Author: Duncan Pike

When a global company like Samsung, Microsoft, or Nvidia has its data stolen, images of clandestine operatives hammering away at keyboards in a darkened room come to mind. Individuals capable of such actions must be well-trained and possibly even state-funded. As a mad Titan once said, “Reality is often disappointing.” It turns out the mastermind behind the recent Microsoft data breach, might just be a UK teenager living with his mother. Hacking Microsoft as an extramural activity  According to a Bloomberg report, security researchers investigating the recent string of high-profile hacks said they managed to trace the attacks, in part,…

It seems like Sonos is looking to branch out a little, judging from recent job listings discovered by Protocol. The positions available strongly suggest that Sonos wants to expand its audio offerings to the home theatre space. The positions, listed on the company’s job portal, include ‘Head of Partnerships, Home Theatre” and “UX Lead- Next Generation Home Theater Experience” as well as a position for a “Principal Platform Product Manager”. That last one isn’t as specific as the other two but it does list “working knowledge of home theatre technologies and protocols” and “experience in home theatre or home entertainment…

Apple services go rotten for a few hours If you thought there might be something wrong with one or more Apple services or features over the long weekend, you would’ve been right. Turns out quite a few of the tech company’s services went down for as much as three hours on Monday, 21 March 2022 at around 19h00 SAST. Some of those services were iMessage, the App Store, Apple Aracade, iTunes, podcasts, and Apple TV+. Apple confirmed all of this on its System Status page. Most of the issues were quickly resolved and the page now shows ‘Resolved outage’ next…

The South African branch of TransUnion, the American consumer credit reporting agency, has been hacked.  According to ITWeb, the group managed to breach the security of TransUnion and are demanding $15 million, or roughly R223 million, in Bitcoin within the next week. If not, the perpetrators are threatening to exploit or release the 4TB of confidential information of some 54 million South Africans. That includes, but is not limited to, contact info, ID numbers, banking details, and credit scores. TransUnion has confirmed the attack and in a statement to ITWeb, said, “We have received an extortion demand and it will…

Apple has revealed local pricing for its newest generation of iPhone SE and iPad Air. We also know when South Africans can lay their hands on them. Pre-orders have opened and are available from Incredible Connection, the iStore, and Digicape. When the iPhone SE and iPad Air were announced on 8 March 2022 at Apple’s ‘Peek Performance’ event, pricing started at $429 and $600 respectively. Those were (obviously) US prices. Local prices were always going to differ. Now, we know by how much. The iPhone SE (3rd-gen) 64GB goes for R9,800 and the iPad Air 64GB (WiFi only) starts at…

The inescapable tech behemoth, Google, announced the dates for its next developer conference. But, at least initially, they didn’t use words to tell everyone. Where’s the fun in that? There’s a rather complicated puzzle to solve that will let you know the dates for this year’s I/O. You can have a crack at it here. If you’d rather not, then we’ll just tell you. Can you untangle this string? https://t.co/PyiD8ZsMBQ Keep an eye on this thread for more clues. ↓ pic.twitter.com/uaMVzn4wgp — Google Developers (@googledevs) March 16, 2022 This year, Google I/O will take place on the 11th and 12th…

Xiaomi confirms it’s bringing the 12 Pro to the rest of the world. Like Xiaomi’s other flagships, the 12 Pro aims to beat out competitors with its favourable price-to-performance ratio. This will be the first Xiaomi flagship to launch globally since it dropped the ‘Mi’ branding from its smartphones last year. The device, which launched in China towards the end of last year, has a simple yet somewhat attractive design. The matte finish on the back might do well fending off fingerprints, which is always a plus. Seems Pro enough to us The 12 Pro sports a decently sized, slightly…

Microsoft has now made its DirectStorage API available to everyone. This new(ish) tech means that games, especially those that use high-res textures or sprawling open-world environments, will load much faster. The process involves taking some of the file compression and decompression tasks that the CPU usually has to deal with, and giving them to the GPU. The GPU is much better suited to handle those kinds of things anyway. That’s why bitcoin miners like them so much. DirectStorage make games go brrrr now? It’ll be some time before we see it used in games to improve load times. The SDK was…

How to watch NASA’s Spacewalk on Tuesday We normally wouldn’t consider a stream of someone doing manual labour a worthwhile use of your time. But when that stream is from NASA and the manual labour is fitting new solar panel arrays to the ISS, we’re willing to reconsider.That’s exactly what’s happening on Tuesday, 15 March 2022. NASA astronauts Kayla Barron and Raja Chari will be conducting the EVA (ExtraVehicular Activity) as part of an ongoing upgrade to the ISS’s power system. They’re just installing struts and brackets for future solar panels, but again, it’s in space. This won’t be Barron’s…

Absa bank customers can now accept card payments using only their smartphones with the bank’s new Mobile Pay app. You don’t need a point-of-sale (POS) terminal or any other additional hardware. Just an NFC-enabled smartphone and a customer with a tap-to-pay bank card. Absa on tap It’s fairly easy to get. Your smartphone needs to be running Android 6.0 or higher, according to the listing on the Google Play Store. Chances are, if your phone came out in 2016 or later, you should be good. Your phone also needs to support Near Field Communication (NFC). That part is important. It’s…