Let’s start out with one reality: You are NOT the customer of Facebook. You are the product. Rather, your attention is the product. Facebook is delivering your attention to advertisers. Since YOU aren’t paying for use of Facebook, Facebook stays alive by receiving money from advertisers vying for your attention. So it is in Facebook’s…
FALSE! Well, you might be safer on a Mac or Linux machine than on an unpatched Windows machine. But just getting a Mac and never taking safety measures, and then clicking on every link that comes into your email and giving your install password to every process that requests it isn’t any safer than running any…
I am going to do my best to present only what I know and not what I think or suspect, and I’m going to try not to project my opinion onto what I’m about to write. But it’s really important that you understand that the major news outlets ran with a headline, blasted out a…
There is a lot of stuff under the hood of your computer. Today I’m going to show you how you can find out exactly what is under the hood. Why, you ask? Well, first of all, it can come in handy when you’re talking with a tech support person over the phone. Another thing is…
Bill Gates is synonymous with computing. Somewhat less so, unless you’re a geek, is Steve Ballmer. Ballmer was the guy who took the reins from Gates, and we kind of hold him responsible for what Microsoft has become–both good and bad. The new name to listen out for is Satya Nadella, as of February 4…
Sometimes I’ll get an email that I KNOW didn’t come from the person shown in the “from” column in my gmail online. Most of those are ending up in my spam filter these days, but every once in a while one will look legit enough that Google lets it through. Only by knowing my friends…
It doesn’t seem like very long ago that I was recommending to folks that they defragment their hard drives once a month. As with all progress, what was once Best Practices is now either no longer necessary, or downright inappropriate. When hard drives were 40GB and smaller, defragmentation was necessary to make sure all your…
There’s a nasty piece of malware out there called Cryptolocker. You won’t know you’re infected with it until you get the notice that your files are encrypted and if you don’t pay $300 by a certain date the decryption key will be destroyed, causing you to lose all your files forever. At this time only…
If you are a Twitter user, you may not find as much value in this post as someone who is not a Twitter user. But if you’re just getting started with it, read on, you might see something useful. Twitter has been described as microblogging. I guess that’s accurate. What you’re reading here is a…
Regardless of the method used to connect to the internet, if you use a wireless router or access point, IT NEEDS A PASSWORD–and it needs to NOT be set as “password.” If you use U-VERSE from AT&T, the password is on the bottom of the device, and it’s a good password. I don’t know how…