Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Another day, another data breach…
Did you make a purchase from GameStop’s online store between mid-September 2016 and the first week of February 2017?
If so, there’s a chance your credit card information might have been stolen by hackers.
Online security firm KrebsOnSecurity has announced that GameStop has been informed about a possible credit card data breach and the company is currently investigating it and taking actions to prevent future breaches. [Read more…]
If you’re using Windows 10 you should know that Microsoft is planning to release a major update for your Windows installation.
This important update is called Windows 10 Creator’s Update and they plan to start rolling it out tomorrow (April 11).
As a participant in Microsoft’s Windows Insider Program I had early access to the Creator’s Update, and I believe it’s a very worthy upgrade for the price (it’s free!).
But that being said, I installed the update on four different computers and had issues with two of them. That’s a 50% failure rate with my limited test, and that doesn’t bode well for the general roll-out of this update. [Read more…]
I’ve written before about the dangers of trusting a password manager to keep your passwords and the online accounts they correspond with secure.
Well, here’s yet another example that illustrates why I believe password managers are inherently risky.
One of the researchers with Google’s Project Zero has discovered and reported a very serious security flaw in one of the browser extensions that supports the popular LastPass password manager service.
According to the Google researcher, this flaw could potentially allow a hacker to insert malicious code into the flawed browser extension and steal your passwords – the very thing a password manager is supposed to prevent. [Read more…]
The folks at Which? claim that a new study they conducted shows that most manufacturers overstate the battery life of their laptops by huge margins (by hours instead of minutes).
I don’t believe that to be accurate, and I’ll explain why.
Which? says they tested a slew of laptop models by several major manufacturers by using them to continually access the Internet over Wi-Fi or watching videos until the battery goes from fully charged to completely empty.
The conclusion they drew from the results of those tests is that most manufacturers are overstating their laptops’ battery lives by as much as 50%. In other words, they are basically saying the manufacturers are fibbing to their customers.
I believe that conclusion is flawed because the study was apparently conducted under the assumption that most laptop owners use their machines in one of those two ways. Well, most users don’t. [Read more…]
As you probably know, Microsoft continues to provide security updates for older versions of Windows for several years after the next version is released.
Unfortunately, they have to stop supporting those old Windows versions at some point in order to better focus their resources on developing and supporting newer versions of the operating system.
You might recall that Microsoft officially ended support for Windows XP back in April 2014. Well, now it’s Vista’s turn.
The final security patches for Windows Vista will be released on April 11, after which there will be no more of them coming down the pike. That means Vista will essentially become an orphan on that date with Microsoft cutting it loose to survive in the wild on its own.
As always happens when Microsoft stops supporting an older version of Windows, it won’t take long for the hackers and scammers of the world to find and exploit previously undiscovered and unpatched security holes in the Vista framework.
What does all this mean? [Read more…]