PCWorld May 2023

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel and a titan of the semiconductor industry whose “Moore’s Law” literally served as the measuring stick for the entire chip business, died Friday at his home in Hawaii. He was 94. Intel confirmed the news Friday afternoon, along with the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, which Moore and his wife founded in 2000. In 2017, The Chronicle of Philanthropy marked the two as California’s most generous donors, giving a total of $6.3 billion to “create positive outcomes for future generations.” Moore co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then left to co-found Intel with Robert Noyce. (Andy Grove is largely credited as being the third of the trio that was responsible for Intel’s success, but he joined on the day Intel was first incorporated.) Moore served as…

ChatGPT, Bing Chat, and Bard promise to transform your life using the power of artificial intelligence, through AI conversations that—just like those with a human being—can inform, amuse, and educate you. But how good are these new AI chatbots, really? We tested them to find out. We asked all three AIs a variety of different questions: some that expanded upon general search topics, some that demanded an opinion, logic puzzles, even code—and then asked them to be more creative, such as by writing an alternate, better ending to Game of Thrones and a Seinfeld scene with a special guest. We’ve included all of their answers, or as much of them as we could provide, and we’ll let you decide for yourself. One note: We have access to all three AI…

The airport, the bar, the library—all places where your hard-working smartphone might need a little pick-me-up, and all places where free, public phone charging stations have been cropping up over the last few years. But according to a warning from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation, you might be better off letting your constant companion run down to zero. A tweet from the FBI’s Denver field office (via CNBC) warns that “bad actors” have been infiltrating public recharging stations in order to load up spyware and malware on smartphones through the USB port. For hackers, getting instant physical, wired access to a device is basically the Holy Grail of information security…and the defeat thereof. It’s a technique informally known as “juice jacking,” something the FBI’s central website and various field offices…

Last week Western Digital experienced a hack of its systems, prompting the company to pull its services offline—including its My Cloud backup and file access service. First disclosed on April 3, the outage began on April 2, as reported on the WD My Cloud status page. As of April 5, customers have still not received further clarification on when to expect restored access to their data. If you’ve been hit by this service disruption, you’re likely riding it out in one of two ways: frustratingly cut off from your files, or temporarily inconvenienced because your data isn’t readily available in the cloud. The difference? In the first scenario, My Cloud’s your only location for your data. In the second, you were following the rule of three. Your data needs backups—and…

Microsoft 365 Copilot’s AI tools don’t seem particularly surprising for the company who originated Clippy’s helper bot. But applying AI and natural language to Microsoft Office feels like a profound, fundamental change that could absolutely transform the way you work. Microsoft 365 Copilot essentially injects AI into the various Office apps. You’ll still interact with them the way you normally would, but Copilot will also live in the toolbar atop those apps, and you’ll interact with it in a sidebar. If you’ve ever hauled a coworker over and told them, “Show me how to do this,” you’ll understand what Microsoft 365 Copilot can do. Except it will actually, you know, do it. It’s really the next generation of AI chatbots: not bots that talk to you like Bing Chat does, but…

We’ve all been there. You sign up for a free trial for something you need in a hurry, only to find out that it’s not everything it’s cracked up to be, and getting rid of it is a lot harder. This sort of thing has been associated with gym memberships and “music club” subscriptions for decades, but recently it’s become much more prevalent online, where you can sign up for something with a few clicks but getting rid of it requires a call to the company or an email to support. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is as sick of it as the rest of us. In a 3-1 vote, the FTC has proposed to amend a statute first put in place in 1973 to make unsubscribing from services easier and…