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(credit: Blue Coat)

Large UK companies are amongst the hardest hit by ransomware in western countries according to a new report that found that more than half had been affected by it—and that nine percent had been left "entirely unable to operate."

Ransomware is clearly a growth industry in Britain; 58 percent of IT directors in this country have paid ransoms in the past, and the UK experiences more attacks than the Canada, Germany, and the US, where bosses are 21 times less likely to give in to hackers' demands.

Ransomware is malicious software which locks users out of key files or their entire system using tough encryption until the owner pays up. It's a relatively simple scam, and according to Malwarebytes, who commissioned the report, gaining rapidly in popularity. The vast majority of attacks are coming through an endpoint, with 46 percent originating from an e-mail.

(credit: Basis)

The Intel-owned company Basis announced yesterday that it would recall all of its Peak smart watches after a portion of customers complained of the device overheating. The issue first came about back in June of this year, when Basis halted the production and sales of its Peak devices due to the risk of burns or blistering because of the device becoming too hot during use. The company did issue a software update that it hoped would fix the issue, but it failed to eliminate the problem. Now Basis is recalling all Peak devices and issuing refunds to customers.

Initially, Basis claimed the problem only affected 0.2 percent of all watches sold. That estimate hasn't changed; however the issue is serious enough for Basis to recall every Peak it has ever sold. The company is asking all users to stop using their Basis Peaks immediately, and warns that the Basis Peak service where data is stored will be shut down next year. Users will have access to all their activity information until December 31, 2016, but after that, you won't be able to log on, access your data, or sync the device to Peak online services.

A recall is bad, but could be survivable. Fitbit voluntarily recalled its Force fitness band in 2014 due to complaints from some customers that they had developed skin irritation and rashes from wearing the device. Even now, Fitbit urges customers to wear its bands properly to avoid irritated skin, which means not wearing a band too tightly around your wrist and avoiding device contact with soap and water.

We tested the latest Mint on this beauty: Dell's XPS 13 Developer's Edition (2016). (credit: Scott Gilbertson)

The newly released Mint 18 is a major upgrade. Not only has the Linux Mint project improved Mint's dueling desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but the group's latest work impacts all underlying systems. With Mint 18, Linux Mint has finally moved its base software system from Ubuntu 14.04 to the new Ubuntu 16.04.

Upgrading to the latest long-term support (LTS) release of Ubuntu means, as with the Mint 17.x series, the Mint 18.x release cycle is now locked to its base for two years. Rather than tracking alongside Ubuntu, Mint 18 and all subsequent releases will stick with Ubuntu 16.04. Mint won't necessarily get as out of date as Ubuntu LTS releases tend to by the end of their two-year cycle, but this setup does mean nothing major is going to change for quite a while.

If the Mint 17.x release series is anything to judge by, that's a good thing. Stability allows Mint to focus on its own projects rather than spending development time creating patches for every Ubuntu update. That should be especially good news for the 18.x series since Ubuntu plans to make some major changes in the next two years: moving to a new display server (Mir) and updating its own Unity desktop to Unity 8 are chief among the priorities. Many of those initiatives will impact components that affect downstream users like Mint.