One of the cause of some of these exposures is Brother's choice of shipping the printers with no admin password. Most organizations most likely connected the printers to their networks without realizing the admin panel was present and wide open to connections.

An attacker could include spyware-like behavior in tainted firmware updates and have printers send copies of printed documents to an attacker's server.

Various smartphones with an active FM chip use the cord from a pair of wired headphones as an antenna, however, so the omission of the headphone jack on the iPhone 7 and iPhone 8 may contribute to those devices' lack of FM tuner support.

The FCC chief framed the activation of the FM radio chip as a boon to public safety, since FM radio signals are generally easier to receive in times of emergency when compared to Internet-based services provided over a cellular network.

Many smartphone manufacturers and mobile carriers have disabled that function. Part of that, critics say, is because having a free alternative may discourage customers from using and thus paying for services that demand mobile data.

The company's message is that rather than repairability, the company designs its products for "durability."

"Our first thought is, 'You don't need to repair this.' When you do, we want the repair to be fairly priced and accessible to you," she added. "To think about these very complex products and say the answer to all our problems is that you should have anybody to repair and have access to the parts is not looking at the whole problem."

The company this week released a new software update for the company's OfficeJet 6800 series, OfficeJet Pro 6200 series, OfficeJet Pro X 450 series, and OfficeJet Pro 8600 series printers. One of the major "benefits" of the update? Printer cartridges from competing manufacturers no longer work.

Stop buying HP printers until the company realizes that eliminating device functionality under the pretense of security is obnoxious bullshit.

The enterprise drives have 363,282 drives days and an annualized failure rate of 1.61%. If we look back at our data, we find that as of Q3 2016, the 8 TB consumer drives had 422,263 drive days with an annualized failure rate of 1.60%. That means that when both drive models had a similar number of drive days, they had nearly the same annualized failure rate.

For the better part of the last decade, every design decision Apple has made has seemingly been in the pursuit of making its products thinner and more beautiful at the expense of upgradability and repairability.

Apple's authorized repair program leaves a lot to be desired—companies must pay a fee to join the program, and those who join aren't allowed to do many types of repair (such as a charge port replacement, which is trivially easy for any repair professional).

The "power supply" issue was a power surge that occurred at a BA data centre on Saturday at 9.30am, Cruz has said. "We will make an in-depth investigation to make sure we get to the bottom of exactly why this happened and we will react absolutely, this will not happen again at British Airways."

Seagate's hard drive capacity today tops out at 10TB. A 12TB drive based on helium technology is being tested, and the feedback is positive, said Stephen Luczo, the company's CEO.

Hard drives are popular among computer owners who want more storage capacity than most SSDs can provide. In data centers, large-capacity drives are replacing tape storage to preserve data.

Once you open the AirPods, there's really no going back; iFixit had to first apply heat to loosen up the glue and then use a knife and guitar pick to pry the things open.

Both the AirPods themselves and their charging case earned a zero out of 10 on iFixit's repairability scale, indicating that the headphones aren't in any way user-serviceable. Low scores from iFixit are normal for most Apple products, but zeroes are rare—it's usually at least possible to access and replace the batteries in iPhones, iPads, and MacBooks with a little effort.

Determined to get remove the last of its dangerously defective Galaxy Note7 smartphones off the market, Samsung has put out the word that it will distribute a software update that will permanently prevent recharging the batteries.

"To further increase participation, a software update will be released starting on Dec. 19 and will be distributed within 30 days," Brenna Eller, Samsung Corporate Communications stated, in the company's official statement. "This software update will prevent U.S. Galaxy Note7 devices from charging and will eliminate their ability to work as mobile devices.”