PC Pro December 2020

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO “TO IGNORE ONE informed PC Pro reader may be regarded as misfortune; to ignore two looks like carelessness.” With huge apologies to Oscar Wilde, that is the best way I can conceive to explain the importance of being earnest about customer support. The PC Pro Technology Excellence Awards (see p24) are the greatest distillation of technical nous in this country, and we ignore that wisdom at our peril. After all, we all have stories to tell of buying an item on impulse – or even after months of research – only to be disappointed soon after we removed it from its box. Nor are all flaws immediately obvious: often it’s a year down the line when you realise the solid metal is in fact brittle plastic, or that your…

Nik Rawlinson In search of the perfect project to showcase the Pi Sense Hat, Nik turned one of his many Pis into a sentient thermometer for his greenhouse. See p42 Stuart Andrews If you’re after a laptop that can handle any task, Stuart’s testing of nine contenders yields some surprising results. Find out which excel from p78 Stewart Mitchell While CV19 has shown the infosec industry at its best (see above), serious issues surround its treatment of women, Stewart finds from p12 Jo Best With life expectancies creeping up, Jo explores the nascent technologies that could help us live healthier and more productive lives. See p36…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO Nvidia faces an uphill battle to convince regulators and partners that its purchase of Arm Holdings won’t radically reshape the mobile and computing industries. UK-based Arm was bought by Japanese investment giant SoftBank in 2016, but was recently snapped up by graphics chip specialist Nvidia in a deal worth $40 billion. However, that deal faces a tortuous route through regulators, who will be worried by the fact that a chip design company driving the mobile industry has been bought by another chip maker, potentially jeopardising Arm’s cherished independence. “The future of Arm is the future of the mobile industry, because every smartphone includes ARM* technology at its core, and increasingly so do mobile networks and data centres, too,” explained Ian Fogg, vice president of analysis at research company Opensignal. “The concern…

Government proposals for a new digital ID system have been branded too intrusive, muddled and lacking detail. The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) revealed plans following a consultation on how to improve identity checks to access government services. The proposals have echoes of the failed ID card scheme proposed more than a decade ago and raise the same concerns over the risk of a tracking overreach – and whether private companies would be given access to records. “National digital ID systems tend to rely on creating huge central databases, meaning all of our interactions with the state and public services can be recorded,” said Gracie Bradley, Liberty’s policy and campaigns manager. “This personal data could then be accessed by a range of agencies or even private corporations, potentially in combination…

There’s little doubt that infosecurity has issues with women, but why that’s the case is a social-science conundrum that may have roots in the adversarial world of hacking. “Some of it can be traced back to earlier days of hacker culture,” said Alyssa Miller, an independent hacker and security consultant. “When we lived in these BBS and IRC communities, everything was based on ‘cred’. You were only valuable if you could establish cred with proof of your latest hack or your overall prowess. I think a lot of those attitudes persist and there’s a lot of insecurity and impostor syndrome as a result. “So you have this man, who’s worried he’s not skilled enough to be accepted as a ‘l33t’ [elite] member of the community, who then sees a competent, skilled woman…

@ PC PRO FACEBOOK.COM/PCPRO If infosecurity conferences have been cancelled during the coronavirus crisis, there’s one group of attendees who probably let out a quiet sigh of relief: women. A staggering one in four women have reported being sexually harassed at infosec events, according to an international survey. The question is why – given this level of abuse and several high-profile cases of sexual assault – has the infosec industry done nothing about it? For Chloé Messdaghi, co-founder of support group Women of Security (WoSEC), her introduction to the perils of working in what she describes as a toxic environment was at a 2017 conference. “I was leaving a drinks event and when I was walking out this guy grabbed me by my neck and put me up against a car and was…