Category: Technology

CHEP has launched a new campaign and brand platform for La Trobe University in its first work for the institution since being appointed as its creative agency earlier this year.

The new platform, ‘The Impact is Real’ demonstrates the effects that La Trobe students, academics and partners are having on people’s lives, showing the university’s strength in health, science and technology.

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The campaign is spearheaded by a brand film featuring current La Trobe University students, including The Australian Ballet’s principal artists, Benedicte Bemet, who studies a bachelor of psychological science.

The spot will roll out on TV, with integrated activations across radio, OOH, cinema and digital channels.

La Trobe University chief marketing officer, Natalie Ellisdon, said: “La Trobe is focused on delivering real impact in our communities today, not just tomorrow. We do this by our close collaborations with industry, conducting relevant research and focusing on building the skills of our students so that they have tangible experience that is directly and immediately applicable in the work that they do. Our focus and growth in the areas of health, science and technology and the growing needs of society in these areas means this impact will only continue to expand well into the future”

La Trobe University director of brand & creative, Darcy Muller, added: “We wanted to position La Trobe as a University that has a clear focus and is differentiated from its peers. Most universities talk about intangible ideas of changing the world, but we want to show how La Trobe people actually affect lives right now”.

CHEP general manager, Thomas Penn, commented: “We’re thrilled to be partnering with an ambitious brand that’s truly preparing Australians to make a positive impact in the new economy. La Trobe University’s impact on its students is apparent in all that they achieve, and we look forward to continuing to tell that story under this new brand platform.”

Google hit Sonos with two lawsuits on Monday, claiming patent infringement on seven different technologies associated with smart speakers, as part of its ongoing battle with the audio hardware biz over intellectual property.

Both companies previously collaborated on building software to support audio devices, but their relationship soured when Sonos cried foul play two years ago, alleging Google had copied five of its patents after the search giant launched its voice-activated speaker Google Home. The patents describe how smart speakers can wirelessly play music across different rooms.

Google, in return, countersued and claimed Sonos had, in fact, stolen IP from five of its patents relating to content availability search, noise control, and more.

Sonos reacted by filing yet another lawsuit, claiming Google had actually ripped off more than five of its patents over years. America’s International Trade Commission sided with speaker biz in its original lawsuit, and agreed Google had infringed five of Sonos IP filings. Engineers at Google scrambled to make software changes to its products to skirt the judge’s decision banning imported devices built on Sonos’ technology into the US.

Google isn’t letting the matter rest, however, and has decided to sue Sonos again. The two lawsuits filed to the District Court of Northern California in San Francisco, claim its rivals have infringed upon US Patent Numbers: 10,593,330, 10,134,398, and 7,705,565 in one complaint [PDF]and 11,024,311, 9,812,128, 9,632,748, and 11,050,615 in the other [PDF]. These patents cover a range of applications, ranging from wireless charging to hotword detection to audio input monitoring.

Google said it was “proud” of its “multi-year partnership” with the smart speaker biz, and it even made its virtual Google Assistant available on Sonos’ speakers. “Sonos has made false claims about the companies’ shared work and Google’s technology in the lawsuits that Sonos filed against Google. While Google rarely sues other companies for patent infringement, it must assert its intellectual property rights here,” it alleged.

“Rather than compete on the basis of innovation and product quality, Sonos has decided to compete in the courtroom, and started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers,” José Castañeda, a Google spokesperson told The Register. :We prefer innovation to litigation but their actions leave us no choice but to defend our technology and challenge Sonos’s clear, continued infringement of our patents.”

Sonos’ chief legal officer, Eddie Lazarus, hit back and called Google’s latest IP theft claims an “intimidation tactic” to retaliate against the company. “Google previously sued us all over the world and Sonos has prevailed in every decided case. By contrast, the courts have repeatedly validated Sonos’ claims that Google is infringing its core patented smart speaker technology,” he told The Register.

“Google’s new lawsuits are an intimidation tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google’s monopolistic practices, avoid paying Sonos a fair royalty for the roughly 200 patents it is currently infringing, and grind down a smaller competitor whose innovations it has misappropriated. It will not succeed.” ®

The Momentum 4 is a definitive release for Sennheiser. It features remarkable active noise cancellation (ANC), audio quality, and battery life, making the well-received Momentum 3 a complete afterthought, along with many other newcomers who have strived to step out of Bose and Sony’s shadows.

Several upgrades were applied to Sennheiser’s latest flagship headphones. Not every change is considered an improvement. Still, that doesn’t stop the Momentum 4 from establishing itself as one of the best noise-cancelling headphones ever assembled.

Microsoft has fixed a remote code execution vulnerability in its MSDT diagnostics tool for Windows, first reported to the company two years ago and rediscovered in May this year.

The fix is ​​part of this month’s Patch Wednesday, and was named Dogwalk by security researchers.

Although researcher Imre Rad reported the bug to Microsoft in January 2020, and despite the vulnerability raising its head again this year, the software giant initially declined to fix the issue.

Now, however, Microsoft has had a change of heart, accordingly to the company’s security researcher Johnathan Norman.

We finally fixed the #DogWalk vulnerable. Sadly this remained an issue for far too long. thanks to everyone who yelled at us to fix it @j00sean @ImreRad

— Johnathan Norman (@spoofyroot) August 9, 2022

After the Dogwalk vulnerability resurfaced in May this year, and exploitation attempts were recorded by Microsoft, the company issued workaround guidance for users.

August Patch Wednesday handles a record 141 vulnerabilities in different Microsoft products.

Among these is an information leak bug that affects Exchange Server, given the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures index of CVE-2022-30134.

Attackers exploiting the bug can read emails, Microsoft warned.

Simply patching isn’t enough to handle the above vulnerability above, and others affecting Exchange Server.

Microsoft said administrators need to enable the Windows Extended Protection feature on Exchange Servers to fully handle the vulnerabilities.

Apex Legends Season 14 was meant to launch today, August 9, but PC players using the Origin client are having trouble downloading the update. That means they can’t drop into the new season and enjoy Vantage, the brand-new Legend, or the major updates to Kings Canyon.

Apex Legends Season 14 officially launched August 9 at 1pm ET / 10am PT / 6pm BST. An hour after its launch, respawn tweeted (opens in new tab) that it was “aware of an issue preventing players from installing the [Apex Legends] update through Origin and are actively investigating.”

Like butterfly keyboards and chargers being included with iPhones, the MacBook’s Touch Bar seems doomed to extinction soon. The feature wasn’t completely useless, but its diminutive size prevented it from reaching its true potential. If you’re going to put a screen on a keyboard, you need to fully commit to the idea, like this mechanical keyboard with a 12.6-inch touchscreen does.

Amazon’s listings of consumer electronics continue to be slowly taken over by brand names that are not only completely unknown, but seemingly created by a random character generator. You can talk amongst yourselves about the right way to pronounce, “Ficihp,” but there’s little debate as to the usefulness of this creation.

As spotted by BoingBoing, although it looks like a self-contained mashup of a laptop and a tablet, the keyboard contains no actual computer components. On its own, it’s useless. But when cable connected to a computer, or a mobile device that’s compatible with external displays and hardware accessories, it serves as both a compact 71-key mechanical keyboard and a 12.6-inch color touchscreen with an ultra-wide aspect ratio and a cropped HD resolution of 1920×515.

Unlike the MacBook’s Touch Bar, which had its customization limited by how applications chose to use it, the screen on this keyboard serves as a secondary display for a laptop or desktop PC, so users can move whatever apps or toolbars onto it they so please. The ability to have touchscreen shortcuts for commonly used tools and functions in complex apps like Photoshop was one tantalizing use case the Touch Bar never fully delivered, but this could.

Some of the other suggested use cases for this accessory in the keyboard’s promotional imagery actually seem quite handy. For instance, you could use the keyboard’s screen to take notes during a video conference call, leaving the larger screen for showing the talking heads of all the participants. Or, you could just use it as a dedicated place to park your Twitter feed so it’s visible at all times. It’s your mental health, who are we to tell you how to take care of it?

Image: Ficihp

The device is seemingly no slouch as a keyboard either, with adjustable brightness, swappable keycaps, and full RGB backlighting that has 15 different built-in lighting patterns. It’s also got n-key rollover, so it’s potentially even suitable for gaming too.

The hardware does have some. It’s only real connection to a device is through a USB-C port, so if you need to go the HDMI route for an older PC or laptop, you’ll need to get a hub or cable adapter to bridge the two. And while the touchscreen supports up to 10-point touch detection, that only works when this thing is connected to a Windows PC. When paired with a Mac, touch detection is limited to just a single point.

The biggest issue, however, might be the keyboard’s $US390 ($541) price tag. You can easily find a much larger hi-def external display and a passable mechanical keyboard for cheaper than this. Is the added touch functionality right at your fingertips worth the premium pricing? That’s up to you.