PCR Five for Friday (23/03/2018)

Currys PC World caught 'ripping off' customers while Kaspersky continues to fight espionage claims

Author:: Jonathan Easton
Publish date:: Mar 23, 2018

Currys PC World has been slammed for forcing its customers into paying ‘rip-off’ set up fees for new laptops.Consumer group Which? said that 108 customers had paid up to £40 in set up costs after being led to believe that they were compulsory. Which? said it had raised the issue around the Knowhow service with the firm ‘multiple times’ since 2015, but continued to hear complaints.Currys PC World has now publicly said it was ‘urgently re-briefing’ its stores and apologised for the situation. A Currys PC World spokeswoman said: "We are sorry to hear that some customers have been charged for a Knowhow Laptop Set-up service on their new machine when they did not request it.

IBM has unveiled the world’s smallest computer at its Think 2018 computer show.Smaller than a grain of salt the 1mm squared chip requires a microscope to see it. Consisting of tiny computer bristles with several hundred thousand transistors the tiny IBM chip reportedly has the computing power of an x86 chip from back in 1990.The tiny devices are part of IBM’s vision for future technology that will be ‘cryptographic anchors’ embedded in everyday objects, used to ensure the object’s authenticity in combination with blockchain tech. Costing less than 10 cents to produce, the tiny chips are seen as an anti-fraud measure. For example, they could be applied to expensive gadgets so you can be sure you’re buying the real thing and not a knock-off, or these tiny computers could even be embedded in things like malaria pills as (edible) ink dots, again to ensure that patients are getting the genuine drug and not a fake.

AMD CTO Mark Papermaster has responded to new CPU vulnerabilities revealed by CTS Labs in a recent white paper.Highlighting the fact that CTS Labs gave AMD less than 24 hours notice before going public with its findings, Papermaster announced that patches will be released in the coming weeks to shore up the defences. In the company’s first public update since the vulnerabilities were revealed, Papermaster said that performance should not be impacted by the upcoming patches.“On March 12, 2018, AMD received a communication from CTS Labs regarding research into security vulnerabilities involving some AMD products. Less than 24 hours later, the research firm went public with its findings,” he wrote in a blog post. "“We believe that each of the issues cited can be mitigated through firmware patches and a standard BIOS update, which we plan to release in the coming weeks. These patches and updates are not expected to impact performance. Security and protecting users’ data is of the utmost importance to us at AMD and we have worked rapidly to assess this security research and develop mitigation plans where needed.”

Worldwide IoT security spend is set to top $1.5 Billion in 2018.According to new figures from Gartner, nearly 20 per cent of organisations observed at least one IoT-based attack in the past three years. As a result, the research firm forecasts that worldwide spending on IoT security will reach $1.5 billion in 2018, a 28 per cent increase from 2017 spending of $1.2 billion."In IoT initiatives, organisations often don't have control over the source and nature of the software and hardware being utilised by smart connected devices," said Ruggero Contu, research director at Gartner.

Kaspersky is reportedly planning to open a data centre in Switzerland in order to tackle spying allegations.The Moscow-based cyber security firm is set to open its Swiss centre in order to address Western government concerns that the firm is using its anti-virus software to spy on its customers, according to documents seen by Reuters. The UK is among a number of countries to have openly declared its scepticism over Kaspersky, along with the US and Lithuania.The first major UK firm to succumb to the concerns circulating around Kaspersky was Barclays. Quick on the heels of the National Cyber Security Centre’s (NCSC) decision to advise the UK Government against using Kaspersky products, Barclays pulled the plug on dealings with the Russian software firm.

Currys PC World slammed for forcing set up fees on customers

Currys PC World has been slammed for forcing its customers into paying ‘rip-off’ set up fees for new laptops.

Consumer group Which? said that 108 customers had paid up to £40 in set up costs after being led to believe that they were compulsory. Which? said it had raised the issue around the Knowhow service with the firm ‘multiple times’ since 2015, but continued to hear complaints.

Currys PC World has now publicly said it was ‘urgently re-briefing’ its stores and apologised for the situation. A Currys PC World spokeswoman said: "We are sorry to hear that some customers have been charged for a Knowhow Laptop Set-up service on their new machine when they did not request it.