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The iPhone X is almost here. We are just days away from the event that comes 10 years after the original iPhone. We have the iPhone 8 on sale and the iPhone doing clever stuff with face recognition. In the last few days Apple has been forced to deny it has reduced it's high manufacturing standards for facial recognition on the iPhone. The "revolutionary" aspect of this phone is it unlocks just by looking at it. By unlock I mean that you have to be the owner of the phone! Underlying this technology is the Israeli company that created the tech behind the Microsoft Kinect sensor. This week saw Microsoft end the production of the Kinect sensor that was, at one point, the fastest selling games peripheral. Apple bought the company that created the technology behind Kinect and had them work on using the idea for facial recognition. However even then Apple are a little late in the game because Microsoft already created " Windows Hello ". Windows Hello logs

Windowsphone actually “died” a couple of years ago. After Steve Ballmer , the previous CEO of Microsoft, bought Nokia for $7.2 billion you might have assumed that Microsoft was serious about mobile. However Microsoft had little choice. Nokia had made Windowsphone it’s primary operating system and now had 98% of the Windowsphone market. If Nokia’s phone division had just gone bankrupt or made Android handsets then Windowsphone would have ended in 2014. Nokia had done a pretty good job for Microsoft. Good industrial design, striking colours, double digit market share in places like Europe, South America and Asia where Nokia was a known brand and Microsoft had neglected. Nokia’s handsets had great cameras and additional apps that added value to the device. Nokia had teams of designers and specialists that knew how to make mobile hardware. Microsoft, on the other hand, struggled to sell Windowsphone in their US home market, contantly re-booted the operating system making older handsets

The most recent ransomware attacks on PC networks have been amplified by SMB 1.x. SMB is the original file sharing protocol on Windows. It actually came from MS-DOS, the previous operating system from Microsoft, and has a long history . It eventually became called CIFS (Common Internet File System) as a rebrand to dominate internet file sharing in the same way as Windows dominated the PC world. In the recent ransomware attacks where computers are controlled by malware the old version 1 of SMB has been used to spread the malware over networks. Very few systems, except the odd printer/scanner, use SMB 1 any more. Mostly you see version 2 or version 3 on networks today. So unless you know you need version 1 it’s best to switch it off in the Windows control panel. If you select switching on/off Windows features you see something like this. Basically you just switch off SMB 1 by unticking the box. Probably a good thing to do on all your PCs to make them a little safer. For more de