PC Pro March 2025

One of the reasons I love going to CES each year is that I get to interview people I otherwise simply wouldn’t meet. Some are high-flying execs at international companies, and that’s great. After speaking to a trio of Intel VPs in one particularly intense half-hour session, I feel I have a far better insight into what’s happening at the company and how that will affect what it’s doing this year. In short, pedal to the metal for the core skills of making, well, cores, but a shedding of distractions such as its RealSense camera division. But I also enjoy speaking to the up-and-comers. We highlight a couple in our big CES feature, starting on p26, such as a Japanese PhD student who has created a hardware platform for third…

KG Orphanides When it comes to rating security suites – from AV effectiveness to the quality of bundled VPNs – nobody does it better than KG Orphanides. Read their verdict from p78. Rois Ni Thuama What does climbing Mount Everest have in common with business leaders understanding the fundamentals of information security? Rois explains all on p116. Davey Winder Is someone spying on you? Our security guru explains why your iPhone might not be quite as secure as you think, and how to find out if your paranoia is justified, from p118. Nicole Kobie Want to live in the future today? You can indeed travel in a driverless car, work in the metaverse and enjoy robot service in your home. Just don’t expect miracles. See p126.…

Picking a fight with one of the leading WordPress-hosting companies by describing it as “a cancer”; twice telling staff who disagreed with him to pack their bags and take a pay-off; threatening to effectively down tools on the development of WordPress itself. It’s been a tumultuous few months for the co-founder of WordPress, Matt Mullenweg, and it doesn’t seem to be getting any calmer. Mullenweg’s dictatorial behaviour as the figurehead of WordPress is shaking confidence in his company, Automattic, and the future of the web publishing platform itself. Website owners are considering switching platforms, disgruntled staff are demanding a change of leadership, and there are rumours of a fork of WordPress, potentially creating a damaging split in the platform’s user base. What on earth is happening to WordPress? Mullenweg’s mission…

Microsoft has bundled its Copilot AI into Personal and Family editions of its Microsoft 365 apps – but it’s bumping up subscription prices as a result. Microsoft was previously charging a hefty £19 a month to add the AI extras to the former Office suite, but it’s now decided to roll them in, albeit with limits. Personal and Family subscribers get 60 AI credits per month, with each prompt in apps such as Word, PowerPoint or Outlook consuming a single credit. Customers who want unlimited access to the AI can still pay £19 per month for Microsoft Copilot Pro. Microsoft has used the bundling of the AI features and the inclusion of Designer (think Canva or Adobe Express) to justify the increase. In the UK, the monthly price of Microsoft…

Ofcom’s decision to ban broadband providers from imposing inflation-linked price rises could lead to customers on cheaper tariffs facing the steepest price rises. The telecoms regulator decided to ban mid-contract price hikes that are linked to inflation following the spike in 2022, which saw the UK’s inflation rate rise to almost 10%. That left millions of customers facing huge price rises without any option to cancel their contract. Ofcom’s new rules ban inflationlinked price rises, stating that “telecoms providers must now set out up front, in pounds and pence, any price rises that will apply to customer contracts”. However, this has already led to some customers paying more than they would have under the previous system. BT, for example, has announced that broadband customers signing new contracts will face a…

The world could save 99% of the energy spent on transferring data over the web if it moved to a system of device-to-device communication, according to a startup firm. Hopcast, a company formed in 2022, claims to be the first mobile-specific content delivery network (CDN). Instead of constantly fetching data from remote servers all over the world, Hopcast’s technology allows for device-to-device transfer of data – similar to systems such as Apple’s AirDrop but without any user intervention. This would both slash the amount of data users require from their mobile network and save a vast amount of energy, according to the company’s co-founder and CEO, Farid Benbadis. “On all Android phones, on all iOS phones, we have the capability to do device-to-device communication, but these resources are not used…