From Techtalk at PCPitstop: Weather.com and Drudge Report (to name just two) sites with millions of visitors were serving up ads with CryptoWall ransomeware, or infected adware on PCs. “Once an ad network is subverted, hundreds of millions of poisoned ads are displayed in real-time. Many of these ads initiate a drive-by attack without the user having to do anything. The attack does a few redirects, kicks in a U.S. and Canada-focused Exploit Kit which checks for vulnerabilitie...
Happy Sunday, all and sundry. I saw this and of course (get it?) signed up and thought about all you guys and girls sitting around with really old photos having great sentimental value, which might be damaged and needing repair. Sooo…I decided to put this post up. Ben Willmore is a great teacher. He’s a member of the Photoshop Hall of Fame who has taught over 100,000 Photoshop users on five continents…tons of books, and tutorials. He’s probably the best around with “"t...
Well, it’s over for 2015. What stunning photos. Seriously…I recommend allowing yourself to be entranced for quite a bit of time by them. The categories were: Outdoor scenes, sense of place, spontaneous moments and travel portraits. Better? Many are available for free as desktop wallpapers… 1600 x 1200 for desktops, but also for tablets and phone, with some branding (National Geographic) at the bottom of the photos… You can easily spend a wonderful coupl...
Bill Gates, Musk, Hawkings and others have all stated their concern regarding the distressing potential dangers of AI more than once, on we go pell-mell towards self aware/self governing machines. We can’t even get security updates right without causing severe problems, but somehow think “We can do this. We can win!”. Just a minor thought…a program, any program (including heuristic ones) are limited by their coding and how, via this coding, they ‘learn’. The same is tr...
Again! Lenovo actually did it again! If their rep wasn’t gone the last time, they’ve gone and shoveled the last bit of dirt and filled the grave. Not gonna detail it…just read it and weep. “Lenovo used a utility it called Lenovo Service Engine in the BIOS of some products that downloaded a program called OneKey Optimizer to user systems and sent "non-personally identifiable system data" to Lenovo servers. What makes this particularly worrisome is...
Well, that’s a misleading title, so my apologies. MS has a long history of borked updates. KB3081424 is yet another. No big deal, right? Wrong. Some users are reporting it causes an endless cycle of reboots. When will MS learn that the policy of mandatory updating hasn’t been well enough thought through or isn’t being timed well? In theory, supposedly all patches/updates, etc. are first distributed to a certain group of users for testing. If all goes well, it is then d...
The first – the Stagefright exploit (several vulnerabilities) is apparently worse than the Heartbleed vulnerability. These could give the opening to run remote code from an MMS message, or even just viewing a specially constructed video on an infected webpage with embedded video content. The vulnerability is well explained here , and here . There’s a fix for that out…you can check and fix with the app described here . Now, two Israeli researchers (Bobrov and Bashan) have...
A bit in the future just yet, but mark your calendars you shutterbugs! creativeLive is a great website to learn all sorts of stuff…I learned my Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom and what very little I know about photography there. The instructors are world class…the lessons are free…even the rebroadcasts are. If you see something particularly helpful or suited to your needs, you can purchase the class, its materials and have all time access to it forever. What&rs...
The first and worst? From MS’s Privacy Policy Statement: “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to […] protect our customers or enforce the terms governing the use of the services.” This (to me) says my computer now belongs to them. Sorry, this is completely unacceptable. ...
Not long ago I was cruising, looking for something to bring you folks. What with the release of W10 to a bunch of tech maniacs, I don’t think this post stands much of a chance of being noticed…but, if you’re in the market to learns something new, it might be something to look at. So, I found this and I’m only adding one site to the list: FutureLearn . I think it’s a pretty good list since my fave site is on the list ( CreativeLive , since you asked). If you guys have a ...
This is really a corker. What? Does MS think it’s SETI now? So, according to Neowin, W10 response has been huge…more than 16 upgrades per second. So, they knew ahead of time this would happen, or at least hoped it would and MS prepped by acquiring 40Tbps with all the major CDNs. BUT (you’re gonna love it): In order to ease the load on their servers and allow users to upgrade faster therey invented Windows Update Delivery Optimization . This works like a torrent hosting ins...
Jorge has released the new version! He has fixed some sticky issues such as: “…Winstep Xtreme hanging for a couple of minutes when running for the first time and the Windows Start Menu button being disabled when showing the Windows taskbar…” – Winstep and, “…v15.7 also adds support for Windows Apps and the new Windows 10 Virtual Desktop Manager.” – ibid Also: “To make up for the fact that there were...
“Microsoft has confirmed that Windows 10 users will be able to block or undo some updates to the system. It's a minor exception to the recently-instated policy that all updates are mandatory. In previous editions of Windows, users have always had the choice of whether or not to download a new feature or security update, including whether or not it was installed automatically, or manually.” – infopackets Also, new features will be released sooner than on a fixed schedule…...
No sooner did we all say that this would be a bad idea, then MS shows us why we were right! “If you run the latest insider build 10240 of Windows 10 you may have already received update KB3074681 which is a cumulative security update for Windows 10 that Microsoft released on July 25. The update installs fine on machines running the operating system but seems to introduce several Explorer related bugs at the same time which users may notice when executing different a...
Martin Brinkmann has come up with an excellent series of recommendations…lacking only Stardock’s products, but I don’t believe he customizes. There really isn’t a single second guess (from me, at least). Anyway…I recommend adding ODNT to W10, and not worrying in the meantime, because you KNOW it’ll be just fine. Take a look at the list here: http://www.ghacks.net/2015/07/26/essential-software-for-windows-10/?_m=3n%2e0038%2e1680%2ehj0ao01hy5%2e1que And don’t miss thes...