Today is Sunday, December 4th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week! Because of the US Thanksgiving holiday, there was not a weekly roundup this past weekend. Also, since there has been so much focus on Twitter lately, they will be excluded for this (and likely future) roundups so that we can bring attention to other news. The Good Google has admitted they need to do a better job of patching Android phones. While the exploits are being fixed quickly, however the updates are not getting pushed out to…
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Once again scammers are getting creative in findings way to get their fake and malicious apps on Google Play. Unsuspecting users install said apps with false sense of security since the apps is offered on Google Play it must be safe (which in most case is true). In the past, most of these malicious apps were more of an annoyance serving adware and performing (ad) click fraud. However, these new fake Android ‘File Manager’ apps are a lot more serious and dangerous. These apps are “clean” when they are uploaded to Google Play, but once install will later ‘phone home’…
All (even not so) great things must come to an end. Microsoft Corporation 400,96 +1,84 +0,46% Windows 8 series was not so well received when it was released 10-yeaes ago. In the beginning user did not like its radical UI change (aka Metro or Tiled or Tablet interface) with the removal of the standard start menu. A year later Microsoft released Windows 8.1 which (albeit hidden) allowed user to start in a desktop interface. It has been over 10-years now and two new Windows versions (10 and 11) later, the time has come for Microsoft to put Windows 8.1 to…
I really haven’t used Facebook, Inc. 196,64 +0,99 +0,51% for personal use (other than for marketing of the blogs) for many, many years. There was a few months in late 2019 early 2020 I did resume using Facebook to keep family, friends (and my former co-workers) informed about a close family member’s battle with terminal illness. Shortly after their passing, I once again distanced myself from Facebook. I had used Facebook in the past to connect to friends I left behind in 1993 when I relocated to Arizona as well as co-workers from former jobs and even people from the…
It is a running Tech Support joke: The user is asked if they have restarted their device. It is recommended you restart your devices (phones, tablets, music players and even PC’s) at least once a week. The 2-5 minutes it takes for the device to restart will save you a lot of time in the future with the increased performance. This is even more important for PC’s. A little background: Last week as I normally do towards the end of the week I pre-order our weekend pizza on Dominos. However, this time around Chrome refused to load the site and…
Google Inc. 159,92 +1,97 +1,25% has settled with 40 US State Attorney Generals for tracking Android users since 2014 without their knowledge or permission. All said and done Google will pay out $391 Million USD. Besides the monetary payout, Google has also agreed to make changes to Android privacy settings to make it easier for users to opt-out. While Android users were misled into thinking disabling the “Location History” in the device’s settings would disable location tracking, another account setting—turned on by default and named “Web & App Activity”—enabled the company to collect, store and use the customers’ personally identifiable location…
Today is Sunday, November 13th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week! The Good In a rare instance Microsoft has made it into ‘The Good’ category this week. Microsoft’s newly released tablet computer, Surface 9 Pro has been found to be much easier to repair than previous models. Furthermore, Microsoft is providing repair manuals and expect to have a large availability of parts on the market in the first half of 2023. The Bad Most people are not aware Flash is dead (replaced by HTML 5) and Adobe Flash…
Yet another Twitter Executive has left. Chief Consumer Officers (business ad sales) and CMO Leslie Berland left shortly after Chief Twit took-over Twitter. Today comes news, Twitter chief information security officer Lea Kissner has also departed. I’ve made the hard decision to leave Twitter. I’ve had the opportunity to work with amazing people and I’m so proud of the privacy, security, and IT teams and the work we’ve done. I’m looking forward to figuring out what’s next, starting with my reviews for @USENIXSecurity 😁 — Lea Kissner (@LeaKissner) November 10, 2022 Also chief privacy officer Damien Kieran and chief compliance officer…
Even before the launch of the “new” Twitter Blue (now with ‘Verified’ Blue checkmark) there has been issues with the verification system. Then there were the US celebrities who changed their profile information on their Verified accounts to impersonate Elon Musk. Many of those accounts end up being banned. Now the ‘new and improved’ Twitter Blue has launched for the low price of $7.99 USD a month (or is it $4.99 USD a month)? Two prices being shown for Twitter Blue membership (BleepingComputer) Regardless of the price the verification system is clearly still broken. From a fake profile being created for Rockstar…
A new malicious Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge browser botnet named ‘Cloud9’ is infecting systems across the world. Users are unknowingly installing this botnet via malicious extensions downloaded from outside the Chrome Web Store. More commonly, users are blinding installing an update to Adobe Flash Player via malicious and faske pop-up when visiting certain none-reputable sites. A reminder, In case you were not aware Adobe ended support for Flash Player nearly 2-years ago on December 30, 2020. Also, Google Chrome had its own built-in Flash Player support which did not require the user to install any plugins. The malicious Chrome…