What is audio? Audio is sound that is within the acoustic range of human hearing. It is the audible portion on the spectrum of sound frequencies, distinct from inaudible sounds heard by certain animals or used in science and medicine. An elephant, for example, can hear sounds at lower frequencies than humans, and porpoises can […]

What is a microchip? A microchip — also called a chip, computer chip or integrated circuit (IC) — is a unit of integrated circuitry that is manufactured at a microscopic scale using a semiconductor material, such as silicon or, to a lesser degree, germanium. Electronic components, such as transistors and resistors, are etched into the […]

What is pipelining? Pipelining is the process of storing and prioritizing computer instructions that the processor executes. The pipeline is a “logical pipeline” that lets the processor perform an instruction in multiple steps. The processing happens in a continuous, orderly, somewhat overlapped manner. In computing, pipelining is also known as pipeline processing. It is sometimes […]

Hive Social, a social media network that has gained significant traction as a potential Twitter “replacement” after the latter was taken over by erratic tech billionaire Elon Musk, has been forced to shut down its servers after ethical hackers identified major vulnerabilities in the service that could potentially have put user data at significant […]

Italian cloud services provider Aruba SpA has secured €500m in investment, which it has used to expand its Global Cloud Data Center (GCDC) site in Ponte San Pietro, which is already Italy’s largest server farm. The company has added two further datacentres to its 200,000m² campus, including one 17,000 m² 9 MW facility that […]

Emails published by Russian hackers and systematically analysed by Computer Weekly reveal that in January 2020 the former “C” (chief of the Secret Intelligence Service, MI6) Richard Dearlove linked up with hard-Brexit campaigners and White House lobbyists to send a threat-laden briefing to 10 Downing Street warning about telecoms company Huawei.   Dearlove’s exposure […]

Credential management specialist LastPass has disclosed a new cyber security incident – its second in four months – that seems to have its roots in the first. The company launched an investigation, notified law enforcement and brought on board expertise from Mandiant, after it spotted unusual activity in an undisclosed third-party cloud storage service, […]

Kingfisher, the owner of UK home improvement brands B&Q and Screwfix, has signed a five-year deal with Google Cloud as part of a push to revamp its e-commerce platforms and digital offerings for its customers. The firm operates 1,500 stores across the UK and Ireland, France, Poland, Romania and Iberia and has 80,000 full-time […]

Beyond the usual suspects – monitoring for attacks, patching vulnerabilities and regular backup checks – what else can we do to protect ourselves against ransomware? So many technologies have been heralded as the silver bullet to stop these threats in their tracks, but have hardly proved their mettle. Artificial intelligence and machine learning has […]

Federal German data protection authorities have banned the use of Microsoft Office 365 in schools due to privacy concerns around the use of US cloud providers. The German Data Protection Conference (DSK) – which consists of the German Federal Data Protection Authority and 16 state regulators – said that, given the lack of transparency […]