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Ransomware and RansomCloud Ransomware is a type of malware that infects a victim’s computers and servers. It encrypts the files and data on those devices rendering the network inoperable. To reverse the process—known as decryption—requires a unique decryption key. The cybercriminals extort a ransom in exchange for the key. Ransomware is big business. Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, ransomware attacks have increased by 600%. In 67% of cases phishing emails are used to ensnare the victim....

SJ highlights several of the most popular web-based tools for finding new books: TheFu suggests checking out award-winning lists and one rather quirky way to pick a good Sci-Fi book: We’ll second his vote to read Sphere and avoid the movie. I also enjoy reading the books that were made into movies (usually bad movies). Someone though that the book was great enough to blow $50M-$300M on it. Sphere really was a great book, but please ignore the movie....

Fraying or Broken Wire Everyone’s dealt with this a couple if not dozens of times in their life. You buy a new charging cable for your electronics, and a few months or even weeks later the wire starts to fray or stops working. If you see any wire exposed, it means the cable is on its last legs. It’s best that you refrain from using the cable as it could cause further damage to your device, or worse, an electrical shock or fire hazard....

The Windows Store in the Windows 8 Consumer Preview is full of third-party preview apps. They’re not complete, but they give us a taste of what we can expect from Metro and Windows in the future. All of these apps share a minimal interface with a focus on content and graphics, pushing traditional interface elements into the background. Whether you love Metro or not, Microsoft has decided that these sort of apps are the future of Windows....

Windows remembers Wi-Fi passwords to save you time, but you can save more time by exporting the saved passwords and transfering them to other computers. LastPass, WirelessKeyView, and Windows itself can back up your wireless passwords. Both LastPass and Windows itself allow you to import the saved settings on other computers, while WirelessKeyView generates a text file listing the information you’ll need. LastPass The LastPass password manager, which we’ve covered in-depth, recently added the ability to import and export your Wi-Fi passphrases....

Once a week we round up some of the reader questions we’ve recently answered and showcase them. This week we’re looking at how to always display the image size in Google Images, preserving browser tabs while using CCleaner, and what to backup when creating your Windows backup files. “Show Sizes” As the Default View in Google Images Dear Image Searching, I use Google image search a lot, but each time I go there I have to take the extra step of not only clicking on the option, “show sizes”, but needing to first scroll down to find this menu option....

Kubernetes Nodes need occasional maintenance. You could be updating the Node’s kernel, resizing its compute resource in your cloud account, or replacing physical hardware components in a self-hosted installation. Kubernetes cordons and drains are two mechanisms you can use to safely prepare for Node downtime. They allow workloads running on a target Node to be rescheduled onto other ones. You can then shutdown the Node or remove it from your cluster without impacting service availability....

You’ve probably seen lots of vintage photo effects, or maybe even made some of your own using software like Instagram. Today we’ll look at a few “vintage effects” and see how they can be replicated in either GIMP or Photoshop. Vintage effects like Instagram are simple, and can be approximated or reverse engineered quite easily if you know how. We’ll take a look at how even free software like the GIMP can replicate effects of iPhone photographers and pros alike....

Who needs to go buy store-bought lights? Here’s a great geek project for the holidays that’s fairly easy to put together with things most geeks already have. My friend, Chris “Groff” Groff, had the great idea to work up some holiday lights using stuff he had lying around, and a few hours later things turned out quite geeky indeed. Materials Holiday lights; we used a USB-powered set of white LEDs from ThinkGeek Bottles; we used 3/4 of a case of Bawls, also from ThinkGeek Aluminum foil Tape; thin double-sided tape works best Some thin string; I used some really heavy-duty kite thread, but you can use braided fishing line Some heavy-duty rope; we used some extra Cat5e we had lying around Heavier tape, like electrical or duct; alternatively, you can use 2-liter bottle caps Scissors Needle-nose pliers, or just a pen...

When reader Artem wrote in with this tip, I was pretty surprised—turns out you can paste images from the clipboard directly into Gmail with Ctrl+V or the context menu… but only in Firefox 4 at the moment. In Google Chrome, it works a little differently. Update: after doing a little more testing, seems like if you do this in Firefox, this might not make it through to the receiver properly in some or all cases....

Today’s Question & Answer session comes to us courtesy of SuperUser—a subdivision of Stack Exchange, a community-driven grouping of Q&A web sites. The Question SuperUser reader Rrazd is curious about the history of DOS and how it interacts with the current iterations of Windows: How much of a role, if any, does MS-DOS play in Windows today? The Answer SuperUser contributor JdeBP leaps in with a very detailed and heavily documented answer:...

One of the things most writers want to know is how much time they’re spending on writing a piece of text. If you use Microsoft Word for all your writing needs, you’re in luck, because it is really easy to find out the time consumed on the editing of a Word document. When you start working on a new Word document, a timer starts, and once you save the document, the time consumed thus far is saved as the ‘total editing time’....

Windows keeps track of documents you have recently opened in a Recent Items list on the Start menu. The Run dialog box also stores a most recently used (MRU) list of commands you have run. You may have encountered a strange problem where the Recent Items list on the Start menu and the MRU list in the Run dialog box are completely empty when you restart your computer or log off and on again....

Watchtower solves the common problem of how to update running Docker containers when a new image releases. Watchtower automatically “watches” your containers, periodically polls for new versions of their images, and restarts them so they’re running the new release. In this article we’ll show how to use Watchtower to simplify your container fleet administration. We’ll also look at the advanced options you can use to customize Watchtower’s behavior. Deploying Watchtower The first step is to start a Watchtower instance inside its own Docker container....

Security breaches and password leaks happen constantly on today’s Internet. LinkedIn, Yahoo, Last.fm, eHarmony — the list of compromised websites is long. If you want to know whether your account information was leaked, there are some tools you can use. RELATED: How to Check if Your Password Has Been Stolen These leaks often lead to many compromised accounts on other websites. However, you can protect yourself by using unique passwords everywhere — if you do, password leaks won’t be a threat to you....

Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, and other Google apps save documents in Google’s own file formats by default. But you can download these documents to your hard drive as Microsoft Office files, whether you just want one document or your entire Google Docs library. Even if you use Google Drive to sync your document files to your PC or Mac, the “.gdoc” files on your computer are just links to the Google Docs website....

The Nintendo Switch Home Screen Even though it was released in 2017, the Nintendo Switch still has minimal customization options compared to other modern devices. The Switch still doesn’t offer custom wallpapers or user-generated themes. It also doesn’t have support for folders or categories, which Nintendo eventually added to the Nintendo 3DS and Wii U. Because of this, if you own a lot of games, your home screen can get cluttered very quickly....

Windows 7’s backup control panel has the ability to create full system image backups. While Windows says you can’t restore individual files from these backups, there’s a way to browse the contents of a system image and extract individual files. System image backups are meant for restoring an entire system. If you want to easily restore individual files, you should use another type of backup – but you don’t have to restore an entire system image to get a few important files back....

The Kubernetes Dashboard is an official application that lets you inspect and edit your resources via a web-based graphical interface. Deploying a Dashboard instance into your cluster lets you visualize activity without running sequences of complex terminal commands. Installing the Dashboard Self-managed Kubernetes installations don’t come with the dashboard included by default. You need to use kubectl apply with the dashboard’s publicly hosted manifest file to deploy an instance inside your cluster:...

Imagine having your Microsoft OneDrive mounted like any other part of your Linux file system. With onedriver you’re not reduced to using OneDrive in your browser. Here’s how to set it up. Microsoft OneDrive and onedriver Microsoft’s OneDrive comes in several flavors. There’s a free-to-use version for home and personal use which gives you 5GB of cloud storage. You can buy more storage if you need to. OneDrive for Business can be purchased as a subscription or is included in other subscriptions such as the Microsoft 365 range of services....