Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: Why is the Internet not working on my laptop?

Posted on August 6, 2017

Question from Caleb H.: Rick, I have a Dell laptop with Windows 10 Home Edition. It’s connected to the Internet with a LAN cable plugged into my router (it’s an older router and not wireless, but it works great).

I know the router and modem are working fine because my desktop PC can load web pages with no problem at all.

The laptop was working fine last night, but when I woke it up from sleep mode this morning I couldn’t load any websites or check my email even though the little indicator in the lower-right corner of the screen says I have an active connection to the Internet.

What do I need to do to get my Internet connection working again? Rebooting the PC didn’t help. Thanks in advance.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: Why won’t Opera’s VPN connect with AVG Antivirus enabled?

Posted on August 5, 2017

Question from Callen W.: I really need your help Rick. I followed your advice and installed the Opera browser so I could use the built-in VPN.

Everything worked perfectly for a couple of days, then Opera started hanging up and no websites would load.

I noticed that the VPN button in the address bar was white instead of blue so I clicked on it and saw that the VPN was turned off and trying to connect.

Every time I try clicking the button to turn the VPN on it says “Connecting” but it never connects.

I did some research and saw where someone said it could be a conflict with my antivirus software. I temporarily disabled AVG Antivirus and sure enough, the VPN connected just fine and websites started loading with no problem.

The problem is when I re-enable AVG the connection issue comes back after a little while.

I’ve used AVG for years and I’d rather not have to give it up just to use Opera and its built-in VPN. Is there something I can do to make Opera and AVG work together?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Adobe to officially (and mercifully) kill off Flash in December 2020

Posted on August 2, 2017

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…]

Scam alert: The popular Copyfish OCR browser extension has been hacked

Posted on July 31, 2017

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…]