PC Pro June 2023

A confession that will shock nobody: I love technology. I love how it changes the world, how it improves people’s lives, how it enables us to either do interesting new things or do old things more quickly. But here’s my second admission: sometimes, the pace of change is so agonisingly slow that I only realise how much things have moved on when I stop and reflect on the previous decade. Like a timelapse photo of a sunrise. Not the past six months. ChatGPT’s arrival on the scene has been a revelation, like Eric Cantona’s arrival at Manchester United, and nothing will ever be the same again. Readers of this magazine will know full well that ChatGPT was based on OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model, and that GPT-4 is now inveigling…

Darien Graham-Smith How can you take the best possible photos with your smartphone? Darien details the camera features found on the latest Apple and Android devices from p42. Writesonic Writesonic is an AI-powered writing assistant that crafts exceptional content, including blog posts, articles, essays and more. Even if it does say so itself. Read our verdict on p70. Dr Rois Ni Thuama If you think class actions are a US-only thing, think again. Our new regular columnist Rois explains why tech companies should prepare for a new EU law right now on p114. Jon Spinage How do you take an idea for an app from concept to profitable product in the space of six years? Jon, CTO of Vitaccess, shares his company’s ups and downs on p116.…

Over the past few years, countless millions of words have been written about augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). For a time, it seemed that the technologies could be about to change the world, with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seemingly going all in, renaming his company Meta after the so-called Metaverse, and launching a mixed reality (MR) headset aimed at businesses. More recently, it has felt more like a VR winter as Silicon Valley abandoned its grand plans. Microsoft, which launched its own pioneering HoloLens headset, has apparently laid off several of the teams working on it, and in March Google finally killed Google Glass, the company’s early attempt at getting into mixed reality. Even Meta is thought to be quietly backing away from the Metaverse, instead putting its…

We all know that the Earth takes 24 hours to complete one rotation. The only problem is that it doesn’t. A host of irregularities, caused by everything from the laws of angular momentum, to the tides, to even natural events such as earthquakes, means that in any given year our clocks could find themselves slipping ever so slightly out of sync with the observed reality. That’s why since 1972 scientists have occasionally voted to add a “leap second” to the calendar, either at the end of June or on New Year’s Eve, to keep clocks reflective of our actual position in space. But all of this could be about to change. Following a vote at the 27th General Conference on Weights and Measures, the leap second could be abandoned as…

Britain needs a “New National Purpose”, argued former Prime Minister Tony Blair in a new report published by his Institute for Global Change. Co-authored with his erstwhile rival from across the despatch box, former Conservative Party leader William Hague, the report called for Britain to implement a wide range of science and technology proposals in order to create a “strategic state”. One idea sticks out above all: a renewed call for the government to create a “digital identity” system to better manage the relationship between citizens and the state. The report recommends that Britain take inspiration from countries such as Estonia and develop a system of legally recognised digital IDs. It further suggests a law be passed to codify the “only once” principle in how the government handles our data…

What could the government do to build the trust necessary for a digital ID to work? “We try to be very transparent, I think this is the ultimate cornerstone,” said Siim Sikkut. “I can log into our equivalent of GOV.UK and see who has access to my data. Even some of my most sensitive data, like my health records.” He explains how this even goes down to the level of identifying individual doctors who can access his records – and if he is suspicious, Estonia has established a reporting mechanism that will launch a data protection investigation. “There have been some people who have been fined for peeking into things they shouldn’t have. And we’ve been very public about those incidents because that stops the next ones.” In 2017, a…