Ben Lovejoy is a British technology writer who started his career on PC World and has written for dozens of computer and technology magazines, as well as numerous national newspapers, business and in-flight magazines. He has also written two novels.
He thinks wires are evil and had a custom desk made to hide them, known as the OC Desk for obvious reasons.
He considers 1000 miles a good distance for a cycle ride, and Chernobyl a suitable tourist destination. What can we say, he’s that kind of chap.
He speaks fluent English but only broken American, so please forgive any Anglicised spelling in his posts.
Twitter has partially denied claims made by engineers employed by the company that direct messages are read by hundreds of employees.
The claims were made in undercover footage shot by filmmaker James O’Keefe in a video for Project Veritas …
Google is building three new under-sea fiber-optic cables, adding to the eight that it already helped construct. The latest ones will connect areas as far apart as the Pacific and the North Sea, and will be used to speed up data transfers as well as provide alternative routings in case of failures elsewhere.
The company said that the new cables would cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take more than a year to install, and it would really prefer not to do it …
An update to the Google Duo video calling app means that you can now make both audio and video calls to people who don’t have the app installed.
For someone without the app, they will see it as an incoming call with a view of your camera. They are then able to answer it and take part in the call, all without installing the app …
Uber is reported to have used remote shutdowns of computers to thwart police raids. It is said to have ‘routinely’ used the system more than 20 times between spring 2015 until late 2016, in places as far afield as Canada, Brussels and Hong Kong …
The UK’s children’s commissioner – responsible for advising on policy on children and young people – is calling on parents to ban their children from using Snapchat …
The lawyer representing James Damore, the former Google engineer fired for writing a now-infamous anti-diversity memo, has filed a lawsuit alleging that the search giant maintains blacklists of conservative employees.
The lawsuit alleges that a number of Google managers not only keep such lists, but have also shared details publicly. One manager even went as far as suggesting a company-wide Google document of blacklisted employees, and wondered whether there ought to be a ‘trial’ to determine who should be included on it …
Google was quick to respond to the CPU vulnerabilities, Meltdown and Spectre. The firm advised that its January security patch included mitigations, and said that it had issued patches to its Android partners.
But whether those patches will ever make it as far as your device is another matter …
Samsung first showed off a prototype of a foldable display as long ago as 2013, with patents also showing a rollable version, but plans to finally put a foldable phone into production have now been confirmed, according to supply-chain sources.
Samsung last year confirmed that the company was aiming for release sometime in 2018, but noted that this wasn’t guaranteed …
Qualcomm has said that its latest Bluetooth chip will allow future wireless in-ear headphones to become smaller, more reliable and smarter.
Reduced power consumption could allow headphones to give almost three times the battery-life of existing models – or, as seems more likely, allow manufacturers to maintain current playback times while shrinking the size of devices …
LG has won a CES Best of Innovation award with what looks like a stunning new 4K projector. Designed to project an image of 150-inches, it supports the HDR 10 standard for high dynamic range, with the company’s brightest ever image of 2,500 lumens …
A beta test will see top-tier Roomba models adding to their duties as they wander around your home. In addition to the cleaning, they will also be mapping the strength of the Wi-Fi signals, looking for dead zones and weak-spots …
Google and Amazon discounted their smart speakers so deeply in the holiday sales that they likely lost money on each unit, say analysts. Amazon discounted its Echo Dot to $29.99 in the run-up to the holidays, with the Google Home Mini also seen for the same price in various sales.
The two companies’ willingness to lose money on the hardware reveals their very different strategy to Apple with its upcoming HomePod speaker …
The repeal of net neutrality rules may allow Internet service providers and mobile carriers to block or throttle services at will, reserving the fastest bandwidth for companies who pay the toll, but the law may not be the only way to keep companies in line …
If you’ve been using the Memories feature in Snapchat, to keep your favorite photos safe, you can now view all the ones you saved this year in a look back at 2017 …
While contact-based wireless charging can be handy, the true holy grail is long-range charging – allowing all products to be automatically charged anywhere in a room. We’re not quite there yet, but Energous has been working on the technology for some time now, and has just announced an important step along the way.
The company has received the first ever Federal Communications Commission for power-at-a-distance charging …
Google claims that the latest version of its AI-powered speech synthesis system, Tacotron 2, is almost indistinguishable from human speech – and has put some comparative examples online to demonstrate.
Tacotron 2 works directly from written text, and Google says it can use context to correctly pronounce identically-spelled words like ‘read’ (to read) and ‘read’ (has read), responds to punctuation and can learn to stress words …
If you’re bored with the standard Waze voice, and don’t want to record your own, the company has just announced that actor Liam Neeson’s voice is available ‘for a limited time’ as part of a promo for his upcoming movie Commuter …
The Department of Homeland Security found that almost all apps used by emergency professionals have vulnerabilities.
Of the 33 popular first responder apps tested, all but one was found to raise potential security and privacy concerns – and more than half had ‘critical flaws’ …
Twitter’s promised new rules designed to tackle abusive tweets and posts by hate groups kick in today. The company first vowed to do more back in October, in response to a #WomenBoycottTwitter protest …
If you’ve ever battled with your kids to limit their screen time to the recommended 1-2 hours per day, there’s good news: it doesn’t appear to be necessary.
A joint study between the Oxford Internet Institute and Cardiff University published in the journal Child Development found that there was ‘no consistent correlation’ between limiting screen time and a range of child well-being measures …
Alphabet’s innovations lab, X, is testing a new approach to bringing Internet connectivity to people in developing countries. In addition to floating Wi-Fi hotspots in balloons, it is now using laser beam links which it has described as ‘just like fibre optic cable, but without the cable’ …
The iPhone X isn’t the only new gadget to boast an OLED screen. A startup that says it wants to spark conversations between strangers has launched Beam, a wearable OLED button that allows you to display anything you want, and update it as often as you like …
Amazon launched its Music Unlimited service just over a year ago, adding to competition in the streaming music space – and a major international expansion today sees it available in 28 new countries.
Amazon quickly followed its US launch by rolling out the service to Austria, Germany and the UK the following month, and Japan later. It subsequently offered a family plan and student deal, and recently added Chromecast support to its Android app …
Facebook made the controversial decision back in 2014 to remove private messaging from the main app, moving it instead into Facebook Messenger. It now seems the company may have similar plans for Instagram.
From today, Instagram is testing a new app called Direct. For those who choose to install it, the inbox disappears from the main app …