PC Pro September 2023

I recently visited Wimbledon. Not to watch tennis, sadly, but for the next best thing: to talk technology. This year, the Championships, with support from long-term technology partner IBM, is using generative AI to create live commentary for matches. By analysing the live action, and using source material from what must be ten of thousands of past commentaries, IBM’s Watson will work out what’s happening in real-time and put it into words. It’s clever. Astonishing, even. But what surprised me most was when I discovered that this partnership stretches all the way back to 1990, when IBM was appointed as the official IT supplier and consultant to the All England Lawn Tennis Club. The year when Stefan Edberg defeated Boris Becker to win the men’s championship, and Martina Navratilova clinched…

It will soon be time to rest your trigger finger. The five-second “skip” button will shortly be disappearing from some YouTube videos, as the Google subsidiary has announced that it will soon be rolling out unskippable 30-second adverts. According to Variety, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan explained this irritation is due to the “seismic shift” in how people are watching video on the platform – with big-screen, smart TV viewing on the rise. “Viewers — especially younger viewers — no longer make a distinction between the kind of content they’re watching,” Mohan reportedly told advertisers at the company’s annual Brandcast event. “When they turn on the TV, they want everything they love in one place — from their favourite creators, to blockbuster movies, to football. And they can find it all…

Microsoft has often made big, expensive bets on almost certainly doomed ideas. From challenging the almighty iPod with the Zune, to trying to muscle Windows Mobile into a market that had been reshaped by Apple and Android, the gambles don’t always pay off. Now Microsoft has decided to pour money into perhaps the most historically doomed venture of all: fusion energy. Fusion is, in essence, a highly speculative form of nuclear power. Unlike the power plants we have today based on nuclear fission – splitting the atom – the idea behind fusion is that it’s conceivably possible to capture the huge amounts of energy released when atoms fuse together. There’s one major snag: so far, it hasn’t been proven to work. The long-running joke in the energy industry is that…

For decades, the fields of rocket science and brain surgery have been cited as fields of endeavour that present almost unimaginable levels of complexity. Now we might want to add another tricky job to the list: managing Twitter. Since Elon Musk dropped $44 billion and took control of Twitter at the end of last year, it hasn’t gone well. The CEO – who, let’s not forget, is heavily invested in both rocket and neural science – has seen the value of the social network plummet. One study found that more than half of Twitter’s top 1,000 advertisers have given up on the platform since his takeover. The stress is starting to show. When Microsoft announced that it would be pulling advertising from the platform, reportedly because it refused to pay…

One of the reasons why web scrapers occupy such a grey area is because a crucial part of scraping at scale is the need to disguise where web traffic is coming from, to get around web servers putting up defensive walls and blocking significant amounts of web traffic that originate from the same IP address. “On a technological level it’s definitely a cat-and-mouse game,” said Oxylabs’ Denas Grybauskas. “It’s a constant battle between who has better IP blocks, and who has better IP rotation and captcha-solving features.” As such, scraping at scale requires the use of proxy servers, so that traffic is routed to the destination by taking different routes each time. “Proxies are like fuel for web-scraping technology,” said Grybauskas. “You basically need to pour in gasoline, and proxies…

PREMIUM LAPTOPS Apple MacBook Pro 16in M2 Pro power from £2,699 from apple.com/uk All the upgrades to this 2023 model are within, as Apple’s M2 Pro and M2 Max processors take charge. Combine this power with the 16.2in mini-LED screen, superb sound system and phenomenal battery life, and you have the world’s premier workstation laptop. REVIEW Issue 342, p48 ALTERNATIVES NEW ENTRY Apple MacBook Pro 14in If you prefer your power in a more compact package than the Pro 16in, then the 14in is an excellent alternative – and it weighs 1.6kg rather than 2.2kg. From £2,149 from apple.com/uk REVIEW Issue 343, p44 Samsung Galaxy Book3 Ultra Samsung packs everything into this 16in laptop, from a superb AMOLED panel and a slim 1.8kg chassis to a Core i9 CPU and…