PC Pro February 2023

I’m an optimist. When someone tells me a recession is coming, I suggest it will be a shallow one that we’ll emerge from, re-energised, in a few months. When I’m told global warming is accelerating, I think of all the money I’ll save on cardigans. Although I’m fully aware that certain of my colleagues on the PC Pro podcast – I’m really thinking of Barry here – would say I’m not an optimist, merely stupid. My optimism is what persuaded me to part with $599 a decade ago to buy a Surface RT, Microsoft’s first attempt to build a computing platform around ARM processors. This isn’t news; certain podcast listeners now regularly chime in to remind me of my purchase, and (although never said explicitly, for they are not so rude…

Olivia Whitcroft Any customer has a right of access to the personal data you hold on them, but you can’t just hand over everything. So how do you decide what information you can give them? Find out from p116. Stuart Andrews Stuart has just spent a month testing all the latest tablets – including the big releases from Apple – so the only tablet he wants at Christmas is a little white pill. Luckily, he’s willing to share his picks from p76. Davey Winder That helpful spell checker you activated may be sharing your passwords in plaintext. Davey explains what measures you can take, before taking the latest privacy-focused web browser for a spin on p118. Lee Grant PC Pro’s resident Dr Frankenstein explains how to inject new life into the kit that’s lying dormant in our…

For decades, Intel’s relationship with chipmaking rivals such as AMD and Nvidia has been a feisty one, often seeking to exploit its domination at all costs. In 1999, for example, the company got into a tangle with the US Federal Trade Commission over how it was protecting technical information and patents. And a decade later, the European Commission found “abuse of dominance” as Intel paid retailers and computer manufacturers to only use Intel CPUs. So it’s perhaps a little unexpected that Intel is now suddenly singing Kumbaya and effectively saying to its rivals “can’t we all just get along?”. “We should have an open programming language… that can run on Intel, AMD and Nvidia GPUs without changing your code,” Intel CTO Greg Lavender told the business website Venturebeat, as he sought to promote…

Apple has long urged consumers to “Think Different”, which might explain why the company has earned a reputation for not following industry standards. Nowhere has this been more notable than with the Lightning cable that it uses to charge the iPhone and other assorted accessories. This could all be set to change, however. Lightning is now almost guaranteed to be discharged from duty from the iPhone in 2024 following the passage of a new European Union directive that will force all phones sold in the bloc to use USB Type-C as a common charging standard. The new USB-C rules are expansive and cover a wide range of devices that charge via wired cable, including phones, tablets, laptops, cameras, headphones, portable speakers, keyboards and mice. And despite Britain’s exit from the EU, unless…

If we assume the risk thinkers are right, then the obvious next question is what to do about it. Unfortunately, that question is even harder. But there are some ideas already emerging. “A lot of people in machine learning are still pretty sceptical that this is a risk and view it as very speculative,” said the University of Cambridge’s David Krueger. “If that mentality were to change, I think that could make a big difference in terms of what people are willing to work on. “You can imagine it might be viewed at least as negatively as working for a big tobacco company to work on certain kinds of AI development, like military applications.” (See p126 – Ed.) But Carey thinks it will eventually become a much higher-profile issue that will command everyone’s…

On 26 September, without most of us noticing, humanity’s long-term odds of survival became ever so slightly better. Eleven million kilometres away, a NASA spacecraft was deliberately smashed into the minor planet-moon Dimorphos, and successfully changed its direction of travel. It was an important proof of concept that showed that if we’re ever in danger of being wiped out by an asteroid, we might be able to stop it hitting the Earth. But what if the existential threat we need to worry about isn’t Deep Impact but Terminator? As crazy as it may sound, the threat of artificial intelligence (AI) going rogue and posing a serious threat to human survival isn’t only for Hollywood movies – it’s increasingly something that serious thinkers are beginning to worry about. Survival of the fittest “AI could pose…