Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
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…]
CrashPlan has been one of the most popular cloud-based computer backup services for some time, but the company has announced that they will soon stop serving the consumer (home) market.
They stopped accepting new subscriptions and renewing existing ones for their “CrashPlan for Home” service on August 22 and they will be “sunsetting” the service over the next year in order to fully concentrate on the business market. [Read more…]
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…]
Adobe has announce in a blog post that they will officially “retire” Flash at the end of 2020, finally putting an end to their (and our) constant struggle to keep it updated and safe from hackers.
Flash was an amazing technology back in the early days of the web. It allowed content creators to fill our world with all kinds of active content that would otherwise have been difficult to produce.
But that is no longer the case.
Modern technologies have now made Flash obsolete, and one security flaw after another has made it downright dangerous. Thankfully, the end of the Flash era is in sight. [Read more…]
Copyfish is a very popular Optical Character Recognition (OCR) browser extension that extracts text from images and videos so you can insert it into a regular text file.
OCR technology has been around for decades, but Copyfish and other extensions now make it easy to extract text right from within your web browser.
Unfortunately, one of the employees at A9T9 (the company behind the Copyfish extension) fell for a phishing attempt and effectively handed control of the Copyfish Chrome extension to a hacker. [Read more…]