Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Do you use the ultra-popular WhatsApp instant messaging app on your mobile phone?
If so, a newly-discovered security flaw enables hackers to install a very dangerous piece of malware known as “Pegasus” onto your phone simply by dialing your phone number!
Do you use Google+ for at least part of your social media activities?
If so, you won’t be able to use it for much longer.
Google has has announced that the consumer division of Google+ will be slowly phased out over the next 10 months, and fully “retired” by the end of August 2019.
Question from Keenan D.: Hi Rick. I hope you can answer a question I have about using my computer.
I have a 15.6″ Acer Aspire laptop and I usually rest it on my lap when I’m using it because it’s more convenient that way.
My roommate is constantly harping on me to stop holding the laptop on my lap because (according to him) it can cause serious health problems. Is he right?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while you’re probably well familiar with the infamous “White Screen of Death”.
If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s the stark, panic inducing white error screen that WordPress displays when it encounters a fatal error with some component of your blog.
There are several reasons why you might see a white screen of death on your blog, but they’re usually the result of a serious problem affecting your blog’s theme, one of the installed plugins or the database.
Whatever the reason, it’s the last thing you want to see when you try to access your blog!
Question from Patty J.: I recently found out about the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. I asked my web host to install it for me so I can make my WordPress blog secure.
I installed the Really Simple SSL plugin and that took care of the redirects from http to https as well as most of the mixed content issues.
But Firefox is still blocking parts of my pages that it claims are still trying to load from insecure sources.
I’ve looked my pages over and I can’t find anything that appears to be loading from an insecure location. Everything on the page appears to be loading from URLs starting with https instead of http.
When I load the pages in Chrome it shows the green padlock with no warnings. It’s only Firefox that’s not cooperating.
I’m pulling my hair out here. How can I find out what Firefox is blocking for being insecure so I can fix it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]