The latest IT news, articles and advice from Astaris

What Is An API?

What Is An API? An Application Programming Interface (API) is intermediary software that allows different applications to talk to each other. In essence, it delivers your request to a provider and then delivers the provider’s response back to you. APIs provide operations and queries that developers can use to design and build apps and web applications, […]

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MEPs Seek Ban On Public Biometric Surveillance

Following the recent leak of an EU draft of rules for applying to AI, 40 MEPs have called for a ban on the use of facial recognition and other types of biometric surveillance in public places. Draft Rules The leaked draft rules by EU lawmakers to regulate the use of AI prompted the MEPs to […]

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MI5 ‘Think before You Link’ Campaign Warning To Staff

MI5 is using a ‘Think before You Link’ campaign to warn its workers about the growing threat of being targeted for information by actors for hostile states using fake profiles on platforms such as LinkedIn. Think before You Link It has been reported that MI5 believes that more than 10,000 British nationals have been targeted […]

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Leisure Industry Post Pandemic…

What’s new? With the leisure industry being closed for almost half of last year, making a comeback is more important than ever, read more to find out what you can do… Restrictions easing is the new ‘new year, new me’… Approximately 12% of all gym sign ups happen around new year, with the 3rd lockdown […]

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Google’s Record Advertising and Cloud Sales Due To Pandemic

Alphabet Inc’s (Google’s) quarterly sales for its advertising and cloud businesses exceeded expectations to hit record levels, helped by the pandemic driving retail and clients online. Figures Google’s advertising business, which includes YouTube, made up 81 per cent of Alphabet’s record $56.9 billion in quarterly sales (fourth quarter).  This represented a massive 23 per cent […]

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Ransomware Payouts Tripled Last Year

The Ransomware Threat Report 2021 from Unit 42 shows that the average amount paid by ransomware victims tripled from 2019 to 2020. Ransomware Ransomware is a form of malware that encrypts the important files on a computer and the user (often a business/organisation) is given a ransom demand, the payment of which should mean that […]

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What’s Happening About The HUGE Facebook Data Leak?

With Facebook having to inform more than a staggering 530 million users that they were exposed to a data breach in 2019, some criticism for the company about the breach has prompted some to ask just what is happening? What Breach It has been reported that in 2019, the ‘scraped’ details of 530m Facebook users […]

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Is it time for hospitality to upgrade their IT?

Hospitality is forever evolving, throughout the Covid-19 pandemic a multitude of adaptations have been made, and technology is no exception, but is your out of date IT hindering the success of your business? Find out more about the common issues businesses are facing and how they can be resolved… What’s changed? With new technology on […]

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Teams Transcriptions

Microsoft has announced the launch of an AI-powered live transcription tool for Teams which provides a written record of the spoken text that occurs during a meeting. How It Works The live transcription tool identifies each speaker and automatically captures in real-time what is said by each speaker and makes the transcript available during and […]

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Notable Notes About … The New £50 Note

Bletchley Park code-breaking hero and wronged computer pioneer Alan Turing is to feature on the UK £50 note from 23rd June. Alan Turing Despite breaking WWII Nazi Germany’s Enigma machine code, allowing enemy messages to be read and thereby shortening World War II and saving countless lives, Alan Turing’s genius and heroism was overshadowed by […]

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Tech Insight – What Are Zero-Click SERPs?

In this article, we look at what a zero-click searches (SERPs) are, how this has impacted SEO, and what measures can be taken to increase the likelihood of your pages achieving featured snippets. Zero-Click SERPs A zero-click search describes when the search engine query is answered by a snippet of text at the top of […]

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Buying Cars and Art … and Making CO2

With news of a booming ‘NFT market’ and the acceptance of Bitcoin as payment for Tesla cars, we look at the environmental impact of these and how the technology needs to be improved to be made more sustainable. Robot Painting Collaboration This week there was news that an artwork co-created by a robot called Sophia […]

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