Two Stories that Could Help you Out

I had an article I was working on to disable notifications for Chrome but I can't find it.

Here are two articles that I found helpful:

How to Backup your iOS device on Your PC or Mac
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/18/technology/personaltech/finding-your-ipad-backup-files.html

20 Cool Command Line Tricks
http://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/20-cool-command-line-tricks-for-windows-and-macos-1797222311

Hopefully I will write something soon, just been super busy.

The Many Problems of Yahoo

You may or may not have heard but Yahoo has been in the news quite a bit. First they were being sold to Verizon for 4.8 billion dollars. This was no surprise to people that follow technology because Yahoo has been doing poorly in the last couple years despite acquiring other companies, investments, and changes to the company. Verizon bought Yahoo because they have a lot of online advertisement revenue and technology patents.

Many technology reporters have disliked Yahoo's website, search, and e-mail for sometime. The reason for this dislike was that the company has paid associate and referral payments to companies that sent them users despite many of those companies doing so through malicious and illegal means such as malware, ad ware, and deceptive software downloads.

News recently came out that Yahoo's e-mail system was hacked and 500 million users accounts were affected. It is unclear how long Yahoo knew this occurred but the breach was from 2014 and they just notified the public last month. This Business Insider article claims that the real number of affected accounts is probably closer to one billion http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-insider-hacking-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T and this article discusses who may have pulled off this massive hackhttp://fortune.com/2016/09/29/yahoo-hacked-by-eastern-european-gang-cybersecurity-firm-says/

Then just a few weeks after this happened an insider at Yahoo discussed that the National Security Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation asked for a real time filter of all e-mails to find and record suspect conversations (Here is a New York Time article discussing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/yahoo-email-tech-companies-government-investigations.html?_r=0 ) . It turned out that it was much worse, there was a 'rootkit' on Yahoo's system which may have allowed government employees access to any and all communications that were being made on Yahoo's system http://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool

Why does this all matter to you?
Many articles from technology publications and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have asked that users close their accounts with Yahoo. They say this because Yahoo has not taken security seriously and not protected its users information from the government or from outside bad actors.

While I think that everyone who has a Yahoo account should immediately change their password; I do not think that you should delete your account and the reason that I say that is because Yahoo recycles e-mail addresses. If you have 'ABC123@yahoo.com' and you go delete your account then in 6 months Yahoo will make 'ABC123@yahoo.com' available for someone else. If you fail to inform everyone from your family and friends to that website that sends you reset codes to change your password, it means that someone else will have that e-mail address and may get an e-mail that was intended for you.

If you have an account with Yahoo change the password and try to change all your accounts that have a Yahoo e-mail address as the username / contact to another provider. I have had one employee and a few patrons that have had people try to get into their Apple account, Facebook account, or receive text messages that were "phishing". In one case a patron was called and told that they had been "hacked" and that they needed to purchase protection or assistance. Luckily that patron called me and we were able to determine that this was a scam.

Emerging Technologies

Opera Open VPN – Available for Apple mobile devices and soon to be available for the desk top web browser Opera has created a free VPN. If you are unfamiliar a VPN is a Virtual Private Network which allows a user to connect to a computer network to either have access to network assets (files or computing resources) or mask their online activities and location. There are a wide variety of reasons to use a VPN but the main use that concerns most people is protecting their personal information while on an open / unsecured Wi-Fi connection such as our Library Free network or hotspots at businesses. I have used it for two weeks and have found it to be quick, gives you the option of which country you would like your location to be connected in, and it blocks some ads and cookies. Opera is continuing to work on it to make it faster and more secure. Right now it is a very nice free VPN option for mobile devices.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/opera-vpn-free-unlimited-ad/id1080756781?mt=8

Opera Browser – Available for Android, Apple devices, Linux, and Windows devices this web browser uses several techniques to reduce load time and power usage while surfing the web. If you make a change to the setting you can take advantage of built in ad blocking. Users that download the “Surf Easy” extension can use Opera’s free VPN. In my use of both the mobile and desktop versions I have found decreased RAM usage, faster load time, and less battery usage compared to Chrome or Firefox. http://www.opera.com/

Aioply Vision – an app created for the blind and visually impaired that says what items are in real time or what color it sees in real time. It doesn’t know everything it sees but users can tell it what it is pointed at helping it learn. http://www.aipoly.com/

Hound – You may be familiar with Siri, Alexa, Cortana, or Ok Google’s digital assistants. This one is faster and does a lot more. For instance you can say, “Find Asian restaurants near me”, you can then say “exclude Korean and Chinese”, and then say “open after 9pm”. Each time it remembers your previous statements and continues to give you results. It does a good job of looking back in time or ahead at weather information, like asking, “What’s the chance of rain next Tuesday in Potland Oregon”. It does a bunch of things, available for Android and iOS http://www.soundhound.com/hound

New York Times article about Windows 10 upgrade problems, why they happen and how to avoid them http://goo.gl/Z9VPcB

IFTTT Recipes and Do Button – If This Then That has a lot of new recipes that can automate tasks between apps and home automation equipment. The Do app has some new recipes that you can tap on a button and it can do things like send preset e-mail, open a door lock, change thermostat, or turn on lights (of course this all depends on the equipment you have).

Fast.com – a webpage created by Netflix that quickly measures your internet connection speed

This week was Google’s Developer Conference, Google IO, they released information about new products, updates, features. You can read about them here: http://goo.gl/Ha4zop

Wired Magazine had a very thorough article about virtual reality, augmented reality, and mixed reality in which it featured one of the most promising and mysterious companies Magic Leap. Funded at 1.4 billion dollars it has the backing of some of the biggest names in technology. It’s a long article but if nothing else, skip down to the video of what it looks like looking through Magic Leap glasses http://www.wired.com/2016/04/magic-leap-vr/