Most popular tech stories of 2019
Credit to Author: Dan Muse| Date: Mon, 30 Dec 2019 11:51:00 -0800
Insider Pro subscribers pick the Top 10 articles published in our debut year.
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Top tech stories of 2019
The new Apple Card, the battle for cryptocurrency dominance, cybersecurity skills shortage – just a few of the stories that made headlines in 2019. Watch as IDG TECH(talk) hosts Ken Mingis and Juliet Beauchamp discuss the top tech stories of the year.
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This new Microsoft 365 feature can help you stay in compliance with regulations like GDPR and better protect data.
Microsoft blinks: Security Essentials will continue to receive updates after Jan. 14
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 05:57:00 -0800
Late last week, I talked about a discrepancy in Microsoft’s promised handling of Microsoft Security Essentials as Windows 7 reaches end of support. An internally inconsistent official announcement seemed to say that MSE signature file updates would stop — even for those who have paid for Extended Security Updates.
Which is absurd. Why would Microsoft stop updating its antivirus program even for people who are paying to continue receiving Monthly Rollup patches?
How bad can text security be? One company just showed us.
Credit to Author: Evan Schuman| Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2019 05:46:00 -0800
There is nothing more quintessentially mobile than text messages, the most commonly used communication method today. That’s why it was very unsettling that a security research house found — and the vendor at issue essentially confirmed — that a massive number of text messages were stored in plaintext, with no security at all. In short, the texts from what the security research firm estimated were “hundreds of millions of people” were open to any thief or stalker who wanted to look.
The company involved, an Austin-based business called TrueDialog, would likely be unknown to almost all of those users. TrueDialog is a marketing firm offering SMS products and services to other companies — a lot of companies. That will make it hard for consumers to even know if their texts were victimized. Text message users were able to text back, giving the impression of having two-way conversations with businesses.
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Attackers often take advantage of the holidays to launch attacks. Use these Microsoft settings to deter them.
Will Microsoft stop updating its Security Essentials on Jan. 14? Are you sure?
Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 06:52:00 -0800
You know that businesses will be able to pay for Win7 security patches after Win7 hits end-of-life on Jan. 14. Many of Microsoft’s Extended Security Update program details aren’t clear to me — How does a very small business buy ESU? Why is Microsoft releasing Edge on Win7 the day after it goes end-of-life? Will that new full-screen nag keep coming back? — but there’s one loose end that sits in the middle of my confusion.
The usual suspects
Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800
One morning Wilma, the print shop manager at a beer distributor, discovers that her computer has a virus. It’s no big deal — sometimes bad things happen to good computers — so she cleans up the system and gets on with her day.
But a few days later the system is infected again.
Considerably more annoyed this time, she contacts Betty (the company’s sole IT person) to get some assistance and make sure the system is 100% clean. After disinfecting the system, Betty checks the browser history and finds that someone has been making late-night visits to X-rated websites.
The question then becomes, Who is using company resources to watch porn? At most companies, suspicion would immediately fall on the nighttime cleaning crew. But the print shop is located in the warehouse, to which the cleaning crew doesn’t have access.
Blockchain/IoT integration accelerates, hits a 'sweet spot'
Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 03:00:00 -0800
Three-quarters of companies implementing IoT have already adopted blockchain or plan to use it by the end of 2020, an indicator of the growing connection between the two, according to a survey of 500 U.S. companies by Gartner.
While the marriage between the two technologies has been expected to be crucial for industry digital transformation, the adoption rate is happening at a “much faster pace than expected,” Gartner said.
“Among the blockchain adopters, 86% are implementing the two technologies together in various projects,” Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and report author, wrote in a blog. She called IoT integration “a sweet spot” for blockchain, the much-hyped distributed ledger technology.
Apple is forcing the ad industry to change
Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Wed, 11 Dec 2019 07:44:00 -0800
Advertising has become too personal.
Modern systems learn too much about your personal life, tastes and aspirations, and while this is manna from heaven for advertisers, it’s an invasion of privacy for many. And Apple is changing the equation.
Intelligent Tracking Prevention
Apple has built a technology that reduces the quantity of data advertisers can harvest from your online life. It is called Intelligent Tracking Prevention and The Information tells us that since the technology debuted in 2017: