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Adrian Kingsley-Hughes/ZDNET I’ve spent a long time traveling dumb. Overpacking. Underpacking. Having everything crammed into a bulging suitcase or uncomfortable backpack. I’ve traveled for six weeks with little more than a bunch of drones and no space for much more than a change of underwear, and I’ve gone away for three days with 50 lbs of luggage, most of which came back untouched. I’ve lost things, broken things, misplaced things, and had some heart-stopping moments…

CompTIA this week made available its CompTIA SecurityX certification program, which is an updated version of the CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+) cert and part of CompTIA’s Xpert Series of certifications. SecurityX follows CompTIA’s release of DataX earlier this year, and it is designed for IT professionals with multiple years of work experience who want to validate their expert-level knowledge of business-critical technologies. The program will be useful for security architects and senior security engineers…

Andriy Onufriyenko/Getty Images It’s old news by now that business processes are being transformed into artificial intelligence (AI) operations. Companies such as Salesforce, Hubspot, and Microsoft unveiled a slew of AI “agent” capabilities this year for business functions such as customer service and sales.  Now, a wave of privately backed software firms are using AI to build brand-new applications from the ground up, to re-invent areas traditionally resistant to technology such as legal services and…

ZDNET It’s the time of year when people start to struggle to find last-minute gifts for those who are not (or are) on your naughty list. If those wonderful people are MacOS users, why not give them something to make their digital life a bit more enjoyable and/or productive? Also: 5 Apple products you shouldn’t buy right now (including this popular iPhone model) There are plenty of MacOS-related gifts to have, but for me, these…

Incase Phone case and accessory makers Incase just announced a new line of peripherals “designed by Microsoft,” unveiling the first products from the two brands’ partnership that will revive Microsoft’s discontinued devices. Incase, best known for its collection of cases, laptop sleeves, and bags, announced the collaboration earlier this year, marking the company’s first line of PC accessories.  Last year, Microsoft discontinued its own line of peripherals, including mice, keyboards, and audio devices, consolidating its manufacturing into…

Richard Drury/Getty Images A long, long time ago, I built websites by hand using the vi editor to write HTML. It was hard. Then along came NoteTab and Bluefish, which made writing and editing HTML easier but still a pain.  DreamWeaver, one of the first what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) tools, was a big jump forward. But, the real game-changer was when content management systems showed up, which combined creation, editing, and production in one package. The first…

David Merron Photography/Getty Images I’ve been covering Linux and open-source since 1999 (the year of Prince). During that long stretch, a year hasn’t gone by that I haven’t experienced someone (or a group of someones) still believing the myths that seem to be forever churning about the open-source operating system. Also: The 3 most Windows-like Linux distros you can try because change is hard It would be impossible to calculate the hours I’ve spent trying to…

Jack Wallen/ZDNET Windows 10 will soon be coming to an end. Anyone using the Microsoft OS has until October 14, 2025, to find an alternative. If your PC can handle the increased system requirements of Windows 11, you can always upgrade, but if your computer is aging, chances are slim that it will support the latest version. Also: If your Windows 10 PC can’t be upgraded, you have 5 options before time runs out Ergo… Linux!…

Grafana Labs/ZDNET There are a handful of leading commercial toolmakers to help IT detect and respond to system outages and application failures, commonly referred to as “incident management and response,” including companies such as PagerDuty, as well as various “observability” companies like Datadog and Dynatrace. Also: 7 solid reasons to consider AIOps However, the market is finally opening up to open-source software approaches, according to a report released last week by JP Morgan’s software analysts. The…