Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
The “Covert Redirect” phishing scam has been around for a long time, but scammers are now using it to harvest the email addresses and passwords that victims use to log in to their Facebook accounts.
The scam works like this: You visit a website and like what you see, but you are asked to either “Create a new account” or “Sign in using Facebook” before being allowed to see or do certain things with the site (leave a comment for example). [Read more…]
Mozilla Firefox is one of the best web browsers out there, but the typical Firefox installation isn’t quite as speedy as it could be these days.
To help speed things up a bit, the developers at Mozilla have added a new tweak that can help prevent Firefox from freezing up at times. It’s a nifty HTTP cache, and here’s how you can enable it: [Read more…]
Question from Aaron T.: I have an older Dell desktop computer and the PS/2 keyboard that I dearly love finally bit the dust.
I went out to buy a replacement keyboard, but I couldn’t find one that plugs into the PS/2 keyboard connector. I ended up buying a USB keyboard instead because that’s all I could find.
The new keyboard works great, but ONLY after Windows finished loading. But sometimes I need to use the keyboard while the machine is booting up. Is there any way to fix this?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
A couple of days ago I wrote about a massive security flaw that affects every version of Internet Explorer since version 6, and to their credit Microsoft really got on the stick to push out an update to patch the hole in each and every version of IE as soon as possible – which turned out to be this morning.
The surprising thing about this suite of patches is that Windows XP is included among them. Microsoft had initially suggested that a patch for XP would not be issued, but they obviously changed their mind – most likely due to intense public pressure. [Read more…]
Microsoft has announced that every version of Internet Explorer since version 6 has a massive security flaw that allows hackers to place viruses directly onto your PC, even if you are running up-to-date anti-virus protection.
And yes, this includes YOUR version of Internet Explorer so there is really no reason to check.
All you have to do to have your PC “catch” a virus is to visit an infected website with your Internet Explorer web browser. That’s all. You don’t have to click on anything, just visit the site, and wham – you’re infected! [Read more…]