Welcome to Boffin!

Well, with Steve back from a 3 week holiday in central Australia, The MIGHTY Hawks winning another AFL grand final!, and no cryptolocker for the whole of last month (touch wood that continues!) things are getting back to normal at EtherTech !

That hasn’t meant though that the IT world has stopped.. Far from it.

Volkswagen is facing fines of over US$18 Billion for cheating emissions tests by reprogramming their on-board computers to detect when the vehicle is being tested by EPA authorities and change all their parameters in order to pass the tests.

This is not new though, Samsung and HTC have been doing this for years with different smartphones detecting when benchmark software is being run and ramping up their CPU to 100% in order to appear faster.

The problem for Volkswagon of course is the 500,000 vehicles in the US that have already been recalled and then there’s the other 11million in the rest of the world that many people have purchased for the stated environmental benefits. Very damaging.

Back to IT though, Winrar has a new problem as well, a new flaw has been found that affects all Winrar SFX versions including v5.21 (with over 500million users installed) allowing hackers to compromise a machine with a specially designed .SFX archive.

The way to avoid this. Simple, Don’t open archives / ZIP files from people you don’t know and trust!

Windows 10 has been grabbing most of the headlines of late, but Microsoft also have released their new Office 2016 on September 22^nd this year (end of last month). In terms of upgrades though, they’ve been a bit stingy this time around, with purchasers of Office 2013 between Aug 22 and Dec 31 2015 being eligible for either a free one-year subscription to Office 365 Personal edition ($70), or a $40 discount on purchasing the new Office 2016.

Changes in Office 2016 include the new styling (Giving it the Windows 10 look and feel). The new version isn’t so much based on how much more you can do with it, but more so on how you can become more productive and effective. Collaboration, document sharing, and greater OneDrive integration.

Finally Excel has been given a real update for the first time in years, with better document security, new chart types, forecasting module, better BI integration, Power query improvements plus many other fixes and enhancements to make using Excel easier and more effective. Outlook 2016 gets a refresh with it now being a lot faster to attach recent files to emails which saves a lot of time. One of the best new features though we think is the new ‘Tell Me’ feature across all applications, which allows you to get tutorials on the fly on how to do things.

How much does it cost ?

Office 2016 Home & Student – $183.00 inc GST

Office 2016 Home & Business – $296.00 inc GST

All products are in stock now.

CYA next month ! (GO HAWKS!)