Following Amazon suing the admins of more than 10,000 Facebook groups over an alleged co-ordinated fake reviews campaign, we look at how to spot fake reviews and dubious ratings on Amazon. Why Use Fake Reviews? On the site of one of the world’s largest retailers and the top online marketplace, large numbers of positive reviews and five-star ratings can…
A 1976 Apple-1 prototype, believed to have been owned by Steve Jobs and hand-soldered by Steve Wozniak is being auctioned and is expected to fetch around $500,000. At $400,000+ Already! The prototype is essentially a broken circuit board with a crack in it but at the time writing this, after 19 bids and with the auction not due to…
A new Oxford University study involving 38,935 video-game players overs six weeks has concluded that there is little to no evidence for a causal connection between game play and well-being. Why Do We Believe Spending Time Playing Video / Online Games Is Bad For Us? A combination of previous research, social judgements, anecdotal evidence, online and media comments, and…
Google has announced that due to the need for more time to evaluate alternatives, it is delaying (by nine months) its plans to rid Chrome of third-party tracking cookies. Third-Party Cookies A cookie is a piece of code (used for tracking) that takes the form of a small text file that is stored on the browser of someone who…
Researchers at the University of Colorado in Boulder have developed a net carbon neutral (or even carbon negative) method of producing Portland cement by substituting quarried limestone with limestone produced by microalgae. The Problem With Traditional Portland Cement The problem with traditional Portland cement is that it is made by quarrying limestone in large quarries and burning it at high…
A new Proofpoint report has warned that hackers, who used to use macro-enabled documents attached to messages to deliver malware are now adapting to Microsoft’s move to block XL4 and VBA macros by default for Office users. Proofpoint says that hackers have now switched to methods such as using container files like ISO and RAR, and Windows Shortcut (LNK)…
One way to get more organised when using Google Chrome is to group open website tabs together with a click to keep related pages together in one workspace. Chrome’s ‘Group tabs’ lets your give the groups a label/name and colour. Here’s how: – Right-click a browser tab. – Click ‘Add Tab to new group.’ – Click ‘New Group’ (or…
With an ONS survey showing that from October to December 2019 and January to March 2022, homeworking in the UK more than doubled from 4.7 million to 9.9 million people, we take a closer look at the figures and what’s behind them. COVID 19 Pandemic Triggered Huge Rise In Homeworking With the UK government first asking people to work…
With young people now unlikely to read newspapers or watch the TV news, and following the latest Ofcom report, we look at which channels people get their news from. Decline of Printed Newspapers Newspaper readership has been declining for many years but the drop in readership during the pandemic years has been much more pronounced, e.g. 35 percent of…
Google has sacked senior software engineer Blake Lemoine, who made the news after saying that Google’s LaMDA chatbot’s responses to questions showed that it was a sentient being. What Happened? Back in June, Google engineer Blake Lemoine reported that the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA ) AI system bot may have feelings and was saying things that a…
