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Viruses. Spyware. These bogey words haunt every PC user, but many do not know what they really are or, more importantly, how to get rid of them. There is no clear-cut definition the separates a virus versus a piece of spyware, and in fact, sometimes the catch-all term “malware” is used. For our purposes, though, there is no real difference. We just want to get rid of all of it.
As discussed previously in this space, the PlayStation Network’s security was compromised recently, giving the intruding hacker’s access to over 70 million user’s personal information. Whether or not the hackers also gained access to user’s credit card information is still not known, the fact is that a large amount of usable credit card information may be hitting the underground online black market. It is that market that the New York Times provided a glimpse into in a blog post published yesterday entitled “How Credit Card Data Is Stolen and Sold”.
Everyone knows the old stand-bys like ctrl+c and ctrl+v, but many people don’t realize just how many useful keyboard shortcuts there are that are incredibly useful. We were reminded by the following video of a particularly awesome shortcut that, once learned, will be used daily (if you’re the clumsy type, anyway.) Wouldn’t want to spoil the surprise, so just watch the video and enjoy:
If you like this, there are plenty more goofy tech videos over at Tested.com.
It seems something of trend now for massively popular cloud-based online services to be in trouble lately. As millions of users around the world are already aware, Sony’s widespread Playstation Network (PSN) has been offline since April 20. What exacerbated user’s aggravation more than just the downtime, however, wasSony’s almost complete silence on what caused this outage, when users could expect to be able to get back online, and especially their silence concerning whether or not a security breach had occurred that could potentially have resulted in leaked personal information, including credit card numbers and addresses.
A crippling failure in Amazon’s Web services business took many Web sites offline today, highlighting the dangers inherent in putting trust in to all-in-one so-called “cloud” hosting services.
Many users are probably just learning today that Amazon even offers a hosting service, but it’s not exactly the kind of publicity Amazon is looking for to spread awareness. Massively popular sites and services like Reddit, GroupMe, and HootSuite (a popular Twitter client) have all been hamstrung today because of their reliance on Amazon’s cloud hosting service.
Alright, it’s not really magical, but it is really, really useful. Toshiba has announced the production of new self-erasing hard drives. Worried about data security? You should think about investing in one of these ingenious machines: the Toshiba Self-Erasing Drive.
Perhaps you travel quite often for your business, and so rely quite heavily on your laptop for storing important sensitive information about your clients and internal documentation. Obviously your OS is already locked down, so you’re not too worried about remote attacks, but what if that drive is yanked from your laptop and plugged in somewhere else. It’s ripe for the picking. There are other solutions, but this Toshiba drive has a particularly elegant and simple one.
We’ve been helping a lot of business users set up their Android phones recently, and we’ve noticed that while most of them seem to love the software, the battery life on most units seems to leave them wanting. The grat thing about Android, though, is that it’s heavily customizable, and there are plenty of customizations that offer an uptick in battery life. In fact, if you turn off all the features you don’t absolutely need, your phone can run for much, much longer. So, without further ado, here are some ways to dial back your phone so you can get through your day without your phone calling it quits:
A somewhat amusing if sad news story popped up today that highlighted something we rarely think about in day-to-day life: that the internet is made up of hard, linked connections. It’s easy to think of the internet as an ethereal abstraction, but one little old lady managed to bring the whole thing crashing down in the nation of Armenia. She was out scavenging for copper when she snipped through a very important fiber-optic cable. The 75 year-old woman was arrested, but given her advanced age, the police did not feel it fair to hold her in jail. (The rest of the news story is here.)
The idea that your computer can get infected was dismissed years ago, you installed antivirus protection. It should be all set right, you keep the updates going and you run Windows updates, so what do you have to worry about? But then it hits you: your computer has been getting slower and slower, you’ve been getting way too many pop-ups on the ‘net and the websites you go to seem to redirect to other sites. Something fishy is going on.
If you’ve taken the time to investigate your options for using HTTPS on Facebook and Twitter recently, you may also wonder why every site on the web doesn’t use this great, secure protocol. (For those not in the know, HTTPS is an encryption standard that makes it impossible for anyone intercepting your traffic to figure out the information you’re sending) Well, it turns out there are a whole host of reasons why not. Some of the issues are technical, some are financial and some are practical, but creating a more secure web means dealing with them all.
