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The sound system maker will not allow existing customers to opt-out of the new privacy policy. Sonos has confirmed that existing customers will not be given an option to opt out of its new privacy policy, leaving customers with sound systems that may eventually "cease to function". It comes as the home sound system maker prepares to  begin collecting  audio settings, error data, and other account data before the  launch of its smart speaker integration  in the near future. A spokesperson for the home sound system maker told that, "if a customer chooses not to acknowledge the privacy statement, the customer will not be able to update the software on their Sonos system, and over time the functionality of the product will decrease." "The customer can choose to acknowledge the policy, or can accept that over time their product may cease to function," the spokesperson said. News of the changes was announced to customers in an email last week.

Microsoft is buying Cycle Computing, which develops software for orchestrating workloads in the Azure, Amazon, and Google clouds, for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft announced intentions to buy cloud-computing orchestration vendor Cycle Computing for an undisclosed amount. Microsoft is positioning the deal, announced on August 15, as a way for it to enable its customers to use high-performance computing and other "Big Computing" capabilities in the public cloud. From  Microsoft's blog post about the acquisition of Cycle Computing  from Azure corporate vice president Jason Zander: "As customers continue to look for faster, more efficient ways to run their workloads, Cycle Computing's depth and expertise around massively scalable applications make them a great fit to join our Microsoft team. Their technology will further enhance our support of Linux HPC workloads and make it easier to extend on-premise workloads to the cloud." Cycle Computin

The newly formed IT services giant reported $245 million in earnings before interest and tax during its first quarter as DXC Technology. DXC Technology has reported its first quarter earnings for fiscal 2018, posting earnings before interest and tax (EBIT) of $245 million and $173 million in net income on revenue of $5.9 billion. Global Business Services profit was $282 million on revenue of $2.267 billion, Global Infrastructure Services profit was $290 million on revenue of $2.969 billion, while the company's United States Public Sector segment brought in $77 million in profit off the back of $677 million in revenue. Overall, income before tax was $185 million in the first quarter, after outlaying $190 million in restructuring costs, $124 million in transaction and integration-related costs, and $120 million from the amortisation of acquired intangibles, the company said in its  report . The results are the first since the formation of DXC Technology in April, whi

Facebook will start ranking faster loading pages higher in News Feed, while showing fewer stories that take longer to load. Facebook has made yet another tweak to its News Feed algorithm as part of its ongoing effort to keep users interested in the content they see on the site. The social media giant said Wednesday that it will start ranking faster loading web pages higher in News Feed while showing fewer stories that might take longer to load. Facebook says the change will allow people to "spend more time reading the stories they find relevant," but it's also a way to push publishers to its Instant Articles format. Launched in 2016, Instant Articles lets publishers create faster-loading, interactive articles on the social network. The program has been somewhat controversial from the beginning, as publishers voiced concerns over how ad revenue would be shared between Facebook and those who produce the content. Facebook has recently tried to make Instant Arti

Microsoft is going public with its step-by-step plan for removing Adobe Flash support in Windows by the end of 2020. Adobe finally has drawn a line in the sand, noting that  Flash will no longer be supported after 2020 . Microsoft officials said they'd do their part to wind down Flash support in the company's Internet and Edge browsers, so that  Flash support will be entirely removed from Windows by the end of 2020 , as well. Flash in Edge already is only click-to-run, as of the Windows 10 Creators Update. Today, Microsoft posted its timeline and plan for getting rid of Flash over the next three years. From Microsoft's post: Through the end of 2017 and into 2018, Microsoft Edge will continue to ask users for permission to run Flash on most sites the first time the site is visited, and will remember the user's preference on subsequent visits. Internet Explorer will continue to allow Flash with no special permissions required during this time. In mid to lat

Google has rolled out a new version of its news feed that's based on the user's interests. Google has updated its mobile app with a more personalized news feed and a new button to follow topics from search results. Google introduced a news feed in December which offered a series of cards containing news that reflects previous searches as well as local weather, sports, TV schedules, movies trailers, and other content. Today's  update introduces the "smart feed"  which makes it easier for users to follow topics of interest and discover new content without necessarily typing out a search query. Also, the feed will now be influenced by trending subjects in the user's area and around the world. Google's machine learning algorithms also determine how interested a person is in different topics and adjusts the feed to reflect that. As with the previous version, users are able to customize the feed in settings. Google is also introducing a new "f

Workday will enter the PaaS game as it hatches plans to open its cloud platform and court developers. Workday plans to open up its platform to developers, partners and third party software vendors. In a blog post , CEO Aneel Bhusri said the move will settle a long-running question for Workday. Bhusri added that Workday chose to focus on reliability and scalability as it built out its cloud service before opening up. Meanwhile, customers have been asking for "a more open Workday platform." These customers "want to use Workday as a cloud backbone that supports cohesive, digital workflows across multiple business applications." With the move, Workday enters the platform-as-a-service game and can better counter rivals. Oracle offers PaaS; SAP Cloud Platform is focused on connecting its apps; Salesforce has its formidable ecosystem; and companies like ServiceNow have opened up to expand into new enterprise areas including human resources. Here's the PaaS la

PassMark figures reveal a nearly 10-percent rise in AMD's share of CPUs being benchmarked compared to the end of 2016 -- another sign that the chip maker's latest performance PC chips have halted a long slide against its rival. What a difference a year makes when it comes to the fortunes of AMD, the only real rival to Intel in PC processors, but one that was increasingly falling behind the market leader, especially in the profitable and influential high-end segment. An afterthought to performance PC buyers in 2016, AMD is back in the game in 2017 with the release of its warmly received Ryzen chip family, which delivers much of the power of Intel's Core CPUs at a noticeably lower cost. In the few months since the first Ryzen processors have been released, we've witnessed a few signs that AMD has succeeded in not only blunting but also undoing some of Intel's massive sales advantage. Revenue figures for Q1 were stronger thanks to Ryzen, which offset AMD

Unfortunate timing, but Qantas says Wednesday's outage was not related to the latest global cyber attack. Q antas has been working on restoring its systems following an outage on Wednesday morning that was experienced by "multiple" airlines globally. The issue has been confirmed as one stemming from the airline's third-party booking system, owned by the Amadeus IT Group, headquartered in Europe. Qantas said Amadeus had advised the airline that the intermittent outages experienced by customers were due to a hardware issue. Amadeus also said the issues were unrelated to the ransomware attack that has swept the world. "To be clear, Qantas has not been impacted by the Petya ransomware attack," a statement from Qantas reads. Qantas  took to social media  on Wednesday morning to notify customers that its booking system was down. "We're expecting improvements soon & will update once it's restored," the company wrote in a Tweet

Samsung SDS has unveiled its AI-based analytics platform Brightics AI aimed at the enterprise market Samsung SDS has unveiled its artificial intelligence (AI)-based analytics platform called Brightics AI, which is aimed at the global enterprise market. Brightics AI automates data analytics modeling, allowing for easy processing and analysis of big data for clients, the company said. Samsung said processing big data conventionally takes two experts up to three months to create and apply an analytics model. By comparison, Brightics AI will complete this process within two hours by automatically suggesting the best analytics algorithm. Collecting, analysing, and visualising data, which takes conventional counterparts three hours, only takes 10 minutes. The platform also has a "prescriptive" algorithm based on AI technology that offers solutions for problems faced by clients, the company said. The company said it has been testing the platform on 70 different busi