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…
2022
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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…
If you have any of the five below extensions installed in Chrome, remove them now! The five extensions flagged by McAfee purport to offer various services, including the ability to stream Netflix videos to groups of people, take screenshots, and automatically find and apply coupon codes. Behind the scenes, company researchers said, the extensions kept a running list of each site a user visited and took additional actions when users landed on specific sites. The extensions sent the name of each site visited to the developer-designated site d.langhort.com, along with a unique identifier and the country, city, and zip code of the…
Last week when I posted the article about Microsoft’s Biggest Release and seeing the image of all those floppy disks it took me back to my childhood. I honestly have thought floppy disks have gone the way of landlines, VHS and Betamax tapes. Especially considering many kids today only know the floppy disk as the ‘save icon’ not as removable media that was the standard of any PC up until the mid/late 90’s when CD-ROM’s took over. Then I come across an article today discussing how Japan is declaring war on floppy disks for ‘government use‘. Wait Japan?! I would…
I am not sure if this has been happening in other parts of the country our just in the Phoenix Metro area: PHOENIX (3TV/CBS 5) — Amazon and Capital One are investigating after Arizona’s Family uncovered a possible fraud scheme last week. The criminal acts seem too similar to be a coincidence. Different men wearing Amazon driver clothes act like they’re dropping off a package but steal a replacement credit card right after FedEx drops it off at Valley homes. This story takes me back to a somewhat similar experience I had happen to me about 4-years ago with credit card…
Yet another ‘if it sounds too good to be true’ deal (such as the Free Microsoft Office Professional Plus in the UK). This time around we have a 30 TB ‘Portable SSD’ for the incredible low price of $39 USD. First red flag besides being unbranded is the $39 price. If this were real you would be spending around $4000 USD for that amount of space. This ‘deal’ appeared on AliExpress as well as WalMart.com (third-party seller). A too good to be true 30 TB SSD Twitter user @RayRedacted (Ray) opted to purchase this ‘deal’ just out curiosity to see…
Password manager service LastPass has notified users their (LastPass) system has been hacked (again). Since 2015 LastPass has its host of security issues, but then again who hasn’t? While LastPass has not ‘advise their users to change their master password (which it is very odd as that precaution is usually what most companies tell their users to do when there has been a ‘security breach’) it still a good idea for users to do this even if it is just out of an abundance of caution. In the announcement sent via email and posted to its blog, the company describes the…