PC Review

The UK Met Office is set to upgrade their current forecasting supercomputer to one that is 6x more powerful (with a further 3x upgrade after 5 years). The total cost for the new system is £1.2 billion, which includes operating costs over the 10 year lifespan. The upgrade in performance will allow weather forecasting resolution down to 100m², a huge improvement on the 1500m² grid (outside... [Read the rest here]

The Wi-Fi Alliance is introducing a new Wi-Fi 6E standard, which designates devices as cable of using the 6Ghz band as well as features of the similarly named Wi-Fi 6 standard (namely higher performance and lower latency). Existing 2.4Ghz and 5 Ghz channels are becoming saturated with the rapid increase in connected devices, so any additional space on the spectrum is to be welcomed. This will... [Read the rest here]

The Half Life series has been one of the most popular gaming franchises of all time, however the story ended abruptly nearly 12 years ago with Half Life 2: Episide 2. Fans have been clamouring for Half Life 3 for years, with an endless supply of memes, false starts and April fools jokes about the game. However, there is finally some good news... Valve have announced Half Life: Alyx, one of... [Read the rest here]

Microsoft have been working on Flight Simulator 2020 for quite some time, having previewed the game at E3 a little earlier this year. This upcoming release has been long awaited by flight sim fans, as the previous edition of the game is coming up to 8 years old and is starting to look a little long in the tooth. Huge generational changes have been made in Flight Simulator 2020, including... [Read the rest here]

Intel have showcased a new product, codenamed "Element", which combines PCIe cards to form a fully modular PC. This means a computer in the future could consist of a simple backplane with lots of PCIe slots, in to which different processing modules could be plugged in. For example, you may need an Intel Element CPU module (also containing memory modules) and then a selection of GPU, RAID and... [Read the rest here]

It will come as no surprise to industry observers that the smart meter rollout failed to hit it's initial target to roll out smart meters across the UK by 2020. Energy companies had warned that the technology was not yet sufficiently ready and that it was a complex logistical problem. As of the Sept 2019, 16.6 million smart meters have been installed. A long way short of the 51.6 million... [Read the rest here]

Over 419 million records containing phone numbers and Facebook ID have been leaked online. Some records also contain names, gender and location information. Over 18 million records relate to UK users and over 133 million records for US users - a significant portion of the respective populations. It looks like this data was scraped at a time when Facebook would allow searching by phone number... [Read the rest here]

Over 27 million data records such as facial recognition profiles, fingerprints, usernames and unencrypted passwords have been found openly available on Suprema Inc's Biostar 2 biometric access control system servers. This security firm powers access control for over 1.5m installations, including governments, police and banks. Two Israeli researchers working for a VPN company found unsecured... [Read the rest here]

AV-Test, the independent anti-virus testing lab, have released their latest results for home anti-virus products. Microsoft Windows Defender (the free and default solution that comes with Windows 10) has received joint highest scores alongside Kaspersky, F-Secure and Norton. When Windows Defender was first released, it was poorly regarded - but it has steadily improved in recent years, to the... [Read the rest here]

Not content with owning a rocket company and electric car manufacturer (among with many other business ventures), Elon Musk has launched Neuralink. This neurotechnology company aims to create an implantable brain/machine interface which works by implanting thin threadlike electrodes in to the brain. If this works as expected, you could end up with a USB-C socket attached to your head in the... [Read the rest here]