Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
The popular travel website Orbitz has just announced a major security breach that allowed hackers to steal the personal and financial information on almost 900,000 customers.
The data theft affects virtually all Orbitz customers who used the site to book a trip in 2016 and most of 2017.
This is the customer information that was stolen: [Read more…]
If you’re a frequent traveler you probably own a 4G mobile hotspot device for connecting your laptop to the Internet when there’s no reliable Wi-Fi or wired Ethernet connection available.
Those hotspot devices sure come in handy when you need one, but it can be a hassle traveling with an extra piece of hardware just to ensure that you’ll always be able to get online when you need to. [Read more…]
As you probably know by now, Microsoft has officially stopped supporting both Windows XP and Windows Vista, leaving users pretty much on their own when it comes to system security and malware protection.
As expected, many of the most popular online services quickly started ending XP and Vista support as well, and the stream of companies taking that action is expanding month by month.
Apple is the latest company to jump on the “Dump XP and Vista” bandwagon. [Read more…]
Many of the web’s most widely respected tech experts recommend using a password manager such as KeePass to store all of your online passwords. I don’t recommend them however, and after reading this post you will understand why.
A typical password manager will store all of your passwords in an encrypted database. In order to “open” the database to extract a needed password you’ll have to enter a master password.
This sounds like a great idea for storing and protecting a bunch of unique passwords without having to remember them all, and the concept is indeed a great one. But unfortunately it is seriously flawed. Here’s why: [Read more…]
A while back I wrote a post explaining why it makes sense to upgrade your PC to USB 3.0 along with instructions for doing it. In a nutshell, you simply purchase and install an inexpensive USB 3.0 upgrade card.
Now’s a great time to do it because you can pick up an awesome Anker Uspeed USB 3.0 PCI-E Express Card (#ad) that will add 2 super fast USB 3.0 ports to your Desktop PC for about the cost of a pizza! [Read more…]