Author: Duncan Pike

If you’ve fallen victim to the YouTube ad-blocker restriction scrouge sweeping the world, there’s still hope that it’ll quietly go away. A European privacy expert filed a formal complaint last month with the formidable Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) regarding YouTube’s ad-blocker detection system. It’s a rather small hope but it’s there. YouTube has had its eye on increasing its Premium subscriber count for a while, probably since it launched in 2014. This year, the platform ramped up efforts to make the offering more enticing. Some of those efforts have been agreeable, like offering subscribers a higher-quality video setting without…

Yesterday saw the annual Dell Technologies Forum held at the Kyalami racetrack in Midrand, Johannesburg. You may not know this, but the tech company doesn’t only make and distribute tablets, laptops, and PCs. Some of those were on display, along with stands for its partner companies and a strategically placed McLaren. But the scope of the event was much broader and involved a lot more corporate speak. Other than an excuse for the company to throw an award party for its partners, the function of this event is to advertise all the wonderful reasons that other companies should turn to…

GPTs are the next big thing from ChatGPT developer OpenAI, revealed at the company’s very first developers conference held earlier this week. This isn’t a whole new thing from the artificial intelligence company but rather a fresh take on what they currently offer. OpenAI’s DevDay saw two rather interesting announcements. GPTs, which we’ll get to, and ‘GPT-4 Turbo’ which will be of more interest to the people who actually attended, like developers, who have incorporated ChatGPT in their workflow. The latter amounts to a few improvements to the company’s GPT large language model (LLM) – basically, it’s much better now…

Taiwanese semiconductor designer MediaTek has announced its latest flagship mobile SoC, Dimensity 9300, which it hopes will give rivals Apple and Qualcomm a run for their money. The announcement comes just two weeks after Qualcomm revealed its latest flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3, and two weeks before the company’s Executive Summit which is set to kick off next week on Thursday, 16 November. As Qualcomm did two weeks ago, MediaTek is not only promising performance and power efficiency improvements over last year’s chips but also a much greater focus on on-device generative AI processing. Performance number bigger?…

Boeing, the aeroplane manufacturer and defence and space contractor, yesterday announced that it was investigating a “cyber incident” five days after ransomware group LockBit announced it had gained access to the company’s systems. The cybercriminal group made the announcement on its leak site which was shared by cybersecurity analyst Dominic Alvieri on X. Bad news for Boeing https://twitter.com/AlvieriD/status/1717969977305673874 The post lists a 2 November deadline whereafter the group will publish the “tremendous amount of sensitive data” it stole if Boeing fails to meet its demands. The cybercriminal group claims it was able to access Boeing’s systems through a zero-day exploit.…

The Volvo C40 Recharge is one of the latest battery-powered electric vehicles to make its way to South Africa. Stuff spent a few hours behind the wheel at the local launch event in the Western Cape several months ago. Recently, we spent a little longer with it, trying to work out if this is the EV that’ll convince more folks to ditch their petrol-thirsty machines. Imagine a future where you don’t have to keep tabs on the price of petrol every month. Wouldn’t that be nice? The C40 Recharge is apparently the first Volvo to be designed as a pure…

The Sonos Move 2 is the US audio manufacturer’s fourth portable speaker, following the Roam SL from 2022, the original Roam from 2021, and the first Move from 2019. But while Sonos might call the Move 2 a ‘portable’ speaker, we couldn’t help but question that. Not because of shoddy battery life or a reliance on internet connectivity. The latter was never a problem for the original Move, being the first Sonos speaker to support music playback via Bluetooth. That’s been improved with the Move 2 and as for battery life, Sonos has more than doubled it. What Sonos hasn’t…

It was only a matter of time before Apple joined the slew of other companies and raised the price of its services this year. Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple News+, and the Apple One bundle subscriptions have seen sizeable increases in the US and a few other countries around the world. Luckily, South Africa seems to have dodged this particular increase. Either that or the fruit company just hasn’t got around to updating the local Apple TV+ website to reflect the changes yet. We’ve reached out to Apple to confirm SA’s safety but didn’t receive a response at the time…

At this year’s Snapdragon Summit, Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 – its much-anticipated mobile flagship SoC (System on Chip) – following its announcement of Snapdragon X Elite, its latest PC processor platform. As with every new flagship mobile SoC, the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 promises improved camera capabilities, “console-defying” gaming performance, and fast connectivity. This time around, Qualcomm has also added “studio-quality audio” and a heavy focus on generative AI. Qualcomm’s Snapdragon SoCs have enjoyed their position atop Android-based performance charts for a long time. They haven’t faired as well against Apple’s A-series chips in the last few…

The Snapdragon X Elite is a new computing platform that Qualcomm thinks will give AMD, Apple, and Intel a run for their (humongous amounts of) money. The new platform was announced at Qualcomm’s annual Snapdragon Summit in Hawaii yesterday along with a few other tasty morsels, like the new Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 mobile SoC (system-on-a-chip) and two new wireless audio-focused chips. We’ll get to those in just a bit. While this does look to be the company’s most powerful computing SoC to date (on paper, anyway), take the claims of it outperforming chips from AMD, Apple, and Intel with…