PC Pro October 2022

I’m a big believer in the wisdom of the crowd. Not only in its traditional meaning, of a crowd of people somehow having greater collective intelligence than one individual, but in the individual intelligence of each member within that collective. One of the huge benefits of social media is that individuals now have a voice. We can’t all be Prime Minister, although it did appear for a while as if every Conservative MP was going to give it a go, but we can now share our wisdom on the platform of our choice. Whether people choose to listen is a quite different matter. Go back 25 years and our lead feature this month, the unapologetically named “25 apps for geeks” (see p28), would have been drawn from the limited experience…

Sarah Kidner Perks work both ways: Sarah explains what perks employees should be asking for, and how employers should be using them to lure the best talent to their business. See p34 James Morris If it’s time to get down to some serious work – from data processing to video editing, from CAD design to 3D animation – our workstation expert James Morris has the answer in this month’s Labs from p74. Olivia Whitcroft Don’t simply copy the Ts and Cs from a contract, explains Olivia. As a lawyer who specialises in IT and commercial contracts, she explains the right way to do things from p116. Paul Ockenden Anyone considering a switch to their ISP’s “digital voice” product should turn to p111 straight away. As Paul explains, it won’t always…

When Berlin mayor Franziska Giffey took a call from Vitali Klitschko, the mayor of Kyiv, the pair discussed several issues, including the status of Ukrainian refugees in Germany. It was a normal conversation between politicians, given the circumstances. Except Klitschko wasn’t real. Though the mayor could see the face of the former boxer turned politician and was talking to him in real-time, she was actually talking to an imposter. Deepfakes – technology that creates realistic renders of famous faces using AI – are now sophisticated enough to work in real-time. It’s not yet clear who the tricksters were, nor what their intentions were, but the same group reportedly fooled the mayors of Vienna and Madrid using the same Klitschko deepfake. Since deepfakes first emerged in 2017, a persistent worry has…

It appears that Alexa has been developing a God complex. Not only can Amazon’s voice assistant declare “let there be light” and switch on the lights; soon she may also be able to bring back the dead. In a startling tech demo at Amazon’s annual MARS conference, the company’s head scientist Rohit Prasad described how “human attributes of empathy and affect are key for building trust,” and that “while AI can’t eliminate the pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last”. And then he played a short video, in which a child says: “Alexa, can Grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?”, to which Alexa responds by playing the story in the simulated voice of his departed grandmother. It’s undoubtedly an impressive technical achievement, but unsurprisingly, some…

“If you try to spew the absolute c**p that is ‘returning a book after you’ve read it is theft’, I need you to delete your social media account.” Those were the words of TikTok user @readinglikesappho, who posted a frustrated video as another salvo in a war being waged on “BookTok”, the influential corner of TikTok that has become a critical part of the publishing ecosystem. The controversy erupted after numerous videos drew attention to a little-known fact about Amazon’s ebook policies, which entitle customers to request a refund and get their money back for up to 14 days after purchase. Unsurprisingly, authors weren’t happy about this trick becoming more widely known, with some claiming to have lost money following the “trick” going viral – both in terms of lost…

Videos aren’t the only example of Amazon creating different refund rules for different products. Even the next closest thing to an ebook – the audiobook – has an entirely different refund policy on Amazon. Audible, the audiobook service that was acquired by Amazon in 2008, allows customers to request a refund for up to a year after purchase. But behind the scenes, the author only loses their royalties if the return is within seven days, with Amazon itself taking the hit if the refund is requested after. “This isn’t a competition issue,” said Nicola Solomon of the Society of Authors. “It’s not a question of us authors being worried about what [Amazon] do to the end user. It’s what [they] do to us as your supplier.” Solomon puts the difference…