PC Pro February 2022

John Finnemore is radio’s greatest comedy writer. He’s best known for the Radio 4 series Cabin Pressure, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, but the show that has burned his name into the minds of radio comedy “geeks” is John Finnemore’s Souvenir Programme. I put the word “geeks” in quotation marks as a tribute to one of John’s inimitable tirades, denouncing someone who describes himself as a geek: “It’s not just about having an interest. It’s not going to an observatory once and then being pleasantly surprised you’re not bored. It’s not being able to tell a Harley Davidson motorbike from a not-a-Harley-Davidson motorbike. [Being a geek is] knowing as much as you can possibly know about a thing and being at least a bit weird about it.” This is why, despite the apparent trendiness…

Dick Pountain Predicting the end of Moore’s Law is a fool’s game, and Dick isn’t playing – although he does dig out some toy soldiers in his search for a molten metaphor. See p20 Jon Honeyball Long fascinated by computational photography, Jon explores the latest magical tricks introduced by the Google Pixel 6 Pro – including making his partner disappear. Discover how on p108 Paul Ockenden You can check the air quality in your home or office the easy way, but where’s the fun in that? Paul recommends a cheap device and provides the code to make it work from p111 Athina England Although we still live in a disposable society, there are flickering signs of change. This month’s guest columnist explains how we can become more environmentally conscious on p116…

Believe it or not, Google cares about Android tablets again. After years of treading water, and effectively ceding the space to Apple’s iPad, the company has announced a new version of Android 12 (dubbed 12L), which will be specifically optimised for making the most of Android on large-format devices. In a blog post detailing the new features of the OS, Google promised a range of tools, guidance and APIs to help developers build apps for the new OS. And it showed off a range of new user-interface tweaks, such as iPad-style split screen multitasking, and new user interface components that respond to context. This means if, for example, you have a list of emails displayed on a phone-sized screen, you may only see the sender and subject lines. But if the…

What do you do when your company is feeling the pressure? It appears that Mark Zuckerberg’s response was to strap on a VR headset and tune out. The Facebook CEO has announced that he’s changing the name of the company and giving it a new mission. Facebook, the corporation, is dead; Meta, with its mission to build the so-called “metaverse”, is alive. From a corporate perspective, it appears that the company will be structured similarly to Google and its parent company, Alphabet. Facebook’s existing products, such as Instagram, WhatsApp and, of course, Facebook, will be managed by one half of the company, while Zuck will be taking $10 billion and investing it in the half of the company he’s called “Reality Labs”. The plan for the new arm is to build the…

In September, Facebook employee Frances Haugen fought back against her now former employer in the most public way imaginable, by leaking an enormous cache of documents to journalists. Haugen was a product manager in the company’s Civil Integrity department, which was set up to deal with the tricky issues that have emerged on Facebook’s platform, such as election misinformation. Explosive revelations about different aspects of the company’s practices were published in the US newspaper the Wall Street Journal, and by other outlets. For example, the leaked documents revealed that the company runs a programme called “XCheck”, which exempts certain high-profile users from the same moderation scrutiny that ordinary users of the platform receive. It meant that decisions on what would normally be considered rule-breaking posts were left up, because the company was…

At some point in the past decade, the world fell out of love with big tech. Companies such as Amazon, Facebook and Google today find themselves routinely on the receiving end of near-constant negative news stories, and are regularly berated by politicians. The evil tech CEO has even become a major villain archetype in Hollywood movies. But the criticism isn’t just coming from the outside. Recent years have seen a number of campaigns by big tech’s own employees, criticising their bosses over a wide range of issues. Meanwhile, a string of whistleblowers has emerged, revealing what’s going on inside some of the world’s largest companies. Strikingly, the protests cover a wide range of issues. For example, military links are a common source of tension, as Microsoft learned when employees publicly protested about a…