HWM Singapore February 2021

AFTER A WHOLE year writing about Covid-19, I’m so done with it. Unfortunately, the coronavirus continues to have far-reaching consequences even in the tech world and we’re not going to be rid of it anytime soon. So, as we settle into the second month of 2021 and Singapore’s Phase 3 of economic re-opening, our team investigated the various measures tech companies have prepared for the eventual return to the office. Is working from home (WFH) here to stay? Have productivity suffered over the past year? Is WFH burnout real? Can Singapore survive another lockdown? These are among the many questions we tried to get to the bottom of in this issue’s feature story. But, if you don’t really want to read another Covidrelated article anymore, I completely understand. That’s why we’ve dedicated…

Contributed By Check Point Software Technologies. On the week of December 13th , US government offices exposed they were targeted by a series of mega cyber attacks, allegedly related to state-sponsored threat organisations. Those attacks targeted government, technology and enterprise organisations worldwide. This series of attacks was made possible when hackers were able to embed a backdoor into SolarWinds software updates. Over 18,000 companies and government offices downloaded what seemed to be a regular software update on their computers, but was actually a Trojan horse. By leveraging a common IT practice of software updates, the attackers utilised the backdoor to compromise the organisation’s network when they then went on to spy, impersonate employees and access data. This recent high profile attack represents additional evidence of the emergence of Generation V of sophisticated…

“If tools aren’t used correctly, at the right time, and in the right way, they can flag an overwhelming number of potential vulnerabilities, many of them insignificant or irrelevant to a particular project. And that can frustrate development teams to the point that they could start ignoring the warnings or even disabling the tools, undermining the security those tools are meant to enhance.” That, according to Meera Rao, is one of the biggest challenges of embedding security into DevOps and yielding effective DevSecOps. Rao, senior director for product management (DevOps solutions) at Synopsys, notes the reality that “at every stage in the pipeline or even in your SDLC, you have many security activities to perform, and each and every one of them gives you vulnerabilities. That can lead to defect overload.” By now,…

As we began to Work- From- Home (WFH), we began to embrace tools like Zoom and Microsoft’s Teams as web-cams and stable Internet access became increasingly important and overseas travel became a fond memory. Eric Goh, Vice President & Managing Director, Singapore, Dell Technologies said that Dell expects that 60% of their workforce will stay remote or have a hybrid schedule where they work from home most of the time. So collaboration tools will be critical in ensuring a smooth transition to the hybrid work culture. As Goh put it, “Work today is no longer anchored to one place and time. Instead, it is focused on outcomes.” But we seem to have made it through what may be the worst of Covid-19 in Singapore, we’ve entered Phase 3 of re-opening where for some,…

The AirPods Max is a collection of numbers: 4 years in the making, 40mm drivers, 9 microphones, 9 sensors of all sorts, and 2 H1 chips. But the biggest number of them all is the price – $849. I am well aware that wireless headphones with active noise cancellation and good sound don’t come cheap, but even I did a double-take when I saw the price. Interestingly, these are the first AirPods to come in different colours. The safe options are obviously space grey and silver, while more adventurous folks can opt for green, sky blue, and pink. The headband and earpads are colour-matched. Build-wise, the earcups are anodised aluminium and they are connected to the headband by polished stainless steel telescoping arms. The headband structure is stainless steel and covered in…

While there may be a seemingly endless selection of cloth pads to choose from today, the Fnatic Dash XD still manages to stand head and shoulders above the crowd. It is available in two sizes, the smaller Dash L, and the desk pad-sized Dash XD, which is what I have for review. The Dash XD measures a whopping 950 x 500 x 3mm. You should definitely check that your desk has enough room for it. It’s all enough that part of my monitor stand is now sitting on it. Right from the moment you unbox it, the Dash XD delivers. It unfurls almost perfectly with no annoying lifting of the edges. What’s interesting is that Fnatic says you should never roll the mouse-pad with the gliding surface on the inside, a similar…