Wise Care 365 is a PC performance enhancement* application, which consists of five key elements: PC Checkup, System Cleaner, System Tune-up, Privacy Protector and System Monitoring. The PC Checkup element can check the whole running condition of your PC, grade its health status, and, if necessary, provide you with quick-fix solutions. ...
How does your email signature look like? Is it a plain, text-based block hanging at the end of your emails? Luckily, Gmail has a rich text editor in signature box to add images and links. In this tutorial, we will learn to add social media links to our Gmail signature.
The objective is to make your signature look interesting as well as increase your social reach. We will not add simple social links but Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn icons that link to these profiles in your signature. It will look creative as well as professional at the end.
Here is a simple step by step tutorial to replace the usual, plain text only signature in your Gmail and customize it with your social media icons without any Chrome extension or application.
Step 1: The first step is to find suitable social media icons for your signature. You can use icon finder site to search the large variety of icons that are free for personal use. Use this icon set for simple back icons or this one for making the colorful impression.
Step 2: Now get back to your Gmail. Open Settings by clicking on the cog icon on the right side. Under the ‘General’ tab navigate to the signature box.
Step 3: On the taskbar, notice an ‘Insert Image’ icon. You can upload the social icons you have previously downloaded from here.
Note: If the image does not appear, your Gmail is probably set to plain text mode. Click on ‘Compose’ and uncheck ‘Plain Text Mode’ option from the pop-up menu in the lower right. Refresh the page and try again.
Step 4: Now highlight the icon and click on the link button. Insert your social profile link where you want to it to be redirected.
You will have to repeatedly do this for each of social icon.
Your new Gmail signature is now created. Play around with the position and spacing to customize it according to your choice. Isn’t this is looking much better than previous one.
Somewhere, you are limited with the size of the image. You have only three options – small, medium, or large. So, if your image is huge in size, it may look big even if you select the small size. But surely you are not limited to plain text links. For icons, upload only 32×32 size image.
That’s all! With social icons in Gmail Signature, people can easily connect with you on different channels.
The post How to Add Social Icons to Your Gmail Signature appeared first on Google Tricks Blog.
This is the news that all Locally stored data on Amazon Fire devices using the latest Fire OS is no longer encrypted, and hasn’t been since last year. Anyone upgrading a Kindle Fire, or any Fire OS device to Fire OS 5 will be left really vulnerable to attacks from hackers. As well as this, any information left by users on their Fire device will be stored in plain text.
While Amazon’s Fire OS 5 garnered generally positive reviews and was praised for its refreshing new look and extra features, it now seems that Amazon also removed device encryption support. Amazon contend that it has maintained security features between Amazon’s cloud service, and also device communication, but that will come as scant consolation for anyone concerned about the protection of their own personal and private data stored on Fire devices themselves.
Amazon have responded to recent criticism with the following statement:
“In the fall when we released Fire OS 5, we removed some enterprise features that we found customers weren’t using. All Fire tablets’ communication with Amazon’s cloud meet our high standards for privacy and security including appropriate use of encryption.”
Users do not, unfortunately, have many options available to them if they want to keep their Fire devices encrypted. They can if they want, not update to Fire OS 5 and retain device encryption, something that will not help anyone who has already upgraded. But this then leaves them vulnerable as they will not receive security updates. Another option is to, well, just upgrade, and hope that nothing bad happens. And of course, users could just stop using Fire devices. I appreciate this last option won’t help anyone who actually has a Fire machine.
Amazon’s move seems to have gone against the current grain considering that almost all of its competitors are moving in the other direction and are making encryption on their devices as standard, and available as default.
However, drawing a connection with Fire OS 5, and the current Apple and FBI iPhone legal battle, as several other websites have, would be wide of the mark, as Amazon released the OS a good few months before Apple fell foul of the FBI.
Amazon’s decision to remove encryption protocols may however seem somewhat ironic given that Amazon has answered Apple’s call to arms against government intrusion, though unlike Google, and Microsoft, has itself failed to file an amicus brief in support of the iPhone maker.
The post Amazon Disabled Encryption For Latest Fire OS appeared first on FileHippo News.
Social media photo and video site Snapchat has had its share of headline-grabbing, embarrassing security issues over the years, some intentional and some due to its own inability to plan. When a hacker warned and then exposed nearly 5 million users’ accounts because of a bug that left the info vulnerable, that was bad enough. But when 100,000 or so shared videos and photos were accessed and released online (despite the company insisting that it doesn’t store the messages its users send, while forgetting that the cellular providers’ servers do store that information) some experts wondered if that might have been enough to seal Snapchat’s fate as an untrustworthy platform.
But the news last week that Snapchat has experienced a whole new data breach only highlights what too many companies refuse to accept: your biggest security threat may very well be someone on your payroll.
In an apology post on February 28, Snapchat admitted that an employee had willingly handed over highly sensitive information on the company’s employees–everything needed to steal their identities–because of a phishing attack. The email appeared to come from the company’s CEO Evan Spiegel, requesting the payroll records of all employees. Unfortunately, at this time of year, that’s not an unheard of request since the tax filing deadline for individuals is next month. The recipient dutifully submitted the information; four hours later, Snapchat was on the phone with the FBI to report the breach.
If Snapchat can take any consolation from this, it’s that human error is behind an increasing number of breaches, especially now that more and more companies are realizing (and believing) the need for tighter antivirus and anti-malware software across their entire networks. This is largely why “boss phishing” is becoming more and more common; as low-level hackers find themselves blocked at every turn, what’s easier than masquerading as the boss and getting an hourly-wage employee to hand over the information they want?
A phishing email was behind one of the most infamous recent data breaches, the Target retail chain breach that affected as many as 121 million customers. The source of the bug that infected the store’s POS credit card system (thereby stealing credit card information) was spread via a link in a malicious email sent to one of Target’s air conditioner repair companies.
Who needs to worry about pesky security protocols and tightened cybersecurity when you can get a secretary to install the bug for you by clicking on a link to a cat video?
Unfortunately, the response in these cases is almost always the same: we’re shocked…we don’t know how this happened…we never thought one of our employees would do this. But that begs the question: Why not? Why don’t more companies realize that their workforce is made up of individuals who may or may not have the necessary training to prevent an attack or the right motivation to keep company data secure? More importantly, why are companies still surprised?
The post Snapchat Breach And The Biggest Security Flaw Ever appeared first on FileHippo News.
TeamViewer is the All-In-One Solution for Remote Access and Support over the Internet. TeamViewer connects to any PC or server around the world within a few seconds. You can remote control your partner's PC as if you were sitting right in front of it. Features: control computers remotely via the internet, record your session and covert it to...
WPS Office 10 Free is the most versatile free office suite, which includes free word processor, spreadsheet program and presentation maker. With these three programs you will easily be able to deal with any office related tasks. WPS Office 10 Free has multiple language support for English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese,Russian and Polish l...
One of the most common pieces of advice you'll get as a startup is this:
Only hire the best. The quality of the people that work at your company will be one of the biggest factors in your success – or failure.
I've heard this advice over and over and over at startup events, to the point that I got a little sick of hearing it. It's not wrong. Putting aside the fact that every single other startup in the world who heard this same advice before you is already out there frantically doing everything they can to hire all the best people out from under you and everyone else, it is superficially true. A company staffed by a bunch of people who don't care about their work and aren't good at their jobs isn't exactly poised for success. But in a room full of people giving advice to startups, nobody wants to talk about the elephant in that room:
It doesn't matter how good the people are at your company when you happen to be working on the wrong problem, at the wrong time, using the wrong approach.
Most startups, statistically speaking, are going to fail.
And they will fail regardless of whether they hired "the best" due to circumstances largely beyond their control. So in that context does maximizing for the best possible hires really make sense?
Given the risks, I think maybe "hire the nuttiest risk junkie adrenaline addicted has-ideas-so-crazy-they-will-never-work people you can find" might actually be more practical startup advice. (Actually, now that I think about it, if that describes you, and you have serious Linux, Ruby, and JavaScript chops, perhaps you should email me.)
I told that person the same thing I tell all prospective job candidates: "come with me if you want to live"
— Jeff Atwood (@codinghorror) May 24, 2015
Okay, the goal is to increase your chance of success, however small it may be, therefore you should strive to hire the best. Seems reasonable, even noble in its way. But this pursuit of the best unfortunately comes with a serious dark side. Can anyone even tell me what "best" is? By what metrics? What results? How do we measure this? Who among us is suitable to judge others as the best at … what, exactly? Best is an extreme. Not pretty good, not very good, not excellent, but aiming for the crème de la crème, the top 1% in the industry.
The real trouble with using a lot of mediocre programmers instead of a couple of good ones is that no matter how long they work, they never produce something as good as what the great programmers can produce.
Pursuit of this extreme means hiring anyone less than the best becomes unacceptable, even harmful:
In the Macintosh Division, we had a saying, “A players hire A players; B players hire C players” – meaning that great people hire great people. On the other hand, mediocre people hire candidates who are not as good as they are, so they can feel superior to them. (If you start down this slippery slope, you’ll soon end up with Z players; this is called The Bozo Explosion. It is followed by The Layoff.) — Guy Kawasaki
There is an opportunity cost to keeping someone when you could do better. At a startup, that opportunity cost may be the difference between success and failure. Do you give less than full effort to make your enterprise a success? As an entrepreneur, you sweat blood to succeed. Shouldn’t you have a team that performs like you do? Every person you hire who is not a top player is like having a leak in the hull. Eventually you will sink. — Jon Soberg
Why am I so hardnosed about this? It’s because it is much, much better to reject a good candidate than to accept a bad candidate. A bad candidate will cost a lot of money and effort and waste other people’s time fixing all their bugs. Firing someone you hired by mistake can take months and be nightmarishly difficult, especially if they decide to be litigious about it. In some situations it may be completely impossible to fire anyone. Bad employees demoralize the good employees. And they might be bad programmers but really nice people or maybe they really need this job, so you can’t bear to fire them, or you can’t fire them without pissing everybody off, or whatever. It’s just a bad scene.
On the other hand, if you reject a good candidate, I mean, I guess in some existential sense an injustice has been done, but, hey, if they’re so smart, don’t worry, they’ll get lots of good job offers. Don’t be afraid that you’re going to reject too many people and you won’t be able to find anyone to hire. During the interview, it’s not your problem. Of course, it’s important to seek out good candidates. But once you’re actually interviewing someone, pretend that you’ve got 900 more people lined up outside the door. Don’t lower your standards no matter how hard it seems to find those great candidates. — Joel Spolsky
I don't mean to be critical of anyone I've quoted. I love Joel, we founded Stack Overflow together, and his advice about interviewing and hiring remains some of the best in the industry. It's hardly unique to express these sort of opinions in the software and startup field. I could have cited two dozen different articles and treatises about hiring that say the exact same thing: aim high and set out to hire the best, or don't bother.
This risk of hiring not-the-best is so severe, so existential a crisis to the very survival of your company or startup, the hiring process has to become highly selective, even arduous. It is better to reject a good applicant every single time than accidentally accept one single mediocre applicant. If the interview process produces literally anything other than unequivocal "Oh my God, this person is unbelievably talented, we have to hire them", from every single person they interviewed with, right down the line, then it's an automatic NO HIRE. Every time.
This level of strictness always made me uncomfortable. I'm not going to lie, it starts with my own selfishness. I'm pretty sure I wouldn't get hired at big, famous companies with legendarily difficult technical interview processes because, you know, they only hire the best. I don't think I am one of the best. More like cranky, tenacious, and outspoken, to the point that I wake up most days not even wanting to work with myself.
If your hiring attitude is that it's better to be possibly wrong a hundred times so you can be absolutely right one time, you're going to be primed to throw away a lot of candidates on pretty thin evidence.
Before cofounding GitHub I applied for an engineering job at Yahoo and didn’t get it. Don’t let other people discourage you.
— Chris Wanstrath (@defunkt) May 22, 2014
I've been twitter following the careers of people we interviewed but passed on at my last gig.
— Trek Glowacki (@trek) January 26, 2016
Turns out we were almost always wrong.
Perhaps worst of all, if the interview process is predicated on zero doubt, total confidence … maybe this candidate doesn't feel right because they don't look like you, dress like you, think like you, speak like you, or come from a similar background as you? Are you accidentally maximizing for hidden bias?
One of the best programmers I ever worked with was Susan Warren, an ex-Microsoft engineer who taught me about the People Like Us problem, way back in 2004:
I think there is a real issue around diversity in technology (and most other places in life). I tend to think of it as the PLU problem. Folk (including MVPs) tend to connect best with folks most like them ("People Like Us"). In this case, male MVPs pick other men to become MVPs. It's just human nature.
As one reply notes, diversity is good. I'd go as far as to say it's awesome, amazing, priceless. But it's hard to get to -- the classic chicken and egg problem -- if you rely on your natural tendencies alone. In that case, if you want more female MVPs to be invited you need more female MVPs. If you want more Asian-American MVPs to be invited you need more Asian-American MVPs, etc. And the (cheap) way to break a new group in is via quotas.
IMO, building diversity via quotas is bad because they are unfair. Educating folks on why diversity is awesome and how to build it is the right way to go, but also far more costly.
Susan was (and is) amazing. I learned so much working under her, and a big part of what made her awesome was that she was very much Not Like Me. But how could I have appreciated that before meeting her? The fact is that as human beings, we tend to prefer what's comfortable, and what's most comfortable of all is … well, People Like Us. The effect can be shocking because it's so subtle, so unconscious – and yet, surprisingly strong:
Baseball cards held by a black hand consistently sold for twenty percent less than those held by a white hand.
Using screens to hide the identity of auditioning musicians increased women's probability of advancing from preliminary orchestra auditions by fifty percent.
Denver police officers and community members were shown rapidly displayed photos of black and white men, some holding guns, some holding harmless objects like wallets, and asked to press either the "Shoot" or "Don't Shoot" button as fast as they could for each image. Both the police and community members were three times more likely to shoot black men.
It's not intentional, it's never intentional. That's the problem. I think our industry needs to shed this old idea that it's OK, even encouraged to turn away technical candidates for anything less than absolute 100% confidence at every step of the interview process. Because when you do, you are accidentally optimizing for implicit bias. Even as a white guy who probably fulfills every stereotype you can think of about programmers, and who is in fact wearing an "I Rock at Basic" t-shirt while writing this very blog post*, that's what has always bothered me about it, more than the strictness. If you care at all about diversity in programming and tech, on any level, this hiring approach is not doing anyone any favors, and hasn't been. For years.
I know what you're thinking.
Fine, Jeff, if you're so smart, and "hiring the best" isn't the right strategy for startups, and maybe even harmful to our field as a whole, what should be doing?
Well, I don't know, exactly. I may be the wrong person to ask because I'm also a big believer in geographic diversity on top of everything else. Here's what the composition of the current Discourse team looks like:
I would argue, quite strongly and at some length, that if you want better diversity in the field, perhaps a good starting point is not demanding that all your employees live within a tiny 30 mile radius of San Francisco or Palo Alto. There's a whole wide world of Internet out there, full of amazing programmers at every level of talent and ability. Maybe broaden your horizons a little, even stretch said horizons outside the United States, if you can imagine such a thing.
I know hiring people is difficult, even with the very best of intentions and under ideal conditions, so I don't mean to trivialize the challenge. I've recommended plenty of things in the past, a smorgasboard of approaches to try or leave on the table as you see fit:
… but the one thing I keep coming back to, that I believe has enduring value in almost all situations, is the audition project:
The most significant shift we’ve made is requiring every final candidate to work with us for three to eight weeks on a contract basis. Candidates do real tasks alongside the people they would actually be working with if they had the job. They can work at night or on weekends, so they don’t have to leave their current jobs; most spend 10 to 20 hours a week working with Automattic, although that’s flexible. (Some people take a week’s vacation in order to focus on the tryout, which is another viable option.) The goal is not to have them finish a product or do a set amount of work; it’s to allow us to quickly and efficiently assess whether this would be a mutually beneficial relationship. They can size up Automattic while we evaluate them.
What I like about audition projects:
Every company says they want to hire the best. Anyone who tells you they know how to do that is either lying to you or to themselves. But I can tell you this: the companies that really do hire the best people in the world certainly don't accomplish that by hiring from the same tired playbook every other company in Silicon Valley uses.
Try different approaches. Expand your horizons. Look beyond People Like Us and imagine what the world of programming could look like in 10, 20 or even 50 years – and help us move there by hiring to make it so.
* And for the record, I really do rock at BASIC.
| [advertisement] Building out your tech team? Stack Overflow Careers helps you hire from the largest community for programmers on the planet. We built our site with developers like you in mind. |
