(A screenshot from a Microsoft video.) Or, rather, down. If they need to bare their souls, emit portents of despair and sound gongs of woe, you really have to worry about the world’s perilous state. So it is on hearing the dire, desperate prognostications emerging from Microsoft. No, the company isn’t worried the Surface will never become the world’s dominant computer, laptop, tablet or whatever it’s supposed to be. Microsoft is worried that it won’t have enough people to make it so....

My wife and I were having dinner at a small restaurant when the owner came up to chat. We’ve been to this restaurant a few times. The staff always seem to be in a decent mood. Not fake-restaurant-decent, but real, actual, human-decent. I wanted to see if there was some secret at this place. I didn’t start by sinking to cliché. (As if I would.) I did mention, however, that people seemed to be moving jobs quite a lot – or quitting altogether – yet the staff at this restaurant always seem to be the same people....

First discovered In July 2021 by Netlab 360, the Abcbot botnet began as a simple scanner that used basic credential stuffing attacks and known vulnerability exploits to compromise vulnerable Linux systems. However, the developers quickly updated their creation to include self-update mechanisms, exploit kits, worm functionality, and a total of nine distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack functions. These findings were a starting point for Cado Security, which published a further analysis of the botnet in December....

“The reason we are proposing change is not because we are worried about losing court cases; it is because we have serious concerns about the level of competition in our economy and our ability under the current law to prevent further consolidation via anti-competitive acquisitions,” he told the Law Council of Australia’s competition and consumer workshop on Friday. “Unless something is done, these concerns will only intensify in the years ahead....

Paul Daugherty is Accenture’s group chief executive – technology & chief technology officer. He leads all aspects of Accenture’s technology business. Daugherty is also responsible for Accenture’s technology strategy, driving innovation through R&D in Accenture Labs and leveraging emerging technologies to bring the newest innovations to clients globally. He recently launched Accenture’s Cloud First initiative to scale the company’s market-leading cloud business further and is responsible for incubating new businesses such as blockchain, extended reality and quantum computing....

“There is currently no AUD-backed stablecoin with significant uptake. However, this is unlikely to remain true for long. An AUD-backed stablecoin would provide Australian cryptocurrency users and investors with an alternate store of value compared to the popular USD-denominated coins, with the associated benefits of blockchain technology,” Afterpay told the Senate Select Committee on Australia as a Technology and Financial Centre in a submission. “It may also work to remove some barriers to entry into the cryptocurrency market for Australians consumers and businesses, as rationalising their cryptocurrency holdings in AUD over USD could provide additional comfort in exploring the space....

Also: These sound machines can actually help you fall asleep faster If you’ve been wondering whether a contactless sleeper tracker would actually work, you’re not alone. I had been asking myself the same question for months, eager to put the Halo Rise to the test. Now, for the past few weeks, the Halo Rise has been my one-stop sleep tracker and alarm, and I’m happy to report that it’s made my mornings brighter in more ways than one....

The larger display allows you to get more text and images, minimizing how often you have to turn the page. When reading on the Kindle Scribe you can now add “sticky notes” on book pages as you read. All of your sticky notes are organized in one place, avoiding the mess that cluttered sticky notes can have in real life. In addition to taking reading notes, you can use the Kindle Scribe as a portable notebook, and it comes with templates for different needs such as sketching, journaling, and to-do lists....

This is a story of larger trends in the sector. The commercial drone industry is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 57% from 2021 to 2028 as a result of the need for better data and analytics that only drones provide. American Robotics has prioritized working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to manufacture devices that can safely and successfully operate under the Aviation Rulemaking Committee (ARC) and FAA guidelines....

(A screenshot from an Icelandair ad.) Yes, of course I’m talking about the whole world, but I’m specifically talking about airports and the airlines that fly into them. Please consider just two headlines from last week. How about this one: “Cases of lost luggage skyrocketing at airports, leaving travelers in the dark.” Clever use of cases, that. And a story heard in so many places. Then there was this tragic tale: “A passenger bought an airline ticket just to look for his lost luggage at Dublin Airport....

Marginally peeved, I went for a walk around the mall and lo, there was an Apple store. The last time I went into one, no one would talk to me. Well, no one who worked at Apple, that is. So I wafted into this one to see whether things had changed. Oh, and to inspect, just one more time, the midnight M2 MacBook Air. Just in case I could be tempted and the store might have some in stock....

“We’re seeing a lot of companies kind of doing a pause with cloud,” according to Bill Wong, AI and data analytics leader with Dell Technologies, who keynoted the recent Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Summit & Industry Awards (BTOES) event hosted by Proqis. “A lot of firms have mandated that everything has got to go in the cloud. What people are finding is, while there are some benefits putting everything in a central spot, the benefit of saving money seems to have fallen by the wayside....

But development for premium Android tablets waned. Even if they had sold relatively well, they would have represented a small fraction of the number of Android smartphones. Developers had a far greater vested interest in ensuring that their development time was devoted to covering a wide base of the latter. And while Apple relentlessly exhorted developers to optimize their apps for the iPad, Google long saw the best approach as a scalable interface that developers largely ignored, even after Google thought to tout tablet optimization in Google Play....

Why? Malware, according to Federighi, who used his speech at the Web Summit conference in Lisbon, Portugal, about online privacy to contrast Android’s malware problem with that of Apple’s iOS. He highlighted that third-party data on malware attacks on different platforms including iOS, Android and Windows showed that attacks on iOS “barely registered”. SEE: Apple finally admits it made a mistake and backtracks on three foolish MacBook Pro design decisions By contrast, there were five million attacks on Android per month....

Also: Don’t waste your money on these Apple products What is the M2 Pro? Using 40 billion transistors, the M2 Pro chipset brings enhanced speed and performance numbers to what was already a competent chipset in last year’s M2. The M2 Pro features 200GB/s of unified memory bandwidth, doubling that of the M2 chip, and can support up to 32GB of RAM. Also: Everything you need to know about the Apple M2 chip Now with a 12-core CPU (versus M1 Pro’s 10-core CPU), apps like Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro will run faster as well....

Can someone who’s spent their whole life expressing their divine, artistic superiority find a way to commune with those they used to ignore? Yes, of course, we’re talking about Apple. Here we are, you see, at an especially moving crossroads in the socio-technological sphere. Apple was always known as the company with supremely exalted design skills and supremely exalted prices. It rather enjoyed it. Its poorly dressed executives would declaim from on high that Apple represented the peak of aspiration....

Apple is also expected to announce new Apple Watch models, with low-end and high-end iPads, and more Macs also expected either at this event or another one later in the year. But this year’s iPhone models arrive as consumers lower their spending due to inflation pressures. Apple typically unveils its new iPhone models at launch events around September and this year it will be an online-only event, in line with others since the pandemic began....

However, with the release of iOS 16.2, iPadOS 16.2, and MacOS 13.1, Apple’s Freeform app is making its debut. Think of Freeform as a digital whiteboard of sorts. One where you can write, draw, and add images and documents – alone or with others. Also: Why your Apple device might stop charging this winter Before you delete or hide Freeform, take a few minutes to give it a try. There’s a lot it can do....

“State-sponsored actors like the NSO Group spend millions of dollars on sophisticated surveillance technologies without effective accountability. That needs to change,” said Craig Federighi, Apple SVP of Software Engineering, said in a statement. “While these cybersecurity threats only impact a very small number of our customers, we take any attack on our users very seriously, and we’re constantly working to strengthen the security and privacy protections in iOS to keep all our users safe....

Apple Pay Later allows users to split up a transaction into four equal payments, and then they pay it down over six weeks with no interest. Users will make the first payment upfront, with the remaining payments occurring every two weeks. Also: WWDC 2022: Every iOS 16 feature that’s coming to iPhones Users can pay in advance and monitor upcoming payments directly in the Apple Wallet app. Apple Pay Later also won’t incur any additional fees, according to the company’s press release....