PC Pro March 2023

I have a love/hate relationship with the BBC podcast Sideways. On one hand, I love the conceit of examining how stories that “see the world differently” can give insights to our ways of thinking. On the other hand, I hate Matthew Syed’s know-it-all delivery. As I write, the most recent release is “All in a Name”, which explores how giving something a name can transform how we view it. An example is sexual harassment, a concept now so firmly embedded into our psyche we know exactly what it means–but before that phrase became established, a judge dismissed one woman’s case against her exploitative senior executives on the grounds that “boys will be boys”. So, why am I bringing up a podcast I hate to love in PC Pro? Because I think the…

James O’Malley This month James takes a virtual trip to Antarctica, where internet speeds remain at a glacial 80Kbits/sec. And Starlink may not be the miracle answer some scientists expect. See p34. Simon Handby It wasn’t all plain printing for Simon this month, as he put a collection of the latest devices to the test. Find out which HP inkjet walked away with the top prize, and which HP laser took the wooden spoon, from p74. Steve Cassidy Phones and apps have supposedly taken over the world, but from p112 Steve argues the case for five “boxes” that vary from £20 Bluetooth speakers to miracle-working network taps. Nicole Kobie For the past two decades, Nicole declares on p21, we have fallen victim to CEO worship. But forget Bezos, Musk or Zuckerberg, it’s the teams behind the headlines…

AI-generated fake videos featuring familiar faces – deepfakes – have the potential to scramble our perception of what is real. But as the technology has improved and refined, the deepfake detectors have been fighting back. Now, Intel has invented what may be a significant step forward in helping us separate the living, breathing humans from the AI puppets. Intel has called its new creation FakeCatcher, and it works by taking a very close look at the blood flow in our faces, using a technique called photoplethysmography – or PPG for short. “I said, there should be some priors that we can trust in real videos. What are those priors?” said Dr Ilke Demir, senior staff research scientist at Intel Labs, who invented the system. “Then I saw an MIT paper about finding blood…

In the days following Elon Musk’s $44bn purchase of Twitter, it briefly felt as if a great migration was under way. Scores of Twitter users announced that because of the uncertainty, or a distaste for the new proprietor, they were jumping ship, and moving away from the bird app – and would be using the elephant one instead. At a brief glance, Mastodon appears and functions much like Twitter: users can post short messages – or “toots” (not tweets), but with a limit of 500 instead of 280 characters. And you can follow people with no obligation for them to reciprocate, just like Twitter. Under the hood, the system is very different – it’s not only open source, but it’s “federated”, meaning that there’s no singular Mastodon server. Instead, you can sign…

The bursting of the bubble shouldn’t have surprised investors – it’s hardly a first. “Every time we’re fooled into this complacency because we feel like this bubble is different,” said Tang. “We think we’re on a rocket ship, when we convince ourselves that things are going to keep going in that direction.” He likens the current bubble to the original dot-com crash in 2000, which saw many early internet companies raise huge sums from investors, before burning up. A particularly notorious casualty was pet supplies website Pets.com, which was backed by a much younger Amazon. Nine months after it hit the NASDAQ stock exchange, trading at $11 a share and raising over $82m, it declared bankruptcy, with shares worth only 19 cents. The lesson Tang took from it is one the Silicon Valley…

When controversial billionaire Elon Musk completed his acquisition of Twitter, the news was quickly followed by the announcement employees wanted to hear least: there would be substantial layoffs. In the days and weeks that followed, Musk took an axe to the company’s payroll, chopping around half of the company’s 7,500 staff, and threatening to cut more if they didn’t sign up to his tough new work regime. It was a dramatic move that captured the attention of, well, Twitter, for several days. But it was not an unusual one. Around the same time, most of the other big names in Silicon Valley – and many of the smaller ones – all announced layoffs. Most dramatic of all was Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which stated it would be shedding 11,000 – or…