk The Moto G7 Power looks virtually identical to the G7, so much so that on a couple of occasions we’ve picked up the wrong model by mistake. It’s a large 6.2in device with a 19:9 aspect ratio, a small chin at the bottom and a notch at the top. Despite this design faux pas, it hasn’t followed the annoying design trend of ditching the 3.5mm headphone jack – it’s still there, ready to accept your trusty old earbuds. Flip it over and the first hint that you’re not dealing with a flagship device appears. Rapping your knuckles on the back reveals that this isn’t a glass back, but a polycarbonate one. It looks fine but a slippery feel means you’ll probably want to…

PRICE £2,206 (£2,647 inc VAT) from laptopsdirect.co.uk We’re unashamed fans of the Lenovo ThinkPad X1 Carbon (see issue 290, p65), svelte dimensions come at the cost of high-end power. There just isn’t enough room in its chassis for a heavyweight processor. So no prizes for originality should go to Lenovo’s engineers for inventing the ThinkPad X1 Extreme, which looks awfully similar but comes ready with a larger screen, an even more powerful CPU, discrete graphics and a host of added features for business customers. ■ Practical design This is a 15.6in laptop, so it was never going to be the most compact clamshell. Still, considering what’s inside it’s reasonably portable at 1.8kg and 18.7mm thick when closed. Build quality is excellent thanks to the typical ThinkPad mix of magnesium alloy…

PRICE £283 (£340 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/295arch The Archer C5400X isn’t the most expensive home router we’ve reviewed recently: that was the £390 Netgear R9000 Nighthawk X10 (see issue 288, p83). But the C5400X is a similar proposition: a premium router aimed at those willing to pay for exceptional performance. While marketed as a gaming router, its key feature is speed, with a 1.8GHz quad-core CPU that should ensure the router doesn’t succumb to lag even under heavy load. As the photos make abundantly clear, it also has eight chunky aerials to help provide a strong, fast Wi-Fi connection over long distances. It’s a tri-band MU-MIMO 802.11ac router with a theoretical bandwidth of 1Gbits/sec on the 2.4GHz band and 2,167Mbits/sec on each of its two 5GHz radios. Like most high-end…

PRICE £992 (£1,191 inc VAT) from pcpro.link/295view Curved monitors have not taken the world by storm. Unlike super-high resolutions or 144Hz refresh rates, there’s no clear benefit to make someone immediately part with their money. Especially when you can buy multiple monitors for the same cash. In fact, you could buy four 32in Iiyama ProLite X3272UHS-B1 screens (see issue 288, p72) for the VP3881’s hefty asking price. Where the ViewSonic wins out, though, is colour accuracy and uniform brightness. With a 38in display that’s been calibrated before it leaves the factory, you can confidently sit this down on a designer’s desk and know it will display the right results. You also have only one monitor to worry about, no unsightly bezels between two displays sat next to one another, and…

PRICE £208 (£249 inc VAT) from fossil.com The Fossil Sport is the most exciting Wear OS smartwatch in recent memory. Why? Because it uses the new Snapdragon Wear 3100 chip, which Qualcomm promises will deliver improved performance and extended battery life over its previous Wear OS chipset. It’s also a great-looking watch. I was sent the “Smoky Blue” model, but you can buy it in red, grey, pink and green. Whichever variant you choose, it has a part-aluminium, part-coloured plastic casing, and comes with a matching silicone rubber strap. Measuring 43mm in diameter, the Sport is noticeably smaller than the fourth-generation Fossil Q Explorist and it should suit a much larger range of wrist sizes as a result. The only problem is that those with the skinniest wrists might be…

PRICE Free (5GB cloud storage); $52/yr (unlimited devices, 2TB cloud storage) from idrive.com If you’re looking for the most cost-effective cloud backup solution, you won’t do much better than free. Sign up with IDrive and you’ll get continuous fuss-free protection, along with 5GB of online storage, without even having to enter your credit card details. It’s not as generous as the 15GB you nominally get with Google, but it’s not shared with anything, and it’s enough to protect your most important documents and projects. And if you later decide you need more, you can expand it to a whopping 2TB for a very reasonable $52 per year – equivalent to £40 at current exchange rates. It may seem a bit mean that, unlike some other cloud services, you don’t get…

■ Windows File History File History is an often overlooked feature of Windows 8 and 10 – which is a shame, as it could rescue you from digital calamity. When enabled, it keeps a regular backup of nominated folders, writing copies to an external hard disk or NAS appliance, and allows you to review and recover changed and deleted files dating as far back as you like: the only limit is your available space. File History can be found in the Windows 8 Control Panel, or in the Windows 10 Settings app under “Backup”. From here you can tailor which locations are protected and set the update frequency (from every 10 minutes to daily). To bring back a lost file, simply click the History button in the Windows Explorer to…

PRICE £30 (1 PC) from genie9.com Genie Timeline is a local backup tool that provides a similar rollback function to Windows’ File History tool (see p87). But it doesn’t just protect your personal data: it also backs up your system files, so you can recover your Windows installation in a disaster. Even better, it’s not limited to protecting specified folders, but will back up certain types of file – such as pictures, email archives and Office documents. The interface is garish, but the setup process is painless. There’s almost nothing to configure: this isn’t a tool for setting up multiple backup jobs with a mix of destinations. You just need to choose a destination for your Timeline backups, and indicate if you want your backups compressed. Scheduling features are similarly…

PRICE $30 (1 PC, Pro edition) from nticorp.com At first blush, Backup Now looks not dissimilar to Macrium Reflect. There’s a couple of key differences, though. First is the price, which converts to £23 – meaning NTI’s product is just under half the cost of Macrium’s. Second, while Backup Now stands perfectly well on its own, backing up to local and network media, it also integrates with NTI’s own cloud storage service, which you can subscribe to separately. Unfortunately, the cloud offering is expensive. A modest 64GB of storage will cost you $10 a month, while plenty of rival services offer unlimited storage for less. What’s more, we found it horrendously slow, taking well over an hour and a half to upload our 550MB file, and nearly an hour for…

PRICE £317 exc VAT from printerbase.co.uk Brother’s Business Smart printers promise big printing on a small budget – and the MFC-J6945DW is certainly affordable. This A3 colour inkjet MFP costs not much more than £300, and running costs are low. That’s true from the outset: rather than a half-empty “starter cartridge”, the printer ships with a full set of high-yield ink cartridges. Once you’ve used these up, you can replace them with the super-high-yield versions, which work out to just 0.9p per A4 mono page and 3.6p for colour – costs no rival in this price range can match. The MFC-J6945DW is well connected, with Ethernet, 802.11n, NFC and USB 2 built in. Mobile users can take advantage of both Wi-Fi Direct and AirPrint connections. Installation was quick and easy.…

PRICE £499 exc VAT from printerland.co.uk The Xerox VersaLink C405DN is perfect for busy workgroups that want every feature at their fingertips. Like all VersaLink models, it benefits from Xerox’s ConnectKey technology, which allows its capabilities to be extended and customised via a selection of business apps – all of them easily accessible from its large 5in colour touchscreen. Connectivity options are flexible, too. The C405DN supports USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet and NFC as standard, while an optional snap-in dongle costing £47 adds simultaneous 802.11n Wi-Fi. While you’re buying add-ons, consider the £230 Productivity Kit, which provides an encrypted hard disk with immediate overwrite, for securely erasing sensitive documents once they’ve been printed. The touchscreen makes it easy to get started, with a wizard guiding you through the business of…

“It’s very rare for Google to reveal how it ranks websites,” said Daniel Foster, technical director of 34sp.com. “But a couple of years ago, it did say that SSL was a factor it used in ranking, and that secure sites would rank better than insecure ones.” This is probably the worst-kept secret in SEO, yet many site owners still haven’t secured their online presence using SSL – Secure Sockets Layer (see Paul’s Expert View opposite on why this isn’t technically the right name). The most widely deployed cryptographic protocol, SSL provides end-to-end encryption for web connections. It’s what’s responsible for turning browser bars green and producing the padlock icon. “I doubt it’s a major factor,” explained Foster, “but in a tie between someone who’s using SSL and someone who’s not,…

Computerisation was supposed to make life easier, but when implemented poorly it has the opposite effect. High-end switches whose web interfaces demand – and check for – ancient releases of Java thereby open up more security holes than the management capability closes. And don’t get me started on the semi-mythical fridge-freezers that got turned into spam email relay servers. These are the sorts of thing that no one needs on their network. Sadly, it’s a fact of life that network devices have a long replacement cycle, and that’s partly because of the pain involved in making changes. When an American hotel hosts a Russian computer convention and all its Windows-XP powered guest-room TV sets wake up hacked at 4am, they can’t quickly swap the whole lot out for a more…

Dark data can be very revealing, but there are good arguments for seeking to minimise the amount that your business generates. It all costs money to store, and if your log files contain personal information about clients and customers, you could face dire legal consequences if they’re not properly handled. The solution is tightly functional systems design – something that you should be embracing even if you don’t care about dark data. Ditch unneeded services and devices, and disable any non-essential logs. You might even draw up a software-defined networking specification that only allows packets on your LAN that match a whitelist of origins and properties; most workers only need a very limited range of traffic types required to do their job. Filtering out unknown datagrams before they get anywhere…

It may be a sign of the times, but quite a few people have been asking me to refurbish their laptops lately. There appears to be a trend towards keeping kit for longer. This is a great idea. Why throw away a laptop if it can be rejuvenated by a software rebuild or modest hardware upgrade? Perhaps the laptop in question doesn’t have enough RAM, or has a very slow hard disk, and grinds to a halt on a regular basis. In those cases, such a machine can have a very fine upgrade applied, combined with the installation of an OS appropriate to the machine, to make a computer better than when it originally came out of its box. Such a refurbished machine can then offer several more years of…

Tim Danton Question for the masthead. Do you use an ad blocker? If so, how do you justify it and do you block all sites? Jon Honeyball Happy to run an ad blocker all the time. Ghostery in Firefox, Ghostery and Adblock Plus in Chrome. Tim Thanks Jon – and how do you justify lost revenue to sites that rely on it? Jon They should ask for subscription. That this is a mess is the industry’s fault. And I can see why Apple is going in all guns blazing with the new News service. It’s simply laziness by the site. Stuff any old ad on my view and grab the money. Paul Ockenden Subscription is interesting. Would you buy a sub for Tim and Barry’s The Big Tech Question site?…