Apple To Remove Abandoned Apps From App Store

Apple has sent an email to its developers detailing some changes that are about to happen to in the App Store…

…And if any of the web chatter I’ve seen over the last few hours is anything to go by, the news seems to have met with almost universal approval by both users and the dev community.

Developers get busy trying to update their Apps to make sure they comply with the new guidelines. (Not really)

The email from Apple reads:

“Quality is extremely important to us…We know that many of you work hard to build innovative apps and update your apps on the App Store with new content and features…We are implementing an ongoing process of evaluating apps, removing apps that no longer function as intended, don’t follow current review guidelines, or are outdated.”

The new evaluation process will start soon, with thousands of Apps apparently already earmarked for removal from the Store in the first swathe of the audit.

Criteria for what does and does not make for a problematic App seems fairly clear cut. Apps that haven’t been updated for compatibility with recent iOS and macOS versions are set for an almost certain disappearance, alongside any Apps that no longer work the way they’re supposed to either, or those that just break or don’t meet current existing guidelines.

The good news for anyone who has downloaded and is using an App set for the chop, is that users will still be allowed to keep using it, which does mean that at least someone in Apple was doing some forward thinking when the plan to clean up the App Store was being devised.

Not all Apps with issues will be removed straight away however. Apple will attempt to contact developers who’ve left “abandoned” apps in the Store, but any required changes will have to be made in 30 days, or it will be Sayonara.

Spammy keyword rich Apps with stupidly long titles will also soon be no more either:

“Search is one of the most frequently used methods for customers to discover and download apps from the App Store. In hopes of influencing search results, some developers have used extremely long app names which include descriptions and terms not directly related to their app. These long names are not fully displayed on the App Store and provide no user value. App names you submit in iTunes Connect for new apps and updates will now be limited to no longer than 50 characters.”

It’s good news all round really.

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Windows 10 Updates: Hello Night Mode

The next Windows 10 update looks like it might be getting a new ‘night mode’ and it’s probably about time.

As anyone who’s ever used any versions of Windows from the current no 10 version all the way back to the early 90s and Windows 3.1, the colour of Windows, is, well, blue.

But blue light has long been touted as something that disrupts human sleep patterns. Ok, so yes, the argument about quite why you’d keep your computer screen on, and running beside your bed when you’re trying to sleep is a valid one. I mean, why would you do that?

Ok, so maybe nobody does actually do that. But there is a market for 3^rd party software that changes the white balance of your computer screen toward the red part of the spectrum gradually over the course of the night, such as f.lux, which is free for Windows and Mac users. (For some reason we don’t seem to have it on Filehippo.com yet: I’ll look into that and get it sorted)

But anyway, Microsoft have looked into it, and while on the whole, there doesn’t seem to be that many significant changes coming in the next update from the Redmond based tech firm, some Windows Insiders have seen the light encoded deep within the Beta version of Windows 10.

References to a “BlueLightReduction” mode have been found, and should it prove to actually work, users can expect to be drawn to the light and access the new feature via the action centre, when and if it goes live.

Studies over the years have shown that bright blue light, may trick our stone age brains into thinking its day time, and disrupt our circadian rhythms, making it harder to fall asleep.

However, it’s not like Microsoft are breaking any new ground. Apple added the ability to reduce blue light on its Mac software back in March, and also for its iPhones.

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New User-Friendly Features In GOM Player

There are a lot of different needs users may have when looking for the right media player. A lot of consumers make do just fine with whatever proprietary title comes pre-installed in their hardware, but others look for media players with more customizable features and a broader range of options.

GOM Player, by South Korea-based Gretch’s GOMLab, has a lot of the same features users would expect to find in any other title, but carries that additional functionality of being able to play broken files while repairing them, as well as locate missing codecs for full playback. There’s no need to download additional codecs to support different video file types since GOM Player can detect the necessary ones and load them.

GOM Player offers support for a lot of different file types, including AVI, MPG, MPEG, DAT, and streaming Windows media formats WMV, ASF, and ASX. When you use the player for content with one of these formats, the software adds it to your playlist for easy retrieval later.

One of the most sought after features of GOM Player is its support for subtitles. First, you can correct a file that doesn’t line up the subtitles with the audio, which has long been an annoyance for people who rely on subtitles for any reason. But even better, the software supports multiple subtitle file types so you don’t have to choose only one source for content. These include SMI, SRT, RT, and SUB (with IDX).

Of course, there are a host of advanced features available in the player too, including A-B repeat, screen capture, Media Player capture, playback speed control, and multiple video effects. It also offers support for 360-degree video playback simply by moving the mouse. While GOM Player is available as a Windows PC download, it offers apps for both iOS and Android, and is completely free. To download GOM Player, check it out at FileHippo by clicking here.

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MegaUpload Founder KimDotcom Live-streams Extradition Appeal

Earlier this week, Kim Dotcom, the extravagantly controversial billionaire internet entrepreneur, made legal history by winning a legal battle to live-stream his extradition hearing in New Zealand.

Unfortunately for anyone watching however, Mr Dotcom’s hearing, has so far been as interesting as watching paint dry on a rainy day surrounded by train spotters.

Despite the self-proclaimed “Internet Freedom Fighter” tweeting defiant messages to his followers such as “The US Government wants to stop live streaming because they don’t want you to see the giant egg on their faces when they get owned in court.” And of course: “We will win this together. Then we make them pay. Then they will remember. Don’t attack the Internet.”

With levels of defiance like that, and Kim Dotcom’s argument that US prosecutors are waging war on the Internet, and that MegaUpload was essentially just a web based vessel through which illegal traffic flowed, in spite of his admin team’s best efforts… the first day in court was a fairly lacklustre affair.

From the moment the trial opened at 1020 am New Zealand time, the live stream was beset by technical issues that lasted for the entire session. Picture quality fluctuated, froze, and the sound sometimes felt like it was being routed through a warped VHS tape from the 1980s. When it did work, on my laptop anyway, it was often difficult to make out what was being said anyway.

Not that any of the poor quality feed being broadcast around the world meant that anyone who was watching missed anything.  The day was filled with long legal jargon filled speeches by lawyers with voices that went on for minutes at a time in exactly the same monotonous tone and pitch.

That said, it was only the first day, and in many respects both sides are just setting out their stalls for the legal fight that is to follow.

Kim Dotcom himself didn’t seem phased by the tedious first day in court,  sitting as he was in his own court room at home, in a large leather chair watching the day’s proceedings on a laptop and large flat screen TV…

Kim Dotcom’s mansion was raided in 2012 by New Zealand police in 2012 at the behest of US authorities. He has fought extradition to the US ever since where he is wanted on on-line piracy charges.

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More Suspicious Election Issues Blamed On Software

This is perhaps one of the most controversial election cycles in US history, with a nation firmly divided and the glimmer of potential for a viable third-party candidate finally being bandied about. With the chaos–and yes, embarrassment–that has embodied the campaigns, the November election promises to be a spectacle.

Which is one reason you would think elections all across the country, everything from major office primaries to the chief of garbage collection in the smallest towns, would do everything they can to ensure that there’s complete transparency and no room for accusations of misconduct.

Unfortunately, the data breach that stole two states’ voter databases–a feat later blamed on Russian hackers–is only the tip of the iceberg in the country’s controversy. Now, a county in Florida has admitted that a software glitch held up the announcement of the results by almost four hours.

Lake County officials claimed that the software that accumulated the voters’ submissions at the polls didn’t connect with the separate software title that analyzed all of the submissions and produced the winning tallies. As a result, officials had to drive to all of the polling places and collect the backup flash drives from those locations’ computers, then analyze the votes themselves and tally them.

Ordinarily, this sounds like a well-thought out plan B: if the software doesn’t work, you simply count up the backup data. It’s what companies of every size around the world have to do in the event of a tech failure. Unfortunately, the results from the county’s election were somewhat surprising, with several upset victories over incumbent candidates, one who’d been in his position for 24 years. That may leave voters with the unsettling feeling that their votes were manipulated by “faulty” software, especially considering the “hanging chad” debacle that resulted in George W. Bush being elected President.

So far, the candidates who lost the ability to be on the ballot in November have not cited any fraud in this instance, but when November’s full elections take place, data breaches and software glitches have the potential to lead to an all-out riot.

 

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Drop Box Logins And Passwords Stolen…4 Years Ago

The popular cloud storage firm DropBox has been hacked and the details of 68 million of its users’ emails and login passwords have been dumped onto the internet for the whole world to see.

The hack, which took place in 2012…wait a minute, 2012? Let me just check that. Yeah, apparently DropBox got hacked in 2012.

So why is this news then?

That’s a good question.

It turns out that back in 2012, DropBox did report the hack, stating that a number of email addresses had been stolen. But last week, Dropbox found itself in the embarrassing situation of having to announce that it had performed a mass account reset, and any user who hadn’t changed their passwords since mid-2012 was forced to change it in order to keep using Dropbox.

 “Our security teams are always watching out for new threats to our users. As part of these ongoing efforts, we learned about an old set of Dropbox user credentials (email addresses plus hashed and salted passwords) that we believe was obtained in 2012. Our analysis suggests that the credentials relate to an incident we disclosed around that time.”

The 2012 hack, wasn’t so much of a hack, as carelessness on the part of one DropBox employee, and luck on the part of the hackers. When LinkedIn found itself hacked in 2012 as well, the hackers  happened to steal an old LinkedIn password of a hapless DropBox employee, which was unfortunately still the employee’s password for his corporate Dropbox account. The hackers then used this to access the DropBox network. What happened next was perhaps, inevitable.

At the time Dropbox practiced good user data security practice, encrypting the passwords and appears to have been in the process of upgrading the encryption from the SHA1 standard to a more secure standard called Bcrypt. That said, at the time, the company had only completed the new encryption protocol for about half its users.

The fact the DropBox breach was caused by the hack of another company only serves to highlight the importance of making sure you regularly change your password for online accounts, and enable 2 step verification whenever you can.

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Hackers Breach US State Election Boards

In the Will Ferrell/Zach Galifianakis comedy “The Campaign,” the quintessential good guy loses the election. He bemoans the results by saying he doesn’t understand what happened since he was ahead in the polls. The POV switches to the stickers on the voting machines; they were made by the victorious incumbent’s major donors, the “Motch Brothers.”

The reality is far from funny, though, as this year’s election circus is proving. There have been rampant reports of voter fraud in districts across the country, and one state went so far as to shut down the driver’s license offices in its majority-black counties (as driver’s licenses are required for voting in that state). There have been hints that the election is already corrupted, and speculation that there will be public outcry after the fact.

But now there’s a new cause for alarm: an alert issued by the FBI that hackers breached two different states’ election boards and nabbed voter databases.

According to a report based on sources within the FBI: “The bulletin does not identify the states in question, but sources familiar with the document say it refers to the targeting by suspected foreign hackers of voter registration databases in Arizona and Illinois. In the Illinois case, officials were forced to shut down the state’s voter registration system for 10 days in late July, after the hackers managed to download personal data on up to 200,000 state voters.

Ken Menzel, the general counsel of the Illinois Board of Elections, said in an interview. The Arizona attack was more limited, involving malicious software that was introduced into its voter registration system but no successful ex-filtration of data, a state official said.”

This news comes at a time when one of the candidates has taken criticism for offering to pay Russian hackers if they break into his opponent’s email account.

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Google Buys Nest From Alphabet…But Why?

It’s always fun to speculate every time Major Corporation A buys Huge Technological Thing from Major Corporation B, especially since so much of the reasoning depends on top-secret, forward-thinking projections that neither corporation can make public due to investor considerations. So, that makes Google’s purchase of Nest from Alphabet all the more interesting.

Glass Nest users will be able to control the Nest thermostat by voice commands, even remotely.

Wait, what? Alphabet IS Google, and they came up with Nest in the first place!

Not exactly. Google still exists under the umbrella of Alphabet, and it’s making a killing as the search-engine-plus-web-advertising arm of things. Yes, Nest existed before Google restructured to include Alphabet, and to make things even more confusing, Google bought Nest Labs in 2014 for over $3 billion. Now, however, Google has bought the rest of the deal, Nest Developers, from Alphabet and brought it over to its own side of things.

So here’s where the interwebs are going nuts with speculation. First, it’s that the under performance of Nest is due to some angst within the company, specifically in some of the leadership, so they’ve packed their things and walked across the street to work with a different team in the company. Probably not an incredibly likely scenario, but one that could have a hint of truth to it.

More likely is the excitement some industry watchers are currently feeling over Google Home, the company’s attempt to compete with Amazon’s Echo. But the beauty of Echo/Alexa is that Amazon lets others do the legwork for them. Lights, thermostats, shopping lists, reading aloud from your Kindle, the ability to tell you where your phone is if you laid it down somewhere, etc…those are things that outside developers have created to work with Echo.

Google has its hands full trying to create something that will compete, but it carries one very big burden on its shoulders: data gathering. As it turns out, consumers are a little wary of having the search engine giant track everything they do in the privacy of their own homes (hey, we saw Terminator 2! August 29th will forever be the date that SkyNet became self-aware!). By bringing Nest under Google and the team behind Google Home, the company very well be creating something that can actually compete with the hundreds of people developing for Echo.

 

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Facebook Changes WhatsApp Privacy Rules Despite Promises Not To

Facebook’s hope that it could relax the privacy policy of WhatsApp, the world’s most popular messaging app, without kicking up a fuss, hasn’t worked, and has caused a worldwide backlash.

 

When Facebook bought out WhatsApp for $19 billion back in 2014, the encrypted messaging app’s CEO Jan Koum said, “Here’s what will change for you, our users: nothing. WhatsApp will remain autonomous and operate independently.”

In fact, in a move that seemed to lend some gravitas to this move earlier this year, WhatsApp actually enabled end to end encryption for every user of the app, by default.

But now in what some have labelled a confusing move, Facebook said last Thursday it would soon be sharing user phone numbers with Facebook, helping Facebook in effect start to monetise the messaging juggernaut.

The move will allow Facebook to target advertisements and friend recommendation  across the social media network:

“We want to explore ways for you to communicate with businesses that matter to you, too, while still giving you an experience without third-party banner ads and spam,…Whether it’s hearing from your bank about a potentially fraudulent transaction, or getting notified by an airline about a delayed flight, many of us get this information elsewhere, including in text messages and phone calls. We want to test these features in the next several months, but need to update our terms and privacy policy to do so.”

And so, for the first time in 4 years, WhatsApp is seeing a change to its terms and privacy policy. In fairness the above quote seems, well, fair enough, but it’s the next section that has some people worried about just what Facebook intends to do with all the data it will gather from sharing information with its messaging app:

“Facebook and the other companies in the Facebook family also may use information from us to improve your experiences within their services such as making product suggestions (for example, of friends or connections, or of interesting content) and showing relevant offers and ads.”

A spokesperson for CNIL, the French data protection commissioner said in a statement:

“Each European authority will be following the changes made to WhatApp’s privacy policy with great vigilance. What is at stake is the control of individual users over their own data when they are combined by major internet players.”

At the moment, while all the above is cause for privacy advocates to have concern, in real terms, nothing has actually changed yet.  The world will have to wait and see just quite how WhatsApp chooses to go ahead with the data sharing move.

The company intends to begin testing before the end of the year.

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Asia Business Worst For Cybersecurity Globally

According to a report by US security company Mandiant, Asian businesses are the most poorly defended in the world against cybersecurity attacks.

The yearlong study identified the fact that cybersecurity breaches, on average took almost three times as long to be discovered compared to the global average. While businesses in the US, for example, generally detect a cybersecurity breach within 4 months, in Asia it can take as long as 17 months to become aware their company has been hacked.

Mandiant also reported that Asia finds itself in the unwanted position of being almost 80% more likely to be targeted by hackers than any other region in the world.

“In 2015, we continued to see heightened levels of cyber threat activity across APAC…We surmise that this is likely fuelled by regional geopolitical tensions, relatively immature network defences and response capabilities, and a rich source of financial data, intellectual property, and military and state secrets.”

According to Mandiant, many Asian firms are vulnerable to cyber-attacks because they are still spending disproportionate amount of money on first line defence, such as firewalls, but literally invest nothing in second and third line defence. The Mandiant report surmises that many Asian companies are unable to defend their own internal networks because they lack basic response plans, expertise, and any contingency planning.

Mandiant also notes that the vast majority of organisations studied in the report were still only relying on antivirus software to detect malware or hacker intrusions.

Rob van der Ende, vice president for Mandiant Consulting, Asia Pacific and Japan at FireEye, said:

“Unfortunately being unprepared for a breach is business as usual in Asia Pacific, and the region’s governments and boards need to address this further.”

A large part of the problem, however, seems to come from other regional players. There are numerous, well known, collectives of hackers working and residing in the Asia Pacific area, all seemingly more than willing to exploit the lax security of legitimate businesses in their own backyard.

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Apple Issues Patch For Zero-Day Vulnerabilities

Apple has issued a warning to its customer base, urging them to update their devices’ iOS to include a new patch that stops three recently discovered zero-day vulnerabilities. For most of us, that probably amounts to blocking someone from infiltrating our Facebook accounts, but the reality of the flaws has real-world consequences.

First, there’s this New York Times piece about the discovery of the flaws in the first place. The discovery was linked to none other than a prominent human rights activist, who received SMS messages that were trying exploit the flaws. Fortunately, he contacted two security groups, who found ties to a foreign hacker group in the code. The attempt was to exploit the vulnerabilities and ghost the activist’s iPhone.

“But I’m not a prominent figure…I’m a soccer mom.” Too many people tell themselves that, and the end result is devastating for the individual consumer. The important takeaway isn’t that hacking is in the realm of headline-making names. Anyone can be a victim, as different hackers have different purposes for your information.

Even in instances like the infamous Ashley Madison breach, the individual account holders weren’t the primary target, but they certainly were caught in the crossfire of a cyberfeud (and it was very easy for many people to think they got exactly what they deserved for owning accounts in the first place). Sometimes the connection in a hacking event is that there are bigger fish to fry, like the employee of a small, locally-owned air conditioning repair company who downloaded a virus to her company’s computers–all three of them, or something; unfortunately, that tiny company had a very big client: Target. The employee’s lack of security protocol led to one of the largest retail data breaches in history.

In cybersecurity, there is no such thing as “too small to matter.” Given the level of connections, the “six degrees of separation” that technology creates, any vulnerability is not only potentially valuable, but also frighteningly easy to exploit.

Users are urged to install the latest update, and to continue watching for alerts that any future updates have been issued.

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Russian “Pizza Hacker” Found Guilty In US Court

Roman Seleznev, the son of a prominent Russian politician, and fabled “Pizza Hacker,” has been convicted in a US court of hacking into U.S. businesses, mainly in the Washington area, to steal credit card information in an international online theft scheme that netted him millions of dollars before he was arrested

Pizza restaurants were targeted in the attacks.

Jurors deliberated for two days before finding Seleznev guilty of 38 charges; including nine counts of hacking, and 10 counts of wire fraud.

A sentencing date has been set for December the second, this year. His ordeal at the hands of the US justice system isn’t over yet either. While facing a maximum jail sentence of 40 years, he’s also still facing other similar charges in Georgia and Nevada.

US prosecutors referred to Seleznev as “one of the most prolific credit card thieves in history.”

John Henry Browne, his US based lawyer has promised to appeal, saying a key issue will be Seleznev’s 2014 arrest by U.S. Secret Service agents in the Maldives. Browne had already sought to have the charges thrown out in earlier court hearing claiming that US federal agents had no jurisdiction and amounted to little more than an illegitimate kidnapping. The judge, however, banned the issue from being raised at trial.

The U.S. Secret Service had been hunting for Seleznev for years before his arrest in July 2014. Seleznev was then transferred to the island of Guam before eventually ending up in Seattle to stand trial.

The hacker’s father (Valery Seleznev), a vocal and close ally of Russian President Vladimir Putin, protested loudly at the time of the claiming his son’s computer skills were at best, average. Valery also asserted that the arrest was merely a blundered ploy by the U.S. to use his son as a bargaining chip in exchange for Edward Snowden.

“If Roman was Canadian, this case would never have happened,” Seleznev’s lawyer John Henry Browne told the Wall Street Journal. “There was definitely politics involved in this.”

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Gene Study Errors Confirm: Scientists Suck At Excel

For the majority of individuals and businesses worldwide, Microsoft Excel is the go to spreadsheet software, and everyone from students to trillion dollar enterprises use the software every day.

But now, Microsoft Office’s spreadsheet package is being blamed for errors in academic papers by scientists.  In fact, according to a report by BioMed Central, as many as 20% of all scientific papers with genomic material data that rely on information inputted to Excel spreadsheets, could be seriously flawed.

However, the real issue, when it comes down to brass tacks and facts, has more to do with the fact that some scientists and researchers just don’t know how to use Microsoft Office very well…that, and Excel’s obsession with automatically formatting and changing things to what it thinks might be right.

“For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to ‘2-Sep’ and ‘1-Mar’, respectively.”

In another setback for scientists, the BioMed report also noted that they had uncovered several instances “where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. ‘SEPT2’ converted to ‘2006/09/02’). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles.”

The BioMed report found that 704 of the papers they studied contained gene name errors created by Excel.

Microsoft told the BBC:

“Excel offers a wide range of options, which customers with specific needs can use to change the way their data is represented.”

Not that Excel alone has issues with genomic data. The study also found the conversion issues were also present in other spreadsheet software, such as Apache OpenOffice Calc. The problem did not however seem to occur in Google Sheets.

At the end of the day however, the real issue isn’t with Excel itself, but with the fact that the some of the world’s smartest and highly educated minds, just don’t know how to use a spreadsheet; or at least, they don’t know how to adapt a spreadsheet from its default settings. Ironic and funny as that is, it’s a very real and serious issue.

“Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused.”

 

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Instagram Launches “Stories,” And It’s No Snapchat

Okay, that headline was mildly misleading. Instagram has launched its very own Stories option (literally, as in, it’s actually called Stories) just like Snapchat, and in almost every way, it works and functions exactly like Snapchat. It’s so much like Snapchat, in fact, that it didn’t bother coming up with a new name for the feature, like something fun or cool like Narr8ives. (Feel free to steal that, Instagram.)

Yes, Instagram has come up with its own method for uploading lots of photos or videos in what is supposed to be a compelling story arc. But unlike Snapchat, it’s the users who don’t have a clue what it’s for. Let’s examine.

Snapchat started out as a sexting app. The company can argue all they want, but we all know that’s what happened. And even if you weren’t taking your clothes off for your BF while trying to make sure those pics didn’t end up floating around (like THAT’S never happened, with or without Snapchat), the underlying functionality was still there. It drew a distinct segment of tech users, meaning, those who were following the latest tech trends but at least had some semblance of concern for their privacy.

Instagram? It was all about vacation pics, pet pics, and food pics. You signed up to have a cool place to share your photos, you followed a few celebrity accounts after learning about some scandalous picture that North West supposedly shared (even though she wasn’t potty trained at the time, yet still knew how to go back through Mommy’s old photos and upload one), and you were in. Instagram was great for following the #dogsofinstagram, if you’re into that kind of thing.

But here’s where the Story war is happening: while almost every single aspect of both platforms’ stories is identical, right down to the snaps/pics disappearing in 24 hours, it’s the users who aren’t the same. Snapchat users by definition seem to be slightly more discerning about what they share; they came at Stories with the knowledge that it’s not one photo sent to one person that will disappear in seconds, so they have to be more careful with what they post in a Story. Instagram users are so used to flooding Facebook with filtered pics of the lasagna they just baked that their Stories are just mere photo albums, or compilations of more of the same.

The end result? Instagram users are going to wake up in the morning to find 300 of the people they follow have created stories about their kids’ Little League practice from the night before.

To correct it, the Facebook-owned company needs to pull a quick…well…Facebook, and create a dedicated app just for the Stories. Like Messenger or Memories, we can still experience only the most compelling Stories that we want to visit, or we can go to Instagram without having to see every single person’s slow-loading Story.

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IObit Uninstaller Saves Windows 10 Users

The rollout of Windows 10 was interesting, to say the least. While a lot of Microsoft devotees eagerly anticipated the new operating system before its launch, the reality of it left a lot of tech users reaching for their torches and pitchforks. They felt arm-twisted into accepting automatic updates and upgrades, while mourning the loss of some of even the most basic features, like good old-fashioned Solitaire.

One company has launched a life preserver, of sorts, especially intended for those who’ve enjoyed some of the upgrade experience but don’t want to be bogged down with the extra programs that came pre-loaded within Win10. IObit Uninstaller 6 helps rid your Windows machine of those additional features that slow things down or chew up space.

“After upgrading to Windows 10, there are many built-in apps installed, by default, on the computer,” said Antonio Zhang, Marketing Director at IObit, in a press release. “However, most Windows 10 users have no idea about how to deal with those unwanted and useless apps. Outdated and problematic Windows update is a thorny problem as well. But we provide an easy method to help them. We are focusing on developing light and easy-to-use tools for Windows 10 users to optimize and protect their computers.”

But here’s the problem: uninstalling built-in programs can leave your system operating at less-than-ideal functionality if you don’t know what you’re doing. That’s why IObit gives you a complete list of programs to remove before you check them off, meaning you’re less likely to delete something critical and end up ruining your operating system.

What else is new in version 6? Plenty. Besides the ability to target Microsoft Edge plug-ins and extensions for removal, this version contains a larger database of known malicious and ad-based plug-ins so you can wipe those out, too. How many known programs? How about more than 4,000 of the most stubbornly rooted programs and plug-ins?
And it’s not just the known features that you can remove, as IObit also supports getting rid of pesky problems in future updates. The uninstaller keeps a close watch for program features that you might not want, then alerts you to their presence so you can take action. For more information or to download IObit Uninstaller 6, check it out by clicking here.

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Back To School Cybersecurity Tips

It may seem hard to believe, but summer’s almost over and the new school year is already here. While students prepare for the upcoming term by stocking up on supplies and scrambling to finish their summer reading assignments, there’s someone else who’s excited by the new school year: scammers and identity thieves.

No matter what grade you’re in–from preschool to Ph.D. candidate, the education sphere has a pretty bad track record of securing your data. Data breaches from university levels down to local elementary schools have exposed countless victims’ records. While hackers target universities with sophisticated viral attacks, one public school in Florida was hit by an organized data theft by none other than their own cafeteria ladies, who managed to nab the personal identifiable information for several hundreds of the school’s students.

It might seem counterintuitive to try to commit fraud against school children or university students; after all, most of them have nothing to call their own, except possibly a lot of student loan debt. But the problem at hand is that students’ identities are very valuable. Minors’ identities are a “clean slate” as far as spending and debt are concerned, and most students don’t check their credit reports regularly because they’re simply not using them for multiple credit cards, car loans, home loans, or other large-scale expenses.

There are some ways that students can fight back against scams and secure their data, especially their digital data. Numerous studies have shown that far too many people don’t use antivirus or other malicious software prevention tools in their tech. At the same time, too many people (of any age) aren’t securing their hardware with pass-codes and passwords. Of course, not too many young people spend their evenings reading up on the latest internet scams or viruses, which is why they’re easily hit by these tactics when tech scams crop up.

By staying informed, safeguarding your data, and putting protections like antivirus and credit report alerts in place, you can do a lot to prevent the theft of your funds or identity.

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Ashley Madison Security Investigation: “Unacceptable shortcomings” Report Finds

Privacy watchdog investigating the now infamous Ashley Madison data hack of July 2015 reports that the website used inadequate security systems and conned users into thinking it was more secure than it actually was.

The report released this week stated that Avid Life Media, the Canadian based owners of the Ashley Madison website had violated privacy laws due to the lax way it stored and used the data that users voluntarily gave the company when they signed up.

The joint investigation by both the Australian Privacy Commissioner and the Privacy Commissioner of Canada is scathing of the way the Ashley Madison website administered its privacy and security practices.

The report noted in particular that a large part of the Ashley Madison IT team’s efforts to monitor its own security were “focused on detecting system performance issues and unusual employee requests for decryption of sensitive user data.”

The highly critical report also found that website owner Avid Life Media did not have “appropriate safeguards, including documented information security policies or practices, an explicit risk management process, and training for staff about their privacy and security obligations.”

Daniel Therrien, Canada’s privacy commissioner, said in a statement:

“Privacy breaches are a core risk for any organisation with a business model based on the collection and use of personal information… Privacy breaches are a core risk for any organisation with a business model based on the collection and use of personal information…Handling huge amounts of this kind of personal information without a comprehensive information security plan is unacceptable.”

The report also found that poor habits such as inadequate authentication processes and sub-par key and password management practices were commonplace at Ashley Madison.

However, perhaps the most controversial finding of the report was the fact that the affair specialist website had actually retained the personal information of users who had paid an extra fee to Avid Life Media to delete all their personal information.

Avid Life Media has said it will abide by the report’s findings to improve the way it handles data.

 

 

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Windows 10 Anniversary Update Breaks Webcams Globally

Microsoft’s big first anniversary update (the biggest update since it launched last year) for its flagship OS, Windows 10, has come under for fire for causing certain types of webcams to freeze and be unusable.

 

The problem seems to reside in the way that Microsoft have made changes to the manner that apps can access webcam video streams. The update was supposed to allow multiple apps to access webcam streams at the same time without affecting streaming.

Essentially, the change was made so that apps such as the Windows Hello webcam authentication or HoloLens would still work even the user also had Skype running.

But it didn’t work out like that for many users with complaints sky-rocketing around the world from people with both inbuilt and external webcams.

Microsoft have said a fix is imminent, but as of the time of writing, no official news of a release date was forthcoming.

People initially started reporting webcam issues in early August, when the anniversary update automatically started installing itself on people’s machines.

The problem is that video footage could not be streamed or would freeze a short time after starting.

To get technical for a moment, the issue is to do with changes to how video encoding Windows 10 is handled by the OS. Before the update only one program or app could use a stream at any one time when it was being shot. Changes to the way that Windows 10 makes sense of updates have exacerbated the issue.  Before the anniversary update, it was possible for any user to roll back to a previous version of Windows 10 within 30 days of an update being installed, but that length of time was cut back to 10 days after the August update.

The cut back in the number of days to uninstall updates seems to have caught the majority of Windows 10 users on the hop, as well.

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What’s Wrong With Education Software

For the purposes of this article, there’s an important distinction between “educational” software and “education” software. “Educational” software refers to the tools that students and learners at any level use to supplement their instruction, whether in a classroom of on their own. “Education” software is the term applied to the titles that power the school itself, such as administrative software, organizational titles, electronic lesson plans or grade books, etc.

It’s no secret that K12 education software (again, not what the students are using in class, but the desktop software that teachers are required to use by the entire school system) is lagging in terms of functionality and affordability. Here’s how it tends to play out: out of the blue, the school system or the state board adopts a new software title to power the administrative side of things, a title that they paid through the nose for. The software is slow and cumbersome and barely an improvement, but it ate up a significant portion of the state’s budget due to licensing.

That’s if the school system even bothers to adopt new software.

But one teacher–Al Bryant, a former programmer and web developer turned high school math teacher–arrived in his new teaching position and was appalled at the crappy software his school was using. He wrote a new title himself, and offered it to the school for free after a beta testing period within his grade level.

They decided to pay for a different software title instead.

Bryant’s attempts to get better exposure for his software, Cram Quest, have proved difficult. He advanced through multiple rounds of the television show Shark Tank before dropping out due to the high percentage of financial control they wanted over his software. He also had a Kickstarter campaign for his title in order to pay for marketing, but failed to reach the full funding amount.

With the extreme financial restrictions placed on education, it would seem logical that an employee who develops software and offers it to the school for free would be given a medal instead of told, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Instead, schools operate the way they always have, resistant to change and willing to shoot themselves in the foot if it means using a vetted company to provide an outrageously expensive product rather than trusting the brilliance of one of their own. It’s too easy to jump to the conclusion that schools don’t even trust their own teachers to be all that brilliant.

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Gawker.com News Site To Close Soon

The news site Gawker.com will shut down next week, just days after its parent company was purchased by Univision.

Gawker.com will not continue to operate under its new owners, bringing a sudden and sad ending to one of the most controversial and contentious digital media websites of modern times.

The news was announced, in typical fashion, by Gawker journalist J.K. Trotter:

“After nearly fourteen years of operation, Gawker.com will be shutting down next week. The decision to close Gawker comes days after Univision successfully bid $135 million for Gawker Media’s six other websites, and four months after the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel revealed his clandestine legal campaign against the company.”

Gawker.com will stay online and the site’s archives will stay, but no new stories will be published.  Staff will be offered positions at the company’s other ventures should they wish.

Gawker has often been at the forefront of releasing and investigating controversial news stories, and sadly, but somewhat fittingly, it was just such an irreverent ‘public interest’ story that proved to be their undoing.

In July a $140 million judgement was found against the company, CEO co-founder Nick Denton and former editor A.J. Daulerio. A Florida jury decided Gawker had violated the privacy of wrestler Hulk Hogan for posting a clip of his sex tape.

Denton informed the staff of Gawker hours before the news of the website’s closure was published saying:

“We have not been able to find a single media company or investor willing also to take on Gawker.com. The campaign being mounted against its editorial ethos and former writers has made it too risky. I can understand the caution.”

Gawker.com was founded 14 years ago and quickly built a reputation  for a no-holds-bar approach to reporting, including breaking gossip stories on high-powered celebrities and business leaders.

The company that has bought Gawker.com is Univision, most commonly known in the US as the country’s biggest Spanish-language media company. It also owns a 40% stake in the satirical website The Onion.

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