I don’t usually post about hardware, but I did see this and thought what the heck… who knows? Maybe I’ll help someone spend less. Anyway…       Link: http://www.logicbuy.com/deals/dell-latitude-laptops-roundup/31616.aspx?sid=pcmnews

  What do you think? The President issued his concern for cyber security in his State of The Union Address, and today the White House published a rough road map outlining areas to be addressed: Protecting the American People Protecting Critical Infrastructure Protecting the Federal Governments Computers and Networks New Framework to Protect Individuals’ Privacy and Civil Liberties   I’m interested in what you all think ...

  Google engineers have denied Vupen’s claim of a Chrome vulnerability. They state it’s an Adobe Flash problem. The Chrome browser comes bundled with Adobe Flash. "Vupen misunderstood how sandboxing worked in Chrome, and only had a Flash bug. It's a legit pwn, but if it requires Flash, it's not a Chrome pwn," tweeted Chris Evans, a Google security engineer and Chrome team lead. "We will not help Google in finding the vulnerabilities," said Chaouki ...

    Big deal. What’s WebGL? WebGL (Web Graphics Library) is an in development standard specification defining a JavaScript API for writing web applications utilizing hardware accelerated 3D graphics. So, this is quite upsetting to the makers of Firefox and Chrome and that’s because they use it in all their versions since 4.x and 9.x, respectively. OK, they’ll patch it. Nope. The very architecture of webGL is what makes it vulnerable, and that’s going to make it...

  For the artists, just ran across this one. The company is reliable and has been around a long time. From NeoPaint: “NeoPaint is a full featured artist’s studio for Windows that’s easy-to-learn, powerful and fun! It’s simple enough for beginners yet packed with powerful features and advanced tools. NeoPaint makes it easy for business and home users to touch up photographs and create great looking graphics for desktop publishing, presentations and the Internet! Neo...

  I love Mike Elgan, and have for years. His work appears in a variety of publications, including Cult of Mac, Computerworld, Datamation, PC World, InfoWorld, MacWorld, ITWorld, CIO, the San Francisco Chronicle and many others, reaching more than a million readers per month. I read his latest on Computerworld.com and felt strongly enough about this topic to base this piece on it. You all know the saying about “Perception is everything”? Pisses me off everytime I hear or read it....

  This past week hasn’t been a good one for helping us feel more secure. 1. Sony: Everyone knows about the 1$ Billion Class Action suit planned based on what is probably an case of felonious laziness. Turns out Sony was warned about the fact it’s servers weren’t secure or updated, by security experts – free of charge! Now I learn of a third wave attack (2): “A group of hackers says it is planning another wave of cyberattacks against Sony in retaliation for its handli...

  Thanks for the ‘heads up!’, Hankers.   Because many in the Community have expressed interest in and use LastPass to keep and secure their passwords, this is a quick ‘heads up!’ to everyone. Martin Brinkmann, a journalist and owner of ghacks.net  (an extremely reputable German IT Security News Site) published an article about a self reported  “anomaly” at LastPass. This is important as it is being treated by LastPass ...

  Just as predicted (somewhere) in the “Mastermind – dead” thread, supposedly “leaked” photos of ObL dead are tainted with malware. We’ve seen this before with all the major disasters such as the Japanese Earthquake  and others. Curiosity, or a desire to help (in the case of the earthquake) and a desire to learn details attracts large numbers of potential victims whose guard is down (“after all, who would even think of exploiting such a thing?”). The scammers and hac...

" I’ve been a bit frustrated in my writing, lately. If you’ll remember, back when I started doing this “News & Apps” article writing, I dealt with Apple products as well, and owning an iPad makes me a bit enthusiastic about it. Well, yesterday a friend approached me with the question, “How come you never write about Apple stuff, Doc? You know, there are quite a few folks with iPhones, iPads and iPods on WC.” I found myself answering, “Well I ...

    Just a quickie… There’s an article which might interest you: Lifehacker put out a great article today on how to decrease expenses… a good thing! Also some deals and things you probably don’t know about yet. Took a bit of ‘chopping’ to get this pic right. Link: http://lifehacker.com/#!5797326/top-10-things-you-can-get-for-free-or-cheap

      Any Video Converter is an all-in-one video converting freeware with easy-to-use graphical interface, fast converting speed, and excellent video quality. It can convert almost all video formats including DivX, XviD, MOV, RM, RMVB, MPEG, VOB, DVD, WMV, and AVI to MPEG-4 movie format for PSP or other portable video device, MP4 player, or smartphones. The freeware also converts video files between multiple formats and downloaded YouTube videos. Un...

  Royal Wedding Name Scam: Sophos uncovered an interesting royal wedding-themed game on social networks that could lead you to revealing important information about yourself. Then, if you post your Royal Wedding Invitation name, guess what you told them? Well, here’s a hint from Yahoo!: Those are all typical answers to security questions used to verify your identity online for Webmail accounts and other services. Best tip? Don’t play. And for those &...

      On Monday, AT&T will begin restricting more than 16 million broadband users based on the amount of data they use in a month. This means that a majority of U.S. broadband users will now be subject to limits on how much they can do online. You can do more, but it’ll cost you – and how! “AT&T's new limits - 150 GB for DSL subscribers and 250 GB for UVerse users (a mix of fiber and DSL) - come as users are increasingly turning to online video ...

  There’s a new feature in Windows 8 that has been described by people who have seen the M1-M3 builds. It’s called the “History Vault”. The History Vault feature allows you easily restore individual files to earlier timestamp…. without doing the whole computer. Now you can get this same feature for free in “Genie Timeline” software which supports Windows7 and x32 as well as x64! I strongly urge you to take a look at the excellent scre...