Tech News Archives - Page 77 of 135

Just for fun: How close are we to the planet Mars?

Posted on September 17, 2017

Most everyone knows that our universe is an amazingly vast place that the human mind will likely never be able to truly comprehend, but relatively few realize just how far it is even to our closest planetary neighbors.

Take for instance the distance to that favorite fodder for countless science fiction books, the planet Mars.

Many of us have been fascinated by the “Red Planet” for our entire lives, but actually going there would take a lot longer than a typical vacation would allow. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Equifax hack leaves almost half of all Americans subject to identity theft

Posted on September 8, 2017

As you’ve probably heard by now, credit reporting giant Equifax has been hacked in what is being described as the largest security breach in history.

According to the company, the breach may have affected up to 143 million Americans. That’s almost half of the entire U.S. population.

And when you consider that millions of our fellow citizens are children who aren’t even in Equifax’s system, you can see that the odds are quite high that you and I are among those affected. [Read more…]

Scam alert: Beware the insidious ‘Locky Ransomware’ that’s being spread by Facebook Messenger

Posted on August 27, 2017

As you probably know by now, scams and viruses are constantly making the rounds on Facebook.

The latest threat is spreading like wildfire with the help of the ubiquitous Facebook Messenger app that runs on millions of smart phones and tablets.

Commonly known as “Locky Ransomeware”, this threat is especially bad because there’s no known decryption program available for unlocking a device once it has been encrypted. [Read more…]

Q&A: How do I prevent ‘Offline Maps’ from automatically updating?

Posted on August 16, 2017

Question from Rina G.: I recently started running out of storage space on my laptop so I did some investigating.

Apparently the “Offline Maps” app is filling up the SSD every time it updates. The SSD is only 32GB so storage space is tight as it is.

How can I disable these automatic updates? This laptop is running Windows 10.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]