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.
It’s not unusual for private medical services to offer the option of a video consultation with a doctor – for a fee. But Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) is piloting a scheme which lets 3.5 million patients get access to video consultations at no cost …
Stats from Adobe’s analytics wing suggest that, for the first time ever, more holiday shopping will be done on mobile devices than on computers …
Smartphone sales in China may be down 5% year-on-year, but four of the five top-selling brands saw growth in Q3, reports Canalys. Oppo was the exception, seeing a slight decline in sales, that allowed Huawei to take the #1 slot …
We saw last month that WhatsApp was testing the ability to recall sent messages, and it is now rolling out the feature to all users …
It was suggested back in August that Google was paying Apple $3B this year to remain the default search engine on iOS devices. That’s up from the $1B it’s known to have paid in 2014, and – as it’s almost all profit – is estimated to account for a whopping 5% of Apple’s total operating profit for the year …
Uber is rolling out an update to its iOS and Android apps that allows you to specify multiple destinations. The existing bill-splitting feature also integrates with it when you’re using the facility to drop multiple people home at the end of a night out …
After throttling video streaming to as little as 480p on its so-called unlimited plan back in August, Verizon is now offering access to 4K streaming – but at a price. Access costs $10 per month per user.
One of the key decisions you need to make when adding smart lighting to a home is whether to have the smarts in the switches or the bulbs. Switches tend to be the easier option if you have non-techies in the home, while bulbs offer more flexibility.
A new smart switch system called Noon Home aims to offer the best of both worlds …
Announcing its quarterly financials, Twitter admitted that it had over-counted the number of users it had, but said that the error amounted to less than 1%. It said that even with the correction, it had seen the number of active users grow by 4M in the past quarter …
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab say that a number of popular dating apps are vulnerable to up to three types of attack, potentially revealing anything from user location to full identity and employer …
A patent application published on Friday shows that Samsung is working on a new wireless charging mat that would allow it to charge multiple devices at once. An illustration shows it simultaneously charging both a phone and a smartwatch.
It appears similar to the AirPower wireless charging mat announced by Apple at the recent launch of the iPhone 8 and iPhone X …
Google has announced that it is halving its commission on the sale of in-app subscriptions from 30% to 15%. The change will take effect in January of next year.
The move mirrors one made by Apple last year, likely for the same reasons …
Once AlphaGo won all three matches against the best player in the world back in May, Alphabet’s DeepMind said that the AI was retiring as the company explored bigger challenges. But it appears that it had just one more Go-related challenge to conquer …
Twitter has responded to Friday’s #WomenBoycottTwitter protest by revealing new steps it will be taking to tackle abusive posts on the platform.
The protest, in which many women refrained from posting on the social network for 24 hours, led to an 8-tweet response from CEO Jack Dorsey in which he said that he recognized the company was not doing enough, and promised new rules in five areas …
If you’re a fan of listening to BBC radio shows while driving, the latest update to the iPlayer Radio app adds Android Auto support …
WPA2 – the encryption standard that secures all modern wifi networks – has been cracked. An attacker could now read all information passing over any wifi network secured by WPA2, which is most routers, both public and private.
All platforms are vulnerable, but the paper notes that Android 6.0 and later – along with Linux – is a particularly easy target, an attack against these devices being described as ‘trivial’ …
Samsung hit a three-year high in UK smartphone market share in August, according to the latest Kantar data, but its very minor growth in the U.S. was out-paced by Apple.
The market intelligence firm said that Samsung’s UK growth was driven by price promotions on the Galaxy S8 …
Google is one of a number of major companies urging the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a case of alleged employment discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation …
If you can not only capture Pokémon but also artistic photographs of them, Niantic is inviting you to submit your photos in a competition held on Instagram …
We learned earlier this year that the average smartphone user spends 2h 15m a day using apps, and new data suggests that more of this time than ever is spent using shopping apps.
App Annie data shows that time spent in digital-first retailer apps like Amazon increased by 44% year-on-year in the first half of 2017 …
Wells Fargo promised cardless ATM withdrawals using Android Pay, Samsung Pay and Apple Pay back in March, and has today announced that the facility is available at more than 5,000 machines across the USA.
A customer can initiate an ATM transaction by signing into leading mobile wallet features, such as Wells Fargo Wallet for Android, Apple Pay, Android Pay or Samsung Pay, found on mobile phones. They simply hold their phone or wearable device with mobile payment functionality near an NFC-enabled ATM terminal. Wells Fargo ATMs enabled for this feature will display a “contactless symbol” decal on the front of the ATM.
Weirdly, however, you’ll use your ATM PIN rather than fingerprint to authenticate …
Software engineer Rob Heaton has identified a vulnerability in WhatsApp that could allow a stalker to work out when two contacts are communicating via the service.
He managed to exploit it by writing a Chrome extension requiring just four lines of Javascript …
While the Russian government was found to have bought around 3,000 ads on Facebook in an attempt to influence the 2016 U.S. election, Google has previously said that it had found no similar practices on its own ad platforms.
However, it now appears that further investigation has found evidence of Russian-bought election ads on YouTube, Google Search, Gmail and the company’s DoubleClick ad network …
BlackBerry officially quit the smartphone business almost exactly a year ago, but the brand name lives on in new devices thanks to a licensing deal with Chinese company TCL.
The KeyOne retained the signature hardware keyboard, but a new model launched yesterday does away with this in favor of an all-touchscreen design …