Author: Duncan Pike

Meta recently announced the return of facial recognition technology to Facebook and Instagram as part of its toolset to protect users against scams or to assist them in regaining access to an account. If facial recognition on Facebook sounds familiar that’s because the company first tried to integrate the tech three years ago but ultimately pulled the plug when it faced substantial public backlash. Presumably everyone has forgotten about that now. Facial recognition makes a return Meta’s first attempt at using facial recognition involved users being automatically recognised in photos posted on the platform or named in an ‘Automatic Alt…

It’s October and while Halloween doesn’t get as much attention in South Africa as it does in the US, there’s no reason you can’t join the fun this spooky season. If your area doesn’t participate in Big Dental’s annual drive to get more kids in dentist chairs, you could always settle down to a good ‘ole horror movie. It’s not Halloween if you aren’t doing double-takes at every shadowy object or jumping at the slightest bump in the night. But if you’ve ever tried picking something to watch on Netflix, especially from its horror catalogue, you’ll know how hard it…

OpenAI has finally released an early version of a dedicated ChatGPT Windows app for its AI-powered chatbot. But you shouldn’t get too excited. Although anyone can download the app preview from the Microsoft Store, only paid users can do anything with it for now. ChatGPT Windows app plays catchup Similar to the ChatGPT app on macOS, the Windows app is a dedicated chat window where you can ask the bot your questions, upload an image or document for it to analyse or summarise, or generate a ‘new’ image. It even has a nifty shortcut for easy access, open it by…

Summer is upon us. If you abide by meteorological convention, it starts in December and ends in February in the southern hemisphere. However, there aren’t any rules (at least as far as we could find) that say you have to wait until then to get your summer gear out. These days, spring is plenty hot enough to warrant switching on the aircon or having a dip in the pool. But those are far from the only ways to cool yourself off when the temperatures venture into the thirties and beyond. Whether you’ve been looking forward to the hot season or…

Late yesterday, Sonos unveiled its new flagship premium soundbar and refreshed subwoofer – the Arc Ultra and Sub 4. Sonos says it’s achieved a “significant breakthrough in audio engineering” with the Arc Ultra using what it calls ‘Sound Motion’. That’s the fancy-sounding name Sonos has given to its newly designed transducers that came with the company’s acquisition of Mayht two years ago. According to Sonos, the new tech “drastically reduces the size of the transducer while supercharging the bass.” That’s resulted in the Arc Ultra delivering “up to double the bass of its predecessor.” With all that bass, we’re wondering…

Dell Technologies and Moyo, a digital business consultancy based in South Africa, have teamed up to introduce South African potato farmers to an autonomous drone that uses AI to detect potato leaf disease with impressive accuracy. If you’re one of those farmers and thought South Africa’s agriculture sector could do with better crop health monitoring, that’s exactly what this solution promises to achieve. If you’re not a potato farmer, maybe read our review of the new iPhone 16 Pro instead, while the grown-ups put food on the shelves for you to buy. You know what SA needs more of? Drones,…

Internet Archive, the American nonprofit digital library and home of The Wayback Machine webpage archiving service, suffered a data breach late last month that has just come to light following a series of DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks that took the site down for several hours on Tuesday, 08 October, again the following Wednesday, and for a third time at the time of writing. The breach exposed the email addresses, usernames, and bcrypt password hashes of roughly 31 million users. Internet Archive under attack Site founder Brewster Kahle confirmed the DDoS attack on X.com and later provided updates after the site’s…

Taiwanese semiconductor company MediaTek today announced its latest flagship chipset, the Dimensity 9400. Built on TSMC’s 2nd generation 3nm process, the new system-on-a-chip (SoC) boasts notable improvements over last year’s Dimensity 9300. The best bits of the Dimensity 9400 Everything about the new Dimenisty 9400 is faster and more efficient, as expected from a new SoC. It uses a 1+3+4 cluster design, translating to one super fast performance core for single-thread applications, three slightly slower cores for multi-threaded workloads, and four efficiency cores for background tasks. For the super fast performance core, MediaTek is using a new Cortex-X925 CPU from…

Xiaomi South Africa officially announced that the Xiaomi 14T is now available in South Africa at a launch event held in Joburg last night. Unfortunately, no mention was made of the 14T Pro, so if you were hoping for that, tough luck. However, the upper mid-range 14T still features a respectable spec sheet, including a MediaTek Dimensity 8300-Ultra SoC and a particular focus on photography with some help from Leica. Sipping some Xiaomi 14T Earlier in the month, we speculated on this launch and it turns out that most of what we suspected regarding the phone’s specs came to fruition.…

Like it or not, the current wave of generative artificial intelligence is here to stay. Case in point, Microsoft Copilot. It started out as the web-based Bing Chat but has evolved into a deeply integrated part of Microsoft’s Windows 11 operating system. That doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If you’d rather not have Microsoft’s Copilot peering at you from your taskbar or automatically opening when you didn’t call for it, there are ways to remove it. Here’s how to do just that. How to uninstall Copilot in Windows 11 On some Windows-based machines, it could be as easy…