
Search results for 'General' - Page: 6
| PC World - 22 Jan (PC World)VPN services have many uses and benefits, like making sure you aren’t being overcharged based on your location, protecting your privacy while using the internet, and streaming media that’s located outside your own region (e.g., another country’s Netflix library). And for the most part, VPNs have long been considered safe to use.
But one recent investigation by Top10VPN has raised questions about whether VPNs are truly as secure as they’re touted to be. In collaboration with security researcher Mathy Vanhoef, Top10VPN shared this discovery ahead of its presentation at the USENIX 2025 conference in Seattle.
In short, they discovered serious vulnerabilities that affect over 4 million systems. These systems include VPN servers, home network routers, mobile servers, and CDN nodes, including those belonging to large global companies like Meta and Tencent.
Specifically, it concerns the IP6IP6, GRE6, 4in6, and 6in4 tunneling protocols, which are supposed to secure data transmission. However, this is where attackers can apparently exploit vulnerabilities (relatively easily) to gain access to networks.
Related: VPN terms and features everyone should know
The VPN security issue, explained
According to the researchers, many VPN protocols can’t reliably verify that the identity of a sender matches the authorized user profile of the VPN. Attackers can therefore use so-called one-way proxies to gain access over and over, all without being traced.
According to the report, hackers just need to send data packets that implement one of the affected protocols to gain unauthorized access. Then, they can do things like launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks or infiltrate private networks to steal data.
The only way to prevent this is to use additional security mechanisms, such as IPsec or WireGuard, which provide end-to-end encryption of VPN traffic data. Only the server is then able to read the encrypted data.
Which VPNs are affected?
Of the numerous VPN hosts that were analyzed, those classified as insecure mainly included servers and services from the US, Brazil, China, France, and Japan. In general, however, caution should always be exercised when using VPN services.
When choosing a VPN, always make sure it offers one of the encryption features mentioned above. The best way to stay safe is to carry out independent tests, which we’ve done for you in our comparison of the best overall VPN services. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 22 Jan (PC World)Windows 11 laptop users can finally rejoice thanks to Microsoft’s latest improvement: a much better battery status display.
Up until now, you could only see a battery level indicator in the bottom right-hand corner of the Windows 11 taskbar, and that indicator didn’t immediately show you the percentage of your battery’s charge. You had to hover your mouse cursor over the battery icon to see it, and you had to right-click to open the power and sleep settings.
Now, in a preview version of Windows 11 that’s currently available to Windows 11 Insiders, there’s an improved view of the battery status display, according to this tweet spotted by BetaNews.
The improved battery level indicator shows your battery charge percentage at all times, no hovering or clicking necessary. When this comes to the general version of Windows 11 for all users, you’ll be able to see your laptop battery percentage with just a glance.
https://twitter.com/phantomofearth/status/1880368411261513892
Maybe this seems like a small and insignificant change. But if you’ve ever worked on your laptop for extended periods without a power connect, you know how important it is to be able to keep an eye on your current battery level without having to interrupt your work. This convenience is also nice when you’re streaming media, like YouTube or Netflix, and don’t want your laptop to die in the middle of it.
Again, this improvement isn’t available to all Windows 11 users yet. To access it now, you need to become a Windows 11 Insider and you need to enable the new feature in the power menu settings.
Further reading: Is it bad to leave your laptop always plugged in? Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | ITBrief - 21 Jan (ITBrief) Lenovo has appointed Victoria Mahan as General Manager for New Zealand, succeeding Libby MacGregor, to lead operations from Auckland. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 21 Jan (RadioNZ) General Practitioners Aotearoa is concerned the government is funding the products without robust scientific evidence and could cause more harm than good. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 21 Jan (BBCWorld)The Solicitor General has referred Urfan Sharif`s sentence to the Court of Appeal. Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | PC World - 21 Jan (PC World)A new year means another tax season—and all the associated headaches. Not just navigating the byzantine maze of US tax code, but dodging related scams, too.
One particular tax scam is especially thorny since it can happen right under your nose. In an attempt to collect a refund, a fraudster files a tax return in your name. But you won’t know it until you go to file yourself and discover a mess to untangle. The risk of this happening is higher in 2025 too after last year’s repeated data breaches. At this point, most everyone’s personal information (including social security numbers) is findable somewhere on the dark web.
Fortunately, the IRS makes this kind of scam easy to block. On the agency’s website, you can request an identity protection PIN, a six-digit numeric string that you must add to your filing. It identifies your tax return as the legitimate one—if a filing lacks the PIN, it won’t count.
Previously, this program was only available to victims of identity theft, either by request or decision of the IRS. Now all taxpayers can voluntarily opt into the program.
PCWorld
To sign up, head to the IRS website. The quickest method for verification is through the government’s ID.me service, but you can also do so through mail or an in-person appointment. The online process takes about 15-20 minutes.
Identity protection PINs are good for only one year and can’t be reused. (A smart system, so that if a number is ever stolen or compromised after use, you’re not vulnerable to fraud again.) When voluntarily enrolling, you can choose to receive a PIN on a continual basis or just one time only. Most people will be best off automatically having the IRS send a new PIN each year—less to think about during an already hectic period. You can use your ID.me login to look up your PIN.
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You can get more details about how the identity protection PIN program works through IRS’s FAQ page, but overall, it’s a fairly straightforward system. That’s a good thing, too, given how much of a general pain US tax returns are. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | BBCWorld - 20 Jan (BBCWorld)The sport of Hyrox is not known to many in the general public, yet is popular enough that UK events have had to introduce ticket lotteries. What does this new craze involve? Read...Newslink ©2025 to BBCWorld |  |
|  | | sharechat.co.nz - 20 Jan (sharechat.co.nz) Promisia Healthcare Limited (Promisia) (NZX: PHL) advises that group general manager Karen Lake has resigned from the company Read...Newslink ©2025 to sharechat.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 18 Jan (PC World)You would think that Arm, which arguably has been the vanguard in the smartphone and PC industry push for improved power efficiency, would double down on that strategy in its plans for 2025. Actually, it’s sort of the opposite.
PCWorld sat down at CES 2025 with Chris Bergey, senior vice president and general manager for Arm’s client line of business. Bergey is responsible for both the smartphone as well as the laptop and tablet business, where Arm’s designs are licensed by companies like Qualcomm and Apple, who tweak and eventually manufacture them as finished goods.
Arm provides multiple types of licenses, but the two most common types are a core license, where a customer will buy a verified core that includes an Arm Cortex CPU, Mali GPU, or other intellectual property. Arm also sells architectural licenses to companies like Apple, which gives them the freedom to design their own cores from scratch, though they must be fully compatible with the Arm architecture.
Arm’s RISC architecture is generally considered to be more power-efficient than the X86 architecture used by AMD and Intel, though it requires either that applications be natively coded for it or for an emulator like Microsoft’s Prism to step in and interpret the code for an X86 chip to understand. While the Arm chips are often more efficient — in terms of the work done per clock cycle (instructions per clock, or IPC) or per watt — they still can lag in overall performance. One exception has been Apple’s custom M4 chip, where its single-threaded performance is seen as especially competitive.
In 2025, the plan is to improve Arm’s own cores, Bergey said. And the first goal is simply to run them faster.
“We think that we are reaching, we’ve reached kind of IPC leadership, and now people are getting very aggressive on frequency, so we’re going to continue to really push there,” Bergey said.
“We’re leading on IPC on some of the products in the market,” Bergey said. “But we’re clocking at a lower frequency than some of those products. And so what I’m just suggesting is — you know, IPC times frequency, right, gets you to [higher] performance. We want to continue to provide the highest performance Arm cores, so we’ll continue to make those investments.”
Bergey said that Arm’s second priority is to accelerate AI workloads on its own designs, specifically on the CPU and GPU. On the CPU, that entails specific instruction capabilities that Arm is adding to the CPUs, progressing past Neon, its Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE), and 2021’s SVE2. These additional extensions will build off of SVE2 to accelerate some of these AI workloads, Bergey said.
Arm also plans to make additional investments in its GPU business — and, like its more established competitors in the PC space, to use AI to improve graphics. “In a mobile handset, you can render at 1080p, 60Hz right? But you could also render at 540p, 30Hz, and use AI to interpolate.”
That sort of approach should be very familiar to PC users who have bought graphics cards from AMD or Nvidia, and who will end up using technologies like DLSS 4’s neural rendering to ease the burden on a discrete GPU. In Arm’s case, using AI to interpolate or render an image is simply more power-efficient than directly rendering the image, Bergey said.
“We’re going to be a leader in trying to bring total processing to the GPUs in a mobile environment,” Bergey said.
Expect to see that as part of what Arm calls the Arm CSS for Client, its next-gen Arm compute platform.
“Basically, we’re making it easier for people to put the technology together, and do so to maximize the performance,” Bergey said. “So if you need to maximize that frequency and get to a four-gigahertz design, we’re going to be able to provide you that recipe for some of the latest [manufacturing] nodes.”
Arm’s litigation: It ain’t over ’til it’s over
Arm normally enjoys solid relationships with its licensing partners — save for Qualcomm, and an ongoing lawsuit that has simmered since 2022. Last October, that suit boiled over after Arm cancelled Qualcomm’s architectural licensing agreement. But when the suit reached court, a district judge found in favor of Qualcomm in two of the three issues, including that Qualcomm proved that the CPUs acquired via Nuvia are covered by its architectural license, and that Qualcomm did not breach the terms of the Nuvia license it acquired.
However, the jury could not come to a conclusion over whether Nuvia itself had breached the terms of its architectural license. According to Bergey, this leaves the case between the two companies “unresolved.” “It’s still an open issue that needs to be resolved between the two parties,” he said. He declined to comment further.
Qualcomm, for its part, was undeterred. “We’ve made a public statement that we are happy with the outcome of the case, and [the court] upheld that we have the right to innovate and to the technology that we are bringing, the disruption that we are creating in the marketplace,” said Nitin Kumar, senior director of product management, at CES last week. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 18 Jan (PC World)Nintendo’s Switch 2 is official. We’ve seen a video reveal of the final design, teasing a more thorough announcement in April. And across the platform fence, the Steam Deck and its many imitators in the PC handheld space have never been hotter. So now it’s time for the inevitable, attention-grabbing headlines pitting them against one another. Which one is better? Which one will win?
Neither. Both. It doesn’t matter. This is a dumb comparison to make, in an editorial article or a YouTube video with a goggle-eyed face and arrows in the thumbnail.
Because the Nintendo Switch 2 and the Steam Deck, for all that they share in form factor, are serving different markets and different people. As huge gaming products, both of them inform and influence the other. But these two products don’t compete directly, not in the same way that, say, the Xbox and PlayStation compete. Or even in the same way that these consoles compete with the PC.
So I’d like to say, with no small amount of self-aware apology, don’t listen to anyone who wants to frame this as a direct competition. Let’s break it down.
The Switch saved Nintendo
Nintendo released the original Switch a little over eight years ago in 2017. And if you weren’t paying attention at the time, it was a big deal. After the disappointing flop that was the Wii U, Nintendo came out swinging, leaning on its incredible success with gaming handhelds to revitalize its core console business and unify the entire company, all in one product.
The Switch wasn’t perfect. It was very underpowered compared to any other major console, it had serious issues with its controllers, it didn’t last long on a charge, and Nintendo hasn’t done a good job managing its digital game store. But denying the Switch’s impact and influence would be impossible.
Nintendo
The merging of portable and home console form factors via the included dock was ingenious, even if it took the failure of the Wii U’s giant screen-controller-thing to get there. Throw in the Switch Lite to appeal to younger players, who were always far more engaged with portable gaming anyway, and suddenly Nintendo was printing money.
Across three models, the Switch has sold 146 million consoles worldwide at the time of writing. Only the PS2 and the original Nintendo DS beat it for lifetime sales, and its nominal competitor the PS4 is way behind on that list. It surely doesn’t hurt that the Switch started at a $300 price point, which is expensive for a portable in context with the Game Boy, but very fair compared to the PlayStation or Xbox.
The Switch probably helped Valve make the Steam Deck
The Nintendo Switch was such a massive success that it was impossible for it not to influence the PC gaming market. But that’s a couched statement. While there were a few notable handheld devices trying to join PC games to the Switch’s form factor (or at least its shape), none made it into the mainstream. Even big companies like Dell (via its Alienware brand) and Razer experimented with a Switch-style gaming PC handhelds, but they mostly didn’t go beyond mildly interesting trade show demos.
Until the Steam Deck. Valve finally revealed its portable PC, running its home-grown Linux OS, in 2021. The Steam Deck resurrected Valve’s attempts to create both console-style PC hardware and its own integrated platform for PC gaming, all with the portable form factor of the Switch. It can also easily dock to a monitor or TV, with wireless controllers or even a mouse and keyboard. It was a smash hit immediately upon its February 2022 release.
Steam Deck
But it’s important to spot the details here. The Steam Deck was not and is not a direct competitor to the Switch, even though they share a lot of design elements. Sure, both of them are portable game machines with similar layouts, and the Steam Deck uses an integrated store that’s basically the closest thing PC gamers have to the Xbox or PlayStation stores. But that’s about where the similarities end.
The Switch is designed with kids in mind, if not exclusively for them. It’s easy to use, hard to break, and the cartridges are even coated in a nasty bitter agent to keep kids from swallowing them. (Which is a very cool touch, Nintendo, kudos.) The Steam Deck, despite starting at a fairly affordable (in PC gaming terms) $400, is very much aimed at grown-ups. It’s much bigger and heavier, and you’re invited to open it up and mod it or repair it if it strikes your fancy.
Perhaps more pertinently, the Steam Deck is a full computer, using x64 hardware adapted from AMD’s integrated CPU-GPU combos designed for laptops. You can even install Windows on it if you want (but don’t do that). The Switch is a far more locked down and proprietary system built on Nvidia’s Tegra chips, an Arm system that was (at the time) almost exclusively for smartphones and integrated electronics. Try to run anything but Nintendo software on the Switch, and it will fight you every step of the way. It is, in a word, a console.
iFixIt
For all the inspiration that the Steam Deck and SteamOS take from the console world, Valve isn’t stopping you from doing basically whatever you want with the thing, just like a laptop or desktop. The same is mostly true for the various Windows-based imitators that have sprung up over the last three years, from Asus, Lenovo, MSI, et cetera. These are handheld gaming PCs, not handheld game consoles, a small but crucial distinction.
There’s always been a lot of crossover between console gaming and PC gaming, and that’s never been more true than today, when the Xbox and PlayStation are both basically just x64 PCs with a lot of proprietary software. But since the late 90s, Nintendo has stood apart from its competitors. Even when it wasn’t beating them — and it rarely was — it holds a very particular position that it’s carved out for itself. And that gives it a unique relationship to the PC as a gaming platform.
You buy a PlayStation or an Xbox or a PC to play video games. There are some exceptions — Sony in particular has some great exclusives, even though it’s sending a lot of them to the PC. But you buy a Nintendo console to play Nintendo games. That’s always been true, and always been the primary draw of its platforms.
The Switch is an ideal secondary gaming gadget
The Switch was no different, blasting out of the gate with Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and Mario Odyssey and Smash Bros. Ultimate quickly following, all experiences you can’t (legally) replicate on non-Nintendo hardware. The immediate success of the Switch also gave Nintendo an opportunity to quickly port in some great games from the Wii U that saw less play on that less successful console, such as Mario Kart 8 and Pikmin 3. Nintendo has steadily released new and successful games for the Switch, plus lots of ports and remakes, throughout its lifetime.
Nintendo has plenty of devotees that only care about Nintendo games, and can rely on them to buy new consoles and titles regularly. This core audience has kept the company afloat during the leaner years of the GameCube and Wii U. But more generalized gamers also see the appeal of Nintendo, and generally buy its stuff as a secondary system if they can afford it. So it’s pretty common, at least in affluent markets, to see a setup with a PlayStation + Nintendo console, Xbox + Nintendo, or PC + Nintendo. I’ve got a Switch docked on my desk right now, even with a massive gaming desktop underneath it.
Dominik Tomaszewski / Foundry
With the Switch’s appeal as a portable and relatively affordable system that’s more capable than any mainstream gadget that came before it, this market for Nintendo as an ancillary gaming platform only grew. It grew so much and so quickly that Nintendo was able to attract the third-party developers that often treat it like a second-class citizen. Even though the Switch’s mobile hardware is far less powerful than any other adjacent platform, you can play everything from hardcore games like Dark Souls to multiplayer twitch-fests Overwatch and Fortnite to indie darlings like Balatro on it. The Nintendo eShop, warts and all, is far and away the company’s most successful digital store ever.
There’s a lot of crossover with the PC gaming market on that list. But once again, I stress that the Switch and the Steam Deck are distinct enough products that they aren’t really selling to the same customers, or at least not exclusively to the same customers. You can’t play Zelda on the Steam Deck (not without a lot of questionably legal work and compromises). You can’t play Elden Ring or Marvel Rivals on the Switch.
A small amount of gamers will want all of that, and be limited to choosing either a Nintendo console or a Steam Deck/gaming laptop/desktop/PlayStation. (I’d put an Xbox in there, if anyone was buying an Xbox in 2025.) But the far greater number of gamers will either be okay with a Switch, okay with a different platform, or okay with buying both. And that’s not likely to change anytime soon.
The Nintendo Switch 2 and the Steam Deck are happy neighbors
PC gaming is more prosperous than it’s ever been in 2025, even if the industry as a whole is going into it with a notable black eye. The Steam Deck is a big part of that, and will continue to be so if Valve’s latest moves are any indication. But it’s worth keeping things in perspective. While PC gaming as a segment of the market is bigger than Nintendo’s very profitable chunk, the Steam Deck has only sold a few million units by estimate, an order of magnitude fewer than the Switch even limiting it to just the last few years.
The Switch was and is an amazing success for Nintendo, striking out on its own path to defy and disrupt its console competition. The Switch 2 might be a continuation of that success…or a disappointing follow-up, like the GameCube and Wii U followed the N64 and the Wii. But either way, Nintendo’s distinct place in the gaming landscape is not a threat to Valve, the Steam Deck, or PC gaming as a whole. These platforms borrow from one another and benefit from mutual successes. They’re happy neighbors, not feuding clans.
Willis Lai / Foundry
There are a small number of gamers, and hopefully readers of this article, who will need to choose between the Switch 2 and the Steam Deck (or PC gaming in general). But that choice will come down to what games you want to play and, far more pertinently, which one you can afford. Lists of hardware features and specification spreadsheets will play a vanishingly small role in the decision.
Buy a Nintendo Switch 2, buy a Steam Deck, buy ’em both if you want to and can afford ’em. But don’t buy into the narrative that this is some kind of zero-sum prize fight between massive corporations. It’s a dumb argument to make, an even dumber one to dwell on. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
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