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Microsoft security researchers have uncovered a vulnerability in the macOS operating system that could allow threat actors to gain access to sensitive data stored on the device.

The company detailed its findings in a blog post, which claimed the flaw bypasses the operating system’s Transparency, Consent, and Control (TCC) technology, and it was dubbed “HM Surf”.

The bug is now tracked as CVE-2024-44133. It has a severity score of 5.5 (medium), and was fixed in mid-September 2024.

What about Chrome, or Firefox?

Microsoft explained that the vulnerability removes TCC protection for the Safari browser directory, and allows for the modification of a configuration file in that directory. As a result, the malicious actor gains access to user data, such as browsed pages, the camera, microphone, location, and more - all without user consent.

While the bug being patched is definitely good news, there is a caveat. As explained in the article, only Safari uses the new protections afforded by the TCC, at the moment. That means other browsers, such as Chrome, or Firefox, “do not have the same private entitlements as Apple applications,” so they can’t work around the TCC checks. In other words, once a user approves TCC checks, the app is the one maintaining access to the privacy database.

“Microsoft is currently collaborating with other major browser vendors to investigate the benefits of hardening local configuration files,” the company explained.

Apple users are encouraged to apply the security update as soon as possible, since Microsoft claims to have found a possible case of in-the-wild abuse:

“Behavior monitoring protections in Microsoft Defender for Endpoint has detected activity associated with Adload, a prevalent macOS threat family, potentially exploiting this vulnerability,” it concluded.

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Sen. Lidia Thorpe was escorted out of a parliamentary reception for the royal couple after shouting that British colonizers have taken Indigenous land and bones.

(Image credit: Lukas Coch/AP)

The sooner you open one of these CDs, the more you stand to earn.

Hawaii's native tree snails, known as the "jewels of the forest," are rapidly disappearing. Some of the most imperiled only live in human care now, safeguarded 24 hours days.

(Image credit: Ryan Kellman)

Health insurers would be required to cover all recommended over-the-counter contraception products, such as birth control and condoms, without a prescription and at no cost, for those with insurance.

(Image credit: Justin Sullivan)

The United Nations effort to achieve “harmony” with the natural world kicks off in Colombia this week. Recent reports show there's a lot of work to do to achieve that goal.

(Image credit: Ivan Valencia)

It’s very unlikely — but theoretically possible — that the presidential election ends with an Electoral College tie. If it did come to pass, here's how the next president would be determined.

(Image credit: Allison Joyce)

You can't eliminate stress, but you can manage it better and sometimes even make it a force for good. That means reframing how you think about it.

Vice President Harris and former president Donald Trump are in a tight race in Pennsylvania. The state could go either way and it’s why both candidates are working so hard to appeal to voters.

(Image credit: Nate Smallwood for NPR)

The Nintendo Switch Online Playtest Program seems to be for a cooperative MMO where you work with others to develop a planet. It also doesn't seem to be related in any way to the upcoming Nintendo Switch 2, as we initially speculated.

Participants who were accepted during the application phase have now received access to a Nintendo Switch app containing information on the playtest, which officially begins on October 23.

X / Twitter user Ethan_ThisGuy appears to have been the first to post screenshots of the app, in a reply to a Wario64 update on the playtest. The user's screenshots have since been deleted, but user Nintendo Prime was able to salvage them.

We have three screenshots to peruse here, with each being accompanied by some text that goes some way to describing what kind of game this is going to be. The first screenshots details an area known as the Dev Core, where players can socialize with one another, as well as "level up your character, get items you will need for your journey" and more.

The main drive of the game - which is unnamed at the time of writing - seems to be a massive collaborative project between players. "In this game, the goal is to work with others to fully 'develop' a massive, expansive planet by utilizing creativity and farmed resources," another screenshot reveals. "As you progress across the planet, you'll discover new lands, enemies, and resources that will become essential to your journey."

To develop the planet together, players will individually work on their own Beacon Zones. Another screenshot demonstrates the higher a beacon is placed in a zone, the wider its reach becomes. Presumably, this will allow players to travel further out into the world and eventually connect with other Beacon Zones and thus, more players. It's all a bit Death Stranding, isn't it?

There's little else to go off right now, but if you were lucky enough to be selected for the playtest, you'll be able to start playing from October 23 until November 5. You'll also need 2.2GB of storage space on your Nintendo Switch console. Here's hoping the next Nintendo Direct - whenever that may be - sheds some more light on this very interesting project.

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These are tough times to be running a business. Relief at exiting the pandemic was short-lived, followed by rampant inflation, sky-high interest rates, business uncertainty and geopolitical volatility. Against this backdrop, the last thing an organization needs is to have critical data stolen and systems crippled by cyber-attack. Or for a key supplier to suffer the same. June’s ransomware attack on an NHS provider showed the catastrophic knock-on effect such a breach can have.

That’s why CISOs up and down the country are trying to build a case for improving cyber resilience. However, their job isn’t easy. First, they have to convince a skeptical – and sometimes downright hostile – board.

Why resilience matters

Cyber-resilience is all about addressing people, process and technology gaps to ensure an organization can continue to operate effectively even if it’s hit by a sustained and sophisticated cyber-attack. It means improving cyber-hygiene through best practices like multifactor authentication (MFA), regular security awareness training, backups, encryption, anti-malware, prompt patching and more. This “prevention” approach must be enhanced with detection and response to catch any threats that may sneak through – and recover quickly before there’s been any significant impact on the organization.

Unfortunately, this is getting harder than ever as digital investments expand the typical corporate attack surface. Half of UK businesses recorded at least one cyber-attack or breach last year, rising to 70% of medium-sized and 74% of large companies, according to the government. Ransomware isn’t the only threat facing these organisations. But it has become the largest one, according to the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), which also warns that the threat is expected to increase as malicious actors get hold of AI tools. 

For some companies, it has become an existential risk. Boards facing the threat of IP or customer/employee data loss and/or service disruption should be well aware by now of the long-term financial and reputational impact on their business. Even relatively small-scale cyber-incidents can force some systems offline for investigation, and redirect resources away from important digital transformation projects.

Undermined and undervalued

Investing in cyber-resilience should therefore be an open-and-shut case for CISOs to make. Unfortunately, it is not quite so straightforward. For cyber strategy to function as intended in an organization, the IT or security lead needs to be heard and understood. The board must buy into their vision, implicitly understanding the business criticality of effective cyber-risk management.

Unfortunately, research reveals that boards are more likely to be disengaged and unenthused by cyber, viewing it as an IT risk and little more. In fact, most (80%) CISOs claim that their board would only be incentivised to act on cyber risk if there was an actual breach. Reactive investments such as these often lead to point solutions which fail to address fundamental challenges, papering over the cracks when something more holistic is needed.

That same research finds that 79% of cybersecurity leaders have felt boardroom pressure to downplay the severity of cyber risks facing their organization. Many claim this is because they are seen as being “nagging” and are viewed as overly negative. A third say they have been dismissed out of hand.

Bridging the gap

This is partly the fault of the board. Although regulators are increasingly demanding more personal accountability for cyber incidents at a board level – which will certainly focus minds – there is more to do. CISOs can sometimes also be part of the problem, by packing their presentations with irrelevant metrics and industry jargon. That’s not the way to win over a business audience that wants answers to far more fundamental questions: How secure are we? What will it take us to get there?

To bridge the yawning boardroom credibility gap, security leaders need to keep their communications simple, to the point and free from tech-speak. They need to align cyber with business risk, and cybersecurity outcomes to business objectives. And they need to work harder to build personal relationships with board members.

The journey starts here

How do they get there? Using the right metrics is a good start. By consolidating point solutions onto a single platform for managing cyber risk, they can generate a single source of truth for more consistent reporting. The best outcome would be a solution capable of calculating risk based on attack landscape, user exposure and security configuration, as well as overall impact on the business. This could be used to continually map risk across the corporate attack surface and take automated remedial actions to close any gaps that appear, like vulnerabilities and misconfigurations.

The results could be displayed in an easy-to-consume executive dashboard, which helps senior leaders grasp the real-world implications of nebulous concepts like cloud misconfiguration and account compromise. This approach lights a clear pathway to closer alignment between security and business objectives, which could ultimately help to enhance cyber resilience. It may be a long journey ahead for some companies, but the alternative is far worse.

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This article was produced as part of TechRadarPro's Expert Insights channel where we feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today. The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/news/submit-your-story-to-techradar-pro

The UK Government has signed a major deal with Microsoft which will see organizations across the country get access to more powerful AI tools.

Speaking at the company's Microsoft AI Tour London event, the pair revealed a five-year partnership which they hope will give public sector firms the chance to utilize the latest in Microsoft technology, including the Copilot AI platform.

Going forward, the partnership will allow public sector organizations to get access to better deals and cost savings across the Microsoft portfolio, including Microsoft 365, Azure cloud platform, Business Applications, and for the first time, Microsoft 365 Copilot.

Microsoft UK Government deal

The UK Government believes this will help organizations boost their efficiency and productivity at a time when many are under pressure to cut budgets and ensure agility.

It is also hoped to help address the AI digital skills gap that has become a major talking point as usage of the technology skyrockets across the business world.

The UK Government is also aiming to build a new generation of cloud services to help its digital transformation journey, and Microsoft will play its part by offering support and its AI technology.

“AI technologies present a unique opportunity to transform public services and fuel the UK’s economic growth," noted Clare Barclay, CEO, Microsoft UK.

“This exciting new five-year partnership will mean Microsoft can continue to support the UK Government to create a world-class, digital-first public sector infrastructure, that will improve service delivery for citizens across the whole of the UK and create opportunities for all.”

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This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.

Zircon is a gemstone not to be confused with the synthetically produced cubic zirconia. Instead, it’s a naturally occurring gold-hewed mineral that comes in a variety of shades. PCSpecialist clearly considers its high-end entry to be a bit of a gem and it’s certainly packed with cutting-edge components.

Despite the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper, PCSpecialist opted not to go with this variant for the Zircon Extreme workstation. Instead, it uses the 32-core AMD Ryzen Threadripper Pro 7975X. This offers 64 threads and runs at the same frequencies as the non-Pro version – a base 4GHz with 5.3GHz boost. However, the Pro processor supports eight-channel memory and has 128 PCI Express 5 lanes, so can offer higher memory bandwidth while supporting many more high-speed peripherals than the vanilla Threadripper.

Strangely, however, although PCSpecialist has included a healthy total of 256GB DDR5 RAM memory running at 4,800MHz, this is supplied as four 64GB DIMMs rather than eight 32GB ones. This means that you can’t take advantage of the extra bandwidth from the eight-channel memory capability unless you add another four DIMMs. On the plus side, while we don’t envisage 256GB feeling like too little during the lifetime of this system, the Asus Pro WS WRX90E Sage SE motherboard has four DIMM slots free for upgrade and seven PCI Express 5 x16 slots, although one of these only operates in x8 speed mode.

Despite the Threadripper Pro having a significantly higher price than the equivalent Threadripper, PCSpecialist has still managed to include AMD’s flagship graphics acceleration. The Radeon Pro W7900 has 6,144 Stream processors and a huge 48GB of GDDR6 frame buffer with 864GB/sec of bandwidth.

(Image credit: Future)

PCSpecialist has taken a traditional approach to storage with the Zircon Extreme, providing one faster, smaller drive for the operating system and apps allied with a larger, slower one for general data. The former is hardly small, however. It’s a 4TB Samsung 990 Pro NVMe M.2 unit, although this is a PCI Express 4 drive, delivering 7,463MB/sec sustained reading and 6,985MB/sec sustained writing in CrystalDiskMark 8. The data drive is a 10TB Seagate IronWolf Pro 7,200rpm conventional hard drive, capable of 262MB/sec reading and 258MB/sec writing. This enterprise-grade disk comes with a three-year data recovery service and a 2.5 million-hour MTBF backed by a five-year warranty.

The chassis is also conventional – a Fractal Define 7 XL. This is the larger sibling of the case supplied by InterPro this month. This version includes eight 2.5/3.5in drive brackets and two 2.5in brackets, with up to 23 drive positions possible. PCSpecialist has equipped the chassis with a potent 1,000W Corsair RMx series PSU, so you can happily add power-hungry components to this system.

The chassis includes eight 2.5/3.5in drive brackets and two 2.5in brackets (Image credit: Future)

Unsurprisingly, with the same number of cores of the same generation as the Scan £10,000 system’s AMD Ryzen Threadripper, the Threadripper Pro in the Zircon Extreme performs very similarly in CPU tests. The PC Pro media benchmarks score of 866 is just one point lower, with identical video-encoding and multitasking results of 816 and 1,096 respectively. Only the image-editing score drops behind at 274. The Cinebench 2024 multi-CPU rendering score of 3,493 is a tad ahead of the Scan, too, although the Blender Gooseberry frame took 165 seconds, around 10 seconds longer. We can’t help thinking that all these results would have been higher had PCSpecialist taken advantage of the Threadripper Pro’s eight-channel memory.

The flagship Radeon Pro W7900 certainly shows how much AMD has to offer graphics acceleration these days, though. The SPECviewperf 2020 scores of 291 in 3dsmax-07 and 1,057 in maya-06 make this the fastest system for 3D animation viewsets this month. CAD and engineering workloads are also impressive, with 210 in catia-06, 278 in creo-03, 772 in snx-04 and 598 in solidworks-07, although these aren’t the fastest in every area. The GPU also delivers the second-best inferencing performance with Geekbench ML at 28,093 and a third best 17,255 in LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL.

Overall, this is a very competent system from PCSpecialist with great performance across the board, but spending extra on the Pro version of the Threadripper without providing eight memory DIMMs is a missed opportunity.

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This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.

AMD was just in the process of launching its Ryzen 9000 Series processors as we were putting this Labs test together, and we’ve managed to squeeze our first look into the roundup. It comes from Scan in the form of the 3XS GWP A1-R24 workstation.

Just as the 14th generation of Intel Core CPUs don’t make any radical changes over the 13th generation, the Ryzen 9000 doesn’t diverge greatly on paper from the 7000 series, with core counts still ranging from six to 16. Even the clock rates haven’t progressed. The AMD Ryzen 9 9900X in the Scan system is a 12-core CPU with a base 4.4GHz clock and 5.6GHz boost. The 7900X it replaces has a 4.7GHz base clock and 5.6GHz boost. The 16-core 9950X is similarly no on-paper leap over its 7950X predecessor.

However, the CPU is now produced on a 4nm process instead of 5nm, which should enable more cores to run closer to boost speeds than the previous generation. There’s also support for 5,600MHz memory instead of 5,200MHz. Scan has gone even further, supplying 64GB of 6,000MHz DDR5 RAM as two 32GB DIMMs, leaving two slots free for upgrade on the Asus ProArt B650-Creator motherboard.

(Image credit: Future)

Scan has managed to go one better than the 4000-series Nvidia RTX graphics we would normally expect at this price and includes the 4500 Ada Generation instead. This sports 7,680 CUDA cores compared to 6,144 for the 4000, and 24GB of ECC-backed GDDR6 frame buffer operating at 432GB/sec, compared to 20GB at 360GB/sec.

The storage is more modest, however. Only one drive has been included, although it’s a fast one. The 2TB Corsair MP700 NVMe M.2 unit operates at PCI Express 5 speeds to deliver an impressive sustained read speed of 12,278MB/sec in CrystalDiskMark 8, with sustained writing of 7,904MB/sec.

Scan has opted for the regular version of the Fractal North Charcoal chassis with the A1-R24. This is a stylish case with wooden slats down the front that make it look more like designer furniture than a PC. The chassis offers a couple of 2.5/3.5in drive mounts, and a couple of 2.5in-only ones, should you need to expand the storage. The PSU included is the 750W Corsair RMX750, which isn’t hugely potent but should be enough for this set of components.

Wooden slats on the front of the case make it look more like designer furniture than a PC (Image credit: Future)

This system had the fewest cores of any entry this month – half as many as the Intel workstations – but it wasn’t the slowest, showing the capability of the new Ryzen 9000 series. The PC Pro media benchmark result of 761 beat the 24-core Intel CPU supplied by InterPro and the 16-core AMD processor from the previous Ryzen generation in the Armari Magnetar PrMM16R9. This includes the best image-editing result this month of 359, competent video encoding of 716, and multitasking of 924, which wasn’t far behind the 32-core systems in the test. The Cinebench 2024 multi-CPU rendering result of 1,873 was the slowest this month, but only 6% behind the Armari’s Ryzen 9 7950X, which has a third more cores. Notably, the single-core Cinebench result was 16% faster. Similarly, the Blender Gooseberry frame render took 324 seconds, which sits in between the two 24-core Intel CPUs this month – despite having half the cores. This bodes well for the AMD Ryzen 9 9950X when it arrives.

The GPU-based performance from the Nvidia RTX 4500 Ada Generation unsurprisingly sits between the 4000 and 5000 we have in other systems. The SPECviewperf 2020 scores of 206 in 3dsmax-07 and 729 in maya-06 promise great 3D animation, while 165 in catia-06, 226 in creo-03, 789 in snx-04 and 491 in solidworks-07 mean CAD and engineering will be smooth. The Geekbench ML result of 24,416 means AI inference is midway between the other Nvidia cards, as is 15,285 with LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL.

With just 12 cores against systems boasting 16 or 24 in this price category, and 32 or 64 in the higher class, the Scan 3XS GWP A1-R24 acquits itself surprisingly well, showing that the AMD Ryzen 9000 series is a welcome upgrade over the 7000 series. Had this system included the 16-core Ryzen 9 9950X, it could have been our Labs Winner.

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Sergeant Joshua Abate says that he's not a rioter or an insurrectionist. Those closest to the active-duty Marine call him "a good guy." But he was part of the mob that attacked the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. On the eve of a new presidential election, what does his case tell us, as the nation still grapples with the legacy of that day? As they look into the military's reckoning with extremism in the ranks, NPR's Tom Bowman and Lauren Hodges examine Abate's main line of defense: Don't focus on what he did; focus on his promising career as a Marine, instead. Embedded's new two-part series "A Good Guy" drops Thursday, October 24. To listen to this series sponsor-free and support NPR, sign up for Embedded+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org.

This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.

Scan is the second manufacturer this month to take advantage of the return of the non-Pro AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU. However, Scan has opted for a lesser model than Armari, enabling more potent graphics acceleration and a different performance balance as a result for this workstation.

Specifically, Scan chose the AMD Ryzen Threadripper 7970X. This is the 32-core variant, which offers 64 threads and a base clock of 4GHz with a 5.3GHz boost. Of course, with AMD processors that have Precision Boost Overdrive enabled, the actual frequency will depend dynamically on power and temperature. Otherwise, the specifications are the same as the Armari CPU, with quad-channel memory support and 48 PCI Express 5 lanes plus 24 PCI Express 4 lanes.

With a cheaper processor than Armari, Scan has spent some of its savings on providing double the memory. There are four 64GB GDDR5 DIMMs, enabling quad-channel bandwidth and running at 4,000MHz. These are ECC modules, too, for enhanced stability. The Asus PRO WS TRX50 Sage WiFi motherboard supports a maximum of 1TB, but you probably won’t need any more memory in the lifetime of this system.

Another area where Scan has spent its CPU savings is in the graphics acceleration. We’ve seen 6000-series Nvidia RTX GPUs in the higher workstation price category before, but Scan has gone one rung down to the 5000 Ada Generation. This has a huge 12,800 CUDA cores and 32GB of ECC-backed GDDR6 frame buffer delivering 576GB/sec throughput.

Scan hasn’t entirely pushed the boat out when it comes to storage, however, with only a single drive included. It’s still relatively large and very fast, though. The 4TB Corsair MP700 NVMe M.2 unit operates at PCI Express 5 speeds, delivering 12,354MB/sec sustained reading and 11,758MB/sec sustained writing when we tested it in CrystalDiskMark.

(Image credit: Future)

If you need more, the good-looking Fractal North XL chassis offers two 2.5in drive mounts and two 2.5/3.5in mounts, so you can easily add more. The North XL’s wooden slatted front bears a more than passing resemblance to a freestanding heating unit created by a leading Swedish interior designer. Scan has also included a 1,000W Corsair RMx1000 PSU, which should handle all the powerful components with aplomb.

With half the cores of Armari’s high-end entry this month, the Scan system was never going to get close to it in CPU tests where this was the key aspect. The overall PC Pro media benchmarks score of 867 is still the second highest this month, with superb results of 281 in image editing, 816 in video encoding and 1,096 in multitasking. The Maxon Cinebench 2024 multi-CPU result of 3,459 falls marginally behind the PCSpecialist Zircon Extreme, coming third in the Labs. The Scan took 155 seconds to complete the Blender Gooseberry render, the second fastest.

The Fractal North XL chassis contains a 1,000W Corsair RMx1000 PSU (Image credit: Future)

While the Scan system can’t compete with Armari’s 64 cores, its more powerful GPU makes it one of the best this month for real-time viewport acceleration and GPU-assisted computation. The Nvidia RTX 5000 Ada Generation provides very competitive SPECviewperf 2020 3D animation results of 255 in 3dsmax-07 and 814 in maya-06. CAD and engineering workloads are even better catered for, with 202 in catia-06, 222 in creo-03, an incredible 1,210 in snx-04 and 609 in solidworks-07. But the W7900 is significantly faster in 3D animation.

The GPU delivers an impressive 27,069 for inferencing with Geekbench ML and 20,282 with LuxMark 3.1 OpenCL. To underline the power of this GPU, when rendered on CUDA the Blender Gooseberry frame took only 75 seconds to output – the second fastest GPU result we’ve seen.

The Scan GWP A1-TR64 is a more balanced system than Armari’s £10,000 offering. It’s also about £500 cheaper. However, the Armari is not so behind on graphics acceleration as it is ahead on CPU tasks, and that gives it the win overall. Scan still earns five stars and a Recommended award for good reason: if your workflow is more skewed towards intensive real-time viewsets and GPU accelerated computation, it’s a better choice. And it looks great, too.

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This review first appeared in issue 361 of PC Pro.

Zyxel’s Nebula NFWA505 is designed to deliver wire-free internet access. This compact desktop Wi-Fi router teams up 5G with Wi-Fi 6 services and targets a wide audience including small businesses, SOHOs, mobile workers, pop-up stores and those that can’t get decent fixed-line broadband speeds.

The FWA505 replaces Zyxel’s older NR5101, but is more competitively priced and sees a design refresh, with all ports arranged vertically at the rear. The status LEDs have been moved from the base to the front of the unit and it also sports a pair of smaller TS-9 connectors at the back for optional external aerials.

Two gigabit ports are provided, with the first offering LAN or automatic WAN failover services and the second used for connecting other devices to its network. Its Wi-Fi 6 AP is AX1800-rated and delivers speeds of up to 1,200Mbits/sec on its 5GHZ radio and 573Mbits/sec on the 2.4GHz one.

As the model name indicates, the FWA505 can be cloud-managed from Zyxel’s Nebula Control Center (NCC), and the price includes a one-year Pro Pack license, with subsequent years costing around £28. You’ll need to familiarize yourself with its local web console, though, as unlike Zyxel’s fully compliant Nebula wireless APs and security routers, the FWA505 doesn’t broadcast cloud SSIDs and can only be configured from its own interface.

Two gigabit ports are provided on the rear of the router (Image credit: Future)

It’s easy enough to deploy as the web interface loads a wizard to get you started. Zyxel supplied our review unit with a Vodafone 5G SIM installed in the micro-SIM slot in the base, which provided instant cellular internet access.

The web console opens with a dashboard showing the status of local and internet connections, cellular status and details of wireless networks. A default SSID is provided for both radios and, although it uses the weaker WPA2 encryption, the encryption key is randomly generated and you can easily swap to the more secure WPA3.

Up to four SSIDs are supported, with three secure guest wireless networks already configured for you. These can be modified as required with the Guest WiFi tickbox enabling L2 isolation so users on these SSIDs only get internet access.

Network security is present and correct, with the router’s firewall offering three protection levels that can be quickly selected using a slider bar. Custom firewall rules comprising protocols, port numbers and ACL (access control list) entries can be created, while parental control profiles limit internet access to specific days and times and enforce URL and keyword blocking.

The gigabit WAN port can be used for internet access and teamed up with the mobile SIM for failover. We tested this by pulling the cable out and the router automatically swapped over to its 5G SIM in one minute.

The FWA505 also delivers respectable wireless speeds. Copies of a 25GB test file between a Windows 11 Pro workstation equipped with a TP-Link Archer TBE550E Wi-Fi 7 adapter and a server on the gigabit LAN averaged 107MB/sec at close range, dropping to 85MB/sec with the router ten meters away in an adjoining room.

Nebula provides remote access to its local web console from the cloud (Image credit: Future)

Adding the FWA505 to our NCC account was simple as we scanned its QR code from an iPad running the Nebula iOS app. A mobile router status widget is added to the site dashboard and selecting it provides more hardware details, a location map and remote firmware upgrade services, plus views of WAN and cellular status and information about wired and wireless clients.

The NCC Pro Pack license increases traffic monitoring from 24 hours to 30 days but, more importantly, enables a remote configurator. Select this from the router’s Live Tools section and it will establish a secure HTTPS remote web console session so you can access all its settings.

Any small business and remote workers that want to go completely wireless will find the Zyxel Nebula FWA505 an affordable solution. It’s well designed, easy to use, delivers respectable wireless performance and can be remotely managed from Zyxel’s Nebula cloud portal.

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From a growing skills gap to a stubborn productivity crisis, business leaders are under increasing pressure to improve efficiency while also fostering employee engagement. Everyone agrees that technology can help, and many businesses are now harnessing AI to enhance processes like customer service and repetitive workflows. But many industry leaders are overlooking another key driver of business growth: creativity.

Investing in creativity traditionally might have seemed like a nice-to-have, but organizations that encourage curiosity and inspire teams to question the status quo outpace their competitors. Canva’s recent survey, conducted with Harvard Business Review, showed that 96% of business leaders agree that creative ideas are essential to an organization's performance and long-term success.

Creative practices are woven into the fabric of the most successful organizations. Increasingly the same is true for AI, but the two strategies are often seen separately – which is a missed opportunity as leveraging both in tandem offers the greatest potential.

A helpful pair of ‘hands’

In today's fast-paced world, downtime is rare and employees struggle to find enough time in the day to be as imaginative as they would like. Creativity often emerges spontaneously and unexpectedly, and to capture and make the most of those ideas, businesses need tools that can help them “get creative about being creative”.

AI can help a lot with this – not only by reducing the time and skills barrier required to go from an initial idea to a real piece of work, but also by freeing up time by automating repetitive tasks like proof-reading text, analyzing customer feedback as well as generating code. The latter is essential as it allows employees to focus on big-picture thinking and channel their energies into more impactful work such as creative ideation and strategy. On the flip side, the abundance of new AI tools and apps may also lead to added complexity. Navigating this landscape can be overwhelming, time-consuming and costly, and business leaders are seeking ways to simplify the process. Investing in training and creating unified workflows is key to creating a seamless experience.

AI as a tool to turn creativity into value

Even though everyone agrees that creativity is crucial for business growth, many companies still struggle to generate innovative ideas and turn them into concrete solutions. Canva’s survey showed that only 22% of business professionals said their organization is “very successful” at identifying creative solutions to problems.

AI presents a huge opportunity to help teams ideate and bring ideas to life – in other words, to enhance rather than replace human creativity. Combine AI with a focus on creativity, and tasks like creating visually appealing presentations, drafting standout assets, or crafting personalized email marketing campaigns become not only quicker but more accessible, so that all team members, regardless of their technical skill levels, can more easily turn ideas into reality.

As a result, business leaders can cultivate a more dynamic and collaborative workplace where team members feel encouraged to challenge themselves and employees can more easily maximize their impact.

Building a future-proof business

Businesses everywhere are grappling with how to best prepare their teams for the next wave of innovation, recognizing that investing in skills development and fostering a culture of adaptability and creativity is key to staying competitive. In recent years, we have experienced economic ups and downs, a pandemic-driven shift in how we approach work, and rapid technological advances – so for some business leaders “future-proofing” may sound impossible.

While predicting tomorrow’s challenges is tough, business leaders can – and should – build resilience and reduce stress factors to be prepared for change. Executives are trying to find that sweetspot and balance enhanced innovation with tightened budgets – and empowering teams to connect, create and collaborate to drive efficiency and productivity at work. As a result, now more than ever, emerging technologies like AI are becoming a solution for forward-thinking organizations.

Looking ahead, businesses that will thrive the most will be those that harness AI not just for operational efficiency, but also for cultivating a vibrant internal culture where creativity flourishes. Those which recognize that technological innovation and creativity should go hand-in-hand will be best equipped to navigate the complexities of the modern workplace and achieve long-term success.

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The Kremlin will be able to talk to major players like India and China about expanding trade and bypassing Western sanctions.

(Image credit: Alexander Zemlianichenko)

Georgia authorities say they are investigating the collapse of a dock gangway that killed seven people on an island where crowds gathered for a celebration by the island’s community of Black slave descendants.

(Image credit: Lewis M. Levine)