Author: Duncan Pike

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…

Blockchain denialists will tell you that the decentralised technology ‘doesn’t do anything new’ and that it ‘results in the same outcome, just with extra steps’. Yet, new research has surfaced detailing a rather clever way malicious internet denizens are using one example of the technology to keep their malware safe from the Feds. See, denialists, blockchain can be useful. We’ll admit that ‘useful’ in this case is heavily dependent on which side of the malware you find yourself. If it’s not your malware then ‘useful’ probably isn’t the first word that comes to mind. Using new tech for old tricks…

If you follow Stuff on Twitter, you might already know that last night Volkswagen announced its new night driving safety course – Night School. The event was held at the Zwartkops Raceway in Centurion, Pretoria where the night school course will be conducted alongside VW’s other advanced driving courses. The new course contains lessons that are reinforced with practical demonstrations and exercises on and off the track. This combination not only improves the participants’ knowledge of what to do in emergency situations but also their understanding of why vehicles behave the way they do and how to react properly. How…

It’s 2023 and misinformation is still a thing. Unless YouTube has anything to say about it. In a recent announcement post, the world’s largest video-hosting platform outlined plans for a new “immersive watch page experience” that will collate news videos from “authoritative sources” across various formats into a single, trustworthy page. That’s the idea, anyway. The new feature will show up when you start watching a video with a purple newspaper icon on the home page or in search results. Instead of needing to look around for more videos on the topic yourself, YouTube will do it for you. Good…

Last Thursday, 12 October 2023, Honor held the Chinese launch for the Magic Vs2. The foldable smartphone team has been busy as this is the third foldable device from the company in the last four months. It was first unveiled in September at IFA Berlin where it was dubbed the “world’s thinnest foldable smartphone” and follows the Magic V Purse which launched in China last month and the Magic V2 which launched in July. As proud as Honor presumably is, a Chinese launch isn’t a big deal for South Africans (or anyone outside of China, for that matter). Especially if…