The top-10 tech stories of 2017

The free Wifi clause obliging thousands to clean toilets, the US government's peculiar pursuit of Kaspersky, and AMD's Ryzen CPU were all among V3's top stories during 2017

The past year has certainly been interesting, at least as far as the technology sector goes. Nationally and globally, politics appears to have become somewhat humdrum with nothing happening from month to month, or year to year - or so it seems.

But in the tech sector, there's been month after month of security breaches, wild accusations, more information about state-sponsored cyber attacks, eyebrow-raising product launches and, um, smartphones being released in nice colours.

These, therefore, are the most read stories on V3 this year - enjoy them. Again.

10. This is the Samsung Galaxy S8 in Coral Blue

Smartphones and gadgets are perennially popular on V3 - especially devices from Apple, Samsung and the other big-name vendors.

Hence, when V3 had the hot news that the Samsung Galaxy S8 was going to be coming out in Coral Blue, the site went crackers.

To be fair, it was among a number of leaks around the Galaxy S8 in the run-up to its launch but, for some reason, a cool new colour for Samsung's flagship smartphone was the story that went down best.

9. Clause in free wifi contract obliges thousands to spend 1,000 hours cleaning music festival toilets

Sh*t happens - sometimes literally.

And some festival goers could have ended up shovelling the brown stuff if the organisers of a music festival had decided to enforce the terms and conditions of their free wifi.

As the company behind the festival, Purple, blogged afterwards for a spot of well-deserved publicity: "A 'Community Service Clause' was added to our usual terms and stated: The user may be required, at Purple's discretion, to carry out 1,000 hours of community service."

The company went as far as to list what this might entail: "Cleaning festival loos, hugging stray cats and dogs, and scraping chewing gum off the streets are just some of the uninviting tasks people have agreed to in exchange for free wifi."

Fortunately, the company wasn't in the mood to enforce the Ts and Cs, despite the agreement of 22,000 festival go-ers, choosing instead to enjoy the publicity and a moralising sermon about the potential perils of agreeing to something without reading the small print first.

8. Hundreds of IT jobs to go at Aecom as it outsources to IBM

When engineering giant Aecom decided to outsource its entire IT department to IBM, the news - broken exclusively by V3 and its sister title Computing - wasn't exactly greeted with unconfined joy by Aecom's IT staff.

"Worked for this horrible company for a long time in its various guises. Can't wait to take the pay-off and escape!!!" was one of the milder comments posted online by staff who, by now, are probably more happily employed elsewhere.

Indeed, many weren't even confident of receiving a pay-off and squarely blamed the company's CIO, Tom Peck: "IBM is forcing relocation and is expected to lay-off people, not retain them. Aecom CIO Tom Peck is to blame for this. Not Vance [WilsonMay, senior director, global information technology] or anyone else. He drove IT into the ground and misused millions of dollars."

So, if a gentleman bearing the surname "Peck" is appointed to run IT at your organisation you know what to do: brush up your CV, re-activate your old profile on Jobsite or Indeed, and get job hunting.

7. Apple readying iPhone SE2

As we said, V3 readers love their gadgets, especially their smartphones.

The iPhone SE, though, is the entry-level iPhone and, especially given that it's basically a reheated iPhone 5S, it's getting a bit long in the tooth. So the news that Apple is working to update its cheapy-cheap (for Apple) iPhone was warmly welcomed.

However, it's unlikely to make an appearance before around March next year at the earliest, so if you're in the market for a new smartphone and it simply has to be Apple, don't hang around - scour the January sales instead (which these days seem to start before Christmas).

6. Deloitte accused of leaving its internal Active Directory server exposed to the internet with RDP open

Everyone loves a bit of schadenfreude, so the news that Deloitte had been more than a bit careless over its own systems administration and security practices certainly hit the spot.

Deloitte, an accounting firm that does an increasing amount of security consulting on the side, had left its corporate Microsoft Active Directory server on the internet with remote desktop protocol (RDP) open - making its internal email system an easy target for hackers.

And target it they certainly did!

Obviously, internet ne'er do wells aren't inclined to blab when they find an Active Directory server with the keys to a company's internal email accounts online, so it wasn't until security researcher Dan Tentler found it that Deloitte got busted.

In the interests of balance, it should be noted that the following organisations (among many others) also got busted in 2017:

And so the list goes on.

In fact, so many organisations are getting done over these days that after the GDPR is introduced in May 2018 taxes could probably be abolished and government comfortably funded by the fines alone.

The top-10 tech stories of 2017

The free Wifi clause obliging thousands to clean toilets, the US government's peculiar pursuit of Kaspersky, and AMD's Ryzen CPU were all among V3's top stories during 2017

5. Best free anti-virus software of 2017

Who doesn't like free stuff? And who doesn't think anti-virus software is generally a good thing? Put the two together and it's little surprise that this proved to be such a popular article on V3 - indeed, it's been popular throughout the year, it seems.

While free ‘personal' editions of anti-virus software packages have been available for years, there's still a significant difference between the best and the worst (Microsoft Security Essentials).

Czech company AVG was among the first with a free edition, a move that helped put it on the map, and it remains a popular and solid option. But the list also includes Avast, Panda, and BitDefender. We'd also add ZoneAlarm free, if you can find it. It uses the Kaspersky heuristic engine, so if you work for the US government you might want to give it a miss.

Add to the list Malwarebytes' excellent anti-malware tool, Ad-Aware Free Anti-Virus+, and Microsoft's Malicious Software Removal Tool and you've got a pretty comprehensive list of good stuff that every PC owner should be toting.

4. AMD unveils Ryzen 7, promising faster chips at half the price

The year 2017 was the year that PCs become interesting again. Well, sort of.

Certainly, the release by AMD of microprocessors featuring its Zen architecture has certainly stirred things up and shaken the market out of its ten-year torpor.

The Ryzen 7, released in February with availability the month after delivered everything that AMD had promised and more, with single-core performance just a notch behind Intel's best, but with multi-core and multi-threaded performance blowing Intel out of the park.

For the first time in a decade, Intel has some real competition. AMD's Ryzen 7 line-up included just three parts - the Ryzen 7 1700, the Ryzen 7 1700X and the Ryzen 7 1800X - all well-specced and keenly priced.

3. AMD Ryzen 5 out on 11 April for between $169 and $249

If Ryzen 7 offered a high-end AMD for enthusiasts, power builders and workstation makers, the Ryzen 5 would provide the mainstream. Unveiled three months after the Ryzen 7, the Ryzen 5 offered Intel-beating performance at a price people with standard-sized pockets could afford.

While popular with enthusiasts, AMD hasn't yet persuaded the big system builders to throw-out Intel en masse and throw-in Ryzens instead, but a number of well-respected second-tier vendors are now offering a wide range of Ryzen-based PCs. These include Mesh, PC Specialist, Novatech, Scan, and Chillblast.

2. Kaspersky takes battle with US government over banning order to court

One of the most intriguing stories of the year, perhaps, is the long-running battle between the US government and Kaspersky.

The Moscow-based anti-virus software maker has been accused of allowing its software to be used by Russian intelligence to scour PCs and servers around the world for interesting titbits of information, such as US National Security Agency exploits being played around with on a staffer's home PC.

An investigation into that particular episode proved that heuristics built-in to Kaspersky's security software had, indeed, fingered the NSA tools the staffer was playing around with as potentially shonky and sent them back to Moscow for analysis - but that's what pretty much all anti-virus software does automatically, these days, when it discovers something that looks a bit nasty.

Apart from that, and some iffy looking stories in the US press, not much by way of actual evidence has really been offered to back up the claims.

Either way, the US Department of Homeland Security wasn't in the mood for listening and ordered all Kaspersky software off of government computers.

The story got even more peculiar when the New York Times claimed that Kaspersky's network had been hacked by Israeli intelligence, who observed Russian government hackers "searching computers around the world for the code names of American intelligence programs".

1. Apple releases £999 iPhone X with Face ID facial recognition and A11 Bionic CPU

Got a spare grand in your back pocket that you don't have any better use for (like paying down your gigantic credit card balance)? Well, why not buy an Apple iPhone X instead of eating for the next few months?

Apple's plans for the iPhone X weren't a very well kept secret - pretty much everything including the price had already been leaked before hand.

This includes the A11 Bionic (!) six-core microprocessor with high-performance cores up to 75 per cent faster than its predecessor, the A10, paired with Apple's first homegrown GPU, which the company developed at the expense of Britain's poor Imagination Technologies.

What hadn't been leaked, though, was the nasty ‘notch' at the top of the device, where Apple decided to put a speaker instead - so you can actually use it as a phone.

This hasn't stopped eager punters going out and buying up the device in their droves, although "the droves" have been smaller than Apple's as because production difficulties delayed availability.

Just as a point of order: Apple claims that your supposed to call it the Phone "10", not the iPhone "Ex", okay?