I wanted to find the best laptop for the casual user – people who want a go-to machine that does the basics well and is designed for frequent use, without necessarily offering the whizz-bang computing power required by gamers or film editors or software designers. Those are the kind of questions that I kept in mind while reviewing the laptops for this article. "As with most things in life," he adds, "the more you spend the better experience and quality you will get."īut how much does that experience, that quality, matter? £300 might buy you a laptop that streams Netflix just fine – but would you be better off shelling out extra for the additional options that inevitably ratchet up the price, like a fancy HD screen, good speakers, or 360 degree hinges? And are the £300 models so ill-designed that you find them uncomfortable to type on after 20 minutes in a cafe, or too heavy to carry in your bag to work? Gaming and premium products start at around £700. “For a good all-rounder to use for work applications like spreadsheets and presentations, I would recommend devices above £400.
“If you’re only going to use it to browse the internet, watch on-demand services like Netflix, and perform basic tasks in programmes like Word, then you’ll be fine with a laptop of under £300," says Phil Elford, Head of Technology at Argos. Should you get cheap and cheerful, or dear and desirable? In which case, there's good news and bad: almost all new units on the market will be up to doing what you need them to – but that means it can be difficult to discern whether the money you pay is a worthwhile investment.
The first step to answering that question is to work out what those needs actually are – and the truth is that for most of us, the answer is basic tasks like sending emails, browsing the internet, and watching films or TV shows. How do you find the best laptop for your needs in this haystack of microchips? There’s an intimidating number of products out there on the market, and they do a dizzying amount of things.
Photos of Donakov's face that were uploaded on multiple profiles, interlinking various of Tessa88's alternative nicknames.Ī YouTube video showing the car license plate for one of Tessa88's alternate acronym's, which was later linked to a traffic incident, revealing Donakov's real name.īelow is an infographic shared by Recorded Future, detailing their findings.Īs a side note, US prosecutors have already charged, arrested, and extradited to the US a Russian hacker, Yevgeniy Nikulin, who they accused of hacking into Dropbox and LinkedIn, two of the databases that Tessa88 had put up online for sale back in 2016.Buying a new laptop is surely one of the more daunting tech purchases you can make. Researchers found YouTube videos, images uploaded on forums and Imgur, and three Odnoklassniki profiles (Russian social network service for classmates) that provided enough clues to identify Maksim Donakov as the person behind Tessa88. Researchers spotted the Tessa88 persona active and trying to sell the databases on underground hacking forums and Dark Web marketplaces only between February and May 2016.īut despite Tessa88's limited activity, Recorded Future said today in a report that they've managed to interconnect several online identities to the Tessa88 moniker, and later to Maksim Donakov. Both have said in multiple interviews given to news media outlets, including to this reporter, that they only acted as middlemen for a larger group of hackers who performed the actual hacks.īoth middlemen weren't active for long. ZDNet: Black Friday 2018 deals: Business Bargain Hunter's top picks | Cyber Monday 2018 deals: Business Bargain Hunter's top picksīut neither Tessa88, nor Peace_of_Mind, were the actual hackers who breached these companies. Peace_of_Mind also sold some of the same databases, but also others, unique to him. Some of the databases that Tessa88 advertised online contained user data -and sometimes even passwords- from companies such as MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn, Dropbox, Badoo, QIP, Rambler, VKontakte, and Mobango. Tessa88 is mostly known for being one of two hackers -together with Peace_of_Mind- behind the string of so-called "mega breaches" that came to light in 2016. The hacker's pseudonym is Tessa88, but Recorded Future claims that behind this acronym stands a 29-year-old named Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov (Донаков, Максим Владимирович), from the town of Penza, Russia.
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