Technology

Streamline your smart home routines with these Alexa-enabled devices.

After Western Digital announced plans to separate its HDD and flash businesses back in 2023, that plan now appears to have come to fruition, with the storage giant dividing its company into two distinct brands.

Despite knowing the move was coming, the timing is interesting, as WD only recently released an 8TB SSD as part of its WD Black SN850X series, joining the existing 1TB, 2TB, and 4TB models in the range.

In an announcement, the company explains to customers, “We are now operating as two specialized websites: WesternDigital.com for HDDs and platforms, and SanDisk.com for flash technology, including SSDs, memory cards, USB flash drives, and more.”

What does it mean for buyers?

The company added its creation of separate websites is designed to, “better position each franchise to execute innovative technology and product development, capitalize on unique growth opportunities, extend respective market leadership positions, and operate more efficiently with distinct capital structures.”

Back in March 2024, Western Digital supplied additional information on the reason for the split, which essentially boils down to "creating shareholder value and driving long-term success for its businesses.”

David Goeckeler, CEO of Western Digital, said at the time that the split was “an extremely complex transaction that incorporates over a dozen countries and spans data storage technology brands for consumers, professional content creators, the world’s leading device OEMs, and the largest cloud providers.”

So now that the division is complete, what will it mean for customers? The company says, “On WesternDigital.com, you can shop for all HDD and platform products from the following brands: Western Digital, WD, WD_BLACK, and SanDisk Professional. On SanDisk.com, you can shop for all flash products, such as SSDs, memory cards, and USB flash drives from the following brands: Western Digital, WD, WD_BLACK, SanDisk, and SanDisk Professional.”

There will, of course, be repercussions for customers. If you have a discount code from Western Digital, you’ll only be able to use it to buy products on the WD site. The reverse is true for customers with SanDisk codes.

More from TechRadar Pro

• These are the best SSDs you can buy right now
• And these are the fastest HDDs available to purchase
• WD's external SSD is aimed at content creators and offers 8TB of fast storage

Stress, cyberthreats and overworking are making cybersecurity professionals want to quit in droves, new research has claimed.

The findings from BlackFrog reveal almost a quarter (24%) of security heads are actively seeking a change of job, with over half (54%) not yet at the quitting point, but open to new opportunities.

Overwhelmingly, stress and demands are the main considerations for security pros looking to quit, with 93% stating these as the main cause of their decision to potentially leave.

Burnout reaching new highs

The report also found CISOs and IT security decision makers are also working overtime in an attempt to keep their business secure, with almost every respondent (98%) stating they work more than their contracted hours.

Of those exceeding their hours, 15% are working more than 16 hours of additional time per week in an attempt to defend against almost constant ransomware and malware attacks. The average security pro was found to put in just over an extra day (9 hours) of work per week.

The reasons given for increased stress mirror the changing threat landscape faced by security professionals, with 42% of respondents voicing their concern about the potential for threat actors to integrate AI tools into their attack vectors, with a quarter of respondents also citing data exfiltration as a top concern. 37% stated the threat of ransomware and malware attacks are a significant source of stress.

When it comes to managing stress, there are some positives. Sport and physical activity is recognized as a means of dealing with stress and complementing overall health, with 86% stating that they allocate time to activities. Sleep, on the other hand, is harder to come by, with only three quarters (75%) stating that they get enough shut-eye.

Despite working significant amounts of overtime, 82% of those surveyed said that they set a clear boundary between their work and private life. The downside however is just under half (45%) have used drugs or alcohol as a way to deal with the pressures of the job, and 69% said that they have been more unsociable.

Help is being offered from the upper management of businesses, with many being offered practical support for dealing with the stress of the job, including flexible hours (64%) and hybrid or remote working for their role (62%).

But security heads still believe that there's more to be done to manage their stress and keep them from quitting, with bigger budgets for security tools (41%) and time prioritization for the things that really matter (40%) stated as additional measures for relieving stress and burden.

More from TechRadar Pro

• Looking for a new role? These are the best job sites
• SMBs are being hit hardest by cybersecurity skills gap
• Take a look at some of the best sites for hiring developers

Yoga can help you ease into restful sleep each night. Here are the top three poses to start using tonight.

New iPads are here. We break down Apple’s current lineup to help you figure out which one of Apple’s tablets is best for you.

Last minute gifting doesn't have to be lame. Saddle someone you love with credit to spend on cheese, wine, spices and cookware.

The US has accused two brothers of being part of the hacker group Anonymous Sudan, which allegedly went on a wild cyberattack spree that hit hundreds of targets—and, for one of the two men, even put lives at risk.

Thousands may now be at risk of mold-related illnesses following this year's hurricanes in the American South.

Act fast if you want to get your hands on this great TV from Hisense at Best Buy. It's on sale today only.

Whether you want to upgrade to an iPhone 16 or iPhone 16 Pro or hope to score last year's iPhone 15 at a discount, we tested every iPhone Apple sells and assembled this list to help you find the best iPhone to suit your needs.

Nintendo products are known for holding their prices years after release, so we've rounded up the best console and game discounts so that you walk away with the best deal possible.

It’s well known that traditional power delivery systems are struggling to keep up with the energy requirements of advanced AI chips. Existing architectures rely on bulky power stages and large capacitor banks that take up significant space on the PCB. This setup leads to high power losses and limits efficiency, creating a barrier to supporting the latest AI workloads. This issue is particularly relevant for tech behemoths like Microsoft and Google, which are heavily investing in AI and data center infrastructure.

Empower Semiconductor has introduced a new Crescendo vertical power delivery platform to tackle these challenges by eliminating the need for capacitor banks and delivering energy directly to AI chips. By placing the PD system directly under the processor, power losses associated with traditional designs are reduced and overall efficiency improved.

The new platform uses the company’s proprietary FinFast technology to provide scalable, on-demand power delivery for up to 3,000A power domains, making it well-suited for the growing demands of modern data centers.

Just the beginning

“AI’s accelerating power requirements far outpaces the capability of today’s lateral power solutions, both in scale and speed. In developing the Crescendo platform, Empower enables generations of new AI processors to hit their performance goals while running efficiently and cool,” said Tim Phillips, founder and CEO of Empower Semiconductor.

“With this introduction we are enabling efficient true vertical power delivery for our customers – and this is just the beginning, as the Crescendo platform will allow the integration of power delivery directly into the processor at total power supply densities exceeding 5A/mm2, setting Empower apart as the technology leader.”

Empower says its technology offers 5x higher power density and over 10% reduction in power delivery losses, cutting more than 8MW of power loss in data centers with 100,000 CPUs.

More from TechRadar Pro

• Data center demand is booming - but we don't have the power to deal with it
• Google is spending billions on data centers and subsea cables to connect them
• Why the data center of 2030 will look very different from today

Dippy, a startup that offers “uncensored” AI companions, lets you peer into their thought process—sometimes revealing hidden motives.

A critical vulnerability in a SolarWinds product is being abused in the wild, and now US government agencies have a deadline to patch it or lose it.

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has added CVE-2024-28987 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. When a vulnerability is added to this list, it means there is evidence of in-the-wild abuse.

This flaw resides in Web Help Desk, a web-based IT service management software that streamlines and automates help desk ticketing, asset management, and IT service management processes. It is considered one of SolarWinds’ most popular products, and offers things like ticketing, incident and problem management, and a self-service portal. IT support teams around the world are using this product every day.

Deadline to patch

The bug is the result of a simple oversight by the SolarWinds team - admin credentials were left hardcoded in Web Help Desk. That means that miscreants can access their targets’ endpoints easily, by logging in as an admin. This flaw carries a severity score of 9.1/10 and is deemed critical. It affects Web Help Desk 12.8.3 HF1 and all previous versions.

The earliest clean version is 12.8.3 HF2.

Since the patch is available, federal agencies have a three-week deadline (by November 5) to apply it. It needs to be applied manually, as there is no automatic solution. Alternatively, they can stop using the tool altogether.

Hardcoded credentials are a frequent occurrence. In October last year, for example, it was found that Cisco Emergency Responder (CER), the company’s emergency communication system used to respond to crises in a timely manner, had hardcoded credentials. In March 2024, researchers found that millions of GitHub projects had the same problem.

CISA did not detail who the crooks are, who they are targeting with this vulnerability, or how it is being exploited in the real world.

Via The Hacker News

More from TechRadar Pro

• SolarWinds left some serious security flaws in its Web Desk Help platform, and now it's under attack
• Here's a list of the best firewalls today
• These are the best endpoint protection tools right now

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has once again outlined his vision for a robotic-boosted future, saying the move could possibly be the biggest advance in human history so far.

Speaking at Lenovo Tech World 2024 in conversation alongside Lenovo Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Yuanqing Yang, Huang noted how the AI revolution could mean bigger changes for businesses than any other technological leap.

"This is going to be the largest of industrial revolutions we've ever seen,” Huang declared, “we’re seeing, in just the last 12 months, just that extraordinary awakening in every single industry, every single company, every single country, recognising that their digital intelligence, their data can be codified, transformed, into their company, their country, or their industry’s digital intelligence.”

Computing revolutions

The two companies announced a new Hybrid AI partnership at the event, and Huang and Yang, who revealed they had known each other for about 20 years, reminisced about the major changes they had experienced in recent times.

“We went through several computing revolutions together,” Huang noted, “starting with the PC revolution and the Internet revolution, and the mobile cloud revolution - and now we’re reinventing computing for the very first time in the largest possible way - we’re reinventing the entire stack.”

“What used to be coding is now machine learning, and coding was designed to run on CPUs - and machine learning is designed to run on GPUs - and what’s amazing is that coding created software, which drove an enormous industry, but now machine learning is creating artificial intelligence, where a machine can do the coding.”

Huang highlighted Meta’s Llama 3 model as a particular boon to this advance, claiming it means “every company can now engage digital AI” if they have the necessary infrastructure and technology stack.

(Image credit: Future / Mike Moore)

Asked on his views on agentic AI, Huang noted, “AI in its most general form is basically robotic.”

"There's going to be digital robots - we call them agents", he said. “They have the ability to understand your instructions, understand the meaning of your instructions, break down into actions, use tools to retrieve proprietary information, or whatever information it has access to, and perform the task, and take action if necessary.”

"We're going to have information robots - we call them agents - but also physical robots…and these two artificial intelligences will be the underpinning of the world's industries."

Huang, who recently spoke about “onboarding” AI agents much like human co-workers, and who appeared on stage at Nvidia GTC 2024 alongside a host of humanoid robots, was keen to show off his pro-robot views once again.

“We’re going to have AI co-workers, AI workers that are good at marketing, to help us with supply chain management, and have these agents work with all of our employees, so we can be a lot more productive."

"We would like to achieve, essentially, superhuman productivity."

More from TechRadar Pro

• Lenovo CEO - get ready for a new era of hybrid AI for all
• AMD Advancing AI 2024 event shows that the AI PC is making progress, but still needs time to cook
• These are the best business laptops around today

Scammer stories have become a hot topic in the world of streaming, particularly for Netflix with the likes of documentary The Tinder Swindler and the drama series Inventing Anna, and it's continuing to expand its documentary library with the latest installment: Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare, which lays bare a woman's nine-year catfish ordeal.

While Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare has taken the world by storm since debuting on the best streaming service on Wednesday, October 16, that's not the only catfish story being told this week as Hulu has also jumped on the catfish bandwagon with the upcoming documentary Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara, which will be released on October 18.

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare has promise to become one of the best Netflix documentaries for its crazy and complex catfish scheme, which particularly shocks if you haven't listened to the hit podcast it's based on. But if you're eager to watch another true crime documentary, then Hulu's Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara will certainly grab your attention as it reveals how a music duo and fanbase were targeted by a cruel catfish plot.

What is Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare and Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara about?

Based on the Tortoise podcast of the same name, Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare follows Kirat Assi, a woman whose online romance takes a disturbing turn when she learns her mysterious fiancé is harbouring a dark secret that upends her life.

The podcast was a huge success and attracted thousands of listeners, but now Assi is re-telling her story in this Netflix documentary, which is ideal if you're unfamiliar with its source material like me. Assi realizes this in her interview with Radio Times as she revealed: "It's just sharing the story to a wider audience. Lots of people don't listen to podcasts and if this helps people to speak up [and] speak out, to fight for themselves a bit harder when it comes to not being believed, then that's what matters."

Meanwhile, Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is an investigation into what the queer indie rock duo have experienced for over 15 years. Tegan Rain Quin enlists the help of documentary filmmaker and investigator Erin Lee Carr to find the person pretending to be her and terrorizing her fans with sinister and unexpected twists. The documentary exposes how terrifying and violating the nightmare has been for the identical twins, their families, and unsuspecting fans who were made to believe that they had formed a real friendship with Tegan.

In a Hulu press release it states: "This is a sprawling yet intimate story of how Tegan's identity was stolen and weaponized in a complex catfish scheme to ensnare members of the community. This film is an examination of the sevre ripple effect of mistrust, anxiety, and self-doubt that resulted from Fegan's (Fake Tegan) actions."

Sweet Bobby: My Catfish Nightmare is available to stream on Netflix now, while Fanatical: The Catfishing of Tegan and Sara is being released on Friday, October 18.

You might also like

• New Hulu movies: the biggest films to stream in October 2024
• Best Hulu movies: 22 great films to stream in October 2024
• Hulu’s upcoming horror series Grotesquerie looks like a quintessential Ryan Murphy production, blending horror, true crime, and… Travis Kelce?

Aaron Kofsky, JD Vance’s financial policy adviser, called Vance “a Trump boot licker” and instructed users on how to transport drugs through TSA in the posts. “Coke then opiates is always my go-to,” he wrote.

Samsung's The Frame TV is based on a simple and brilliant idea: what if your TV could also be a picture frame for some of the world's greatest artworks? And now its catalog has been joined by nearly 30 new artworks courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, or MoMA for short.

The new Art Store arrivals were selected by curator Daria Greene, who wanted to honor the museum's history and vision. The artworks include Frida Kahlo’s “Fulang Chang and I” (1937), the first time Kahlo's work has been available for display on the platform, Vincent van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1889), Henri Rousseau’s “The Dream” (1910) and Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Evening Star III” (1917).

Can't make it to the museum? Let the museum come to you

When we reviewed the 2022 version of the Samsung The Frame, we said that its new anti-reflective screen made it particularly good for viewing works of art. While even the best TVs can't quite match the experience of seeing an original artwork in place – Van Gogh's The Starry Night is available with massive zoom levels on the MoMA website, btu I'm told that it's still not as breathtaking as being up close with the original – the combination of a QLED display, 4K resolution and anti-reflective display is as good as you can get if New York isn't convenient to you.

The arrival of the artworks from MoMA is significant for another reason: until now the majority of artworks available for The Frame were public domain, either because they were so old their copyright had expired or in rarer cases, because the artist had given away their copyright.

That inevitably meant the catalog was skewed towards older works of art, and while they're of course valuable too it did mean that the choice of modern art was a little limited. So it'll be nice to see the MoMA collection take its place alongside other modern works by artists such as Keith Haring, Jen Stark and Shinique Smith.

You might also like

• Samsung TVs’ free update to One UI is already happening – here are the changes coming to TVs
• Panasonic Z95A review: a stunning, bright OLED TV with best-in-class Dolby Atmos sound
• Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar: price, release date, features and new 'Sound Motion' speaker tech explained

Invincible fans just got their biggest update yet about the return of the superhero animation series: we finally have a teaser trailer and official premiere date, along with confirmation that the next installment won't see a midseason break.

The first three episodes of Invincible season 3 will be released on Prime Video on Thursday, February 6, 2025, with a new episode dropping on the same day every week until March 13, which means that there will be another eight episodes in the season.

This isn't a complete surprise for fans who are in the know, as co-showrunner Simon Racioppa had previously told TechRadar that launching the series in two parts "wasn't the original plan" for Invincible season 2, so we didn't expect it to happen again.

What we did expect, though, was a teaser trailer (see below) to be unveiled around the time that the release date was revealed, and this has turned out to be the case. You can watch the two-and-a-half minute clip below.

Mark never gets a break. Here’s your Invincible Season 3 update… pic.twitter.com/8Ahmmdpt8ROctober 15, 2024

What does the Invincible season 3 teaser trailer tell us?

The teaser shows Mark Grayson (Steven Yeun) and Cecil Stedman (Walton Goggins) in a cafe having a very meta conversation about the series. It shows the pair catching up about recent events and Invincible season 2's ending, while also poking fun at the show's hiatus since the finale.

Even the announcement for season 3's release date was done in true Invincible fashion too, with Mark turning to Cecil and asking: "when is this all going to start"? Like many of the best superhero movies, the series deploys a self-aware humor as a way to poke fun at its own delays and setbacks.

There's still no official synopsis for season 3 of the show, but we do know from this brief clip is that Mark will need to go through some extensive 'special training' to prepare for what's coming next.

Seeing as the next chapter of one of the best Prime Video shows has been in the making for over three years, you'd think that the leading superhero from the comic book series of the same name by Robert Kirkman would be ready for anything, but even he's surprised by the idea of having to exercise...

You might also like

• Prime Video will soon offer Apple TV Plus as a subscription add-on
• Prime Video is going to be filled with even more ads
• The Rings of Power season 3: Prime Video release date prediction and more

Alibaba’s international commerce business, Alibaba International Digital Commerce (AIDC) Group, has launched a new large language model focused specifically on translations (via SCMP).

The model – Macro MT – is hoped to aid with cross-border ecommerce and trade efforts by eliminating language barriers as well as integrating with other business scenarios and everyday communication.

The news comes not long after AIDC VP Zhang Kaifu committed to leveraging generative AI to help with translation, content creation and more (via Reuters).

Alibaba launches AI model for translation

“Macro MT will seamlessly integrate into Alibaba International’s overarching business strategies, fortifying the operational backbone of our diverse cross-border e-commerce platforms such as AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol and more," Zhang confirmed.

The model offers integration into systems managing product listings, customer service and search, promising translations of titles, descriptions, image captions and keywords.

From launch, 15 languages will be supported, including Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean, however Alibaba is preparing to add more languages and improve translation quality in the future.

Beyond integration within Alibaba’s platforms, AIDC aims to make Macro MT available globally, extending its benefits to a wider range of merchants as well as individual and business users outside of ecommerce. Macro MT is intended to address the pitfalls of existing translation tools.

The decision to build such a model came after the company noticed that “existing translation tools fall short in navigating the intricacies of culturally nuanced and idiom-laden expressions.”

Zhang added the model had already surpassed some world-leading translation models, as demonstrated by its performance on the Flores benchmark which focus on translating to and from English and low-resource languages that typically get less support.

More from TechRadar Pro

• Meta announces an AI translation tool that could change the way you watch Instagram and Facebook Reels forever
• These are the best AI website builders
• We’ve listed the best AI tools and best AI writers