Almost two-year ago (October 23, 2020) Apple released the iPhone 12. The first iPhone not come packaged standard with ear buds and a charging brick. Apple’s justification for excluding these was for environmental reasons. Without these accessories Apple could use a smaller packaging with less of a carbon footprint. Sounds logical, especially since they also wouldn’t be manufacturing as many of the charging bricks and ear buds as well. However, you could say this would be the same as selling Electric Vehicles (EV) and not including the charging cable in the MSRP. Seems silly right…oh wait Tesla already did that…
September 2022
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Windows users world wide are in a panic today as Windows Defender is throwing a false Win32/Hive.ZY Alert when certain popular apps (including Microsoft’s own Edge browser) are opened. A bad Microsoft Defender signature update mistakenly detects Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Discord, and other Electron apps as ‘Win32/Hive.ZY’ each time the apps are opened in Windows. The issue started Sunday morning when Microsoft pushed out Defender signature update 1.373.1508.0 to include two new threat detections, including Behavior:Win32/Hive.ZY. Microsoft is aware of the issue and is pushing out new security intelligence updates. To check for new security intelligence updates Search for and open Windows…
Typically when you hear about DDoS Attacks, you think of websites being brought down or crawling under the weight of superfluous requests. The hacktivist group Anonymous performed a ‘physicals’ DDoS attack of sorts on September 1st. They performed said ‘attack’ by exploiting the Russian ride-hailing app, Yandex Taxi tp summon dozens of taxis to Kutuzov Prospect in Moscow. “On the morning of September 1, Yandex.Taxi encountered an attempt by attackers to disrupt the service — several dozen drivers received bulk orders to the Fili region,” Yandex Taxi said in a statement to the Russian state-owned outlet TASS. The ride-hailing service, which is owned…
Yet again a major international corporation has been the victim of a date breach. While Samsung has disclosed hackers did obtain “Customer Data” early reports indicate (for now) the type of data obtained was not that major. The company says that Social Security numbers, as well as credit and debit card numbers, were not accessed. However, the event “may have affected information such as name, contact and demographic information, date of birth and product registration information.” It hasn’t revealed how many people may have been affected. The company is notifying some customers directly via email. Samsung says someone gained unauthorized…
The USB Promoter Group announced USB4 Version2.0 on Thursday, a specification that will allow for up to 80Gbps to be transferred over the USB-C connector that is commonly in use on PCs and smartphones. The standard will be backwards compatible with USB4 Version 1.0, USB 3.2, USB 2.0, and Thunderbolt 3 — but not USB 1.0 or Thunderbolt 4. Until now, USB and Thunderbolt have basically co-existed in parallel worlds. Because of somewhat murky licensing issues, Intel-based laptops have used a Thunderbolt 3 or Thunderbolt 4 port and laptops powered by AMD’s Ryzen have used USB4. As we discussed in our USB4…
The European Union (EU) and the State of California has some of the toughest consumer and privacy rights rules and regulations. The legislative arm of the European Union has proposed new rules for mobile phone and tablet reparability. It says manufacturers should make at least 15 components available for at least five years after they release a new phone in the EU. Within that timespan, consumers would be able to replace parts such as batteries, displays, chargers, back covers and SIM and memory card trays, as The Verge notes. The European Commission is also eyeing improvements to battery durability. It says that phone…
In January 2023 Google Chrome is going to block extensions still using the old Manifest V2 rules. An extension manifest outlines the permissions and abilities a developer includes in an extension for Chrome browser. From Google’s perspective, Manifest V3 comes to enhance user privacy and security by: Limiting extension access to user network requests. Forcing authors to include all functionality within the extension, ending the practice of hosting code remotely. Moving network request modifications from the extensions to the browser. Replacing background pages with dedicated service workers to improve browser performance. The unintended consequences of the new manifest is most of…
Over the past few days I been making a lot of updates to this blog both visual and behind the scenes. Here are a few of the changes with further details below: New Theme with new images and color pallet. Changed the order of the side bar widgets. Corrected a coding error with the Collapsing Categories widget which was causing the site to display a PHP error. Purged 95% of the ‘Categories’. New social posting, follow and notifications. Receive notifications via email, Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn. Most noticeable is the new theme images for the background and header. Updated the…