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The Background on FLoC Federated Learning of Cohorts (FLoC) is a Google proposal to group web users together into “cohorts.” Each member of a cohort will have broadly similar interests, inferred from their browsing habits. This data will be exposed to marketers which will use it to personalise online ads. It’s important to understand the context in which FLoC is being introduced. Personalised advertising is currently driven by third-party cookies that let ad networks track you across websites....

Responses to this week’s Ask the Reader question show that just because you’re away from home doesn’t mean you have to give up the security and privacy that your home network provides. Earlier this week we asked you to share you browsing away from home security tips and tricks and obliged. JC offered one of the more entertaining tales of away-from-home browsing: TheFu highlights how, despite your best efforts sometimes the Wi-Fi hotspot can thwart you:...

You just got an iPhone, now what? The amount of things to setup can be overwhelming for first-time users, but How-to Geek is here to guide you through the essential steps required to get your iPhone up and running. Photo by Paulo Ordoveza. 1. Create an Apple Account You’ll have to create an Apple account to use many of the features on your phone (iTunes, App Store, etc). You can do so here, or just create one when prompted when you first turn on your iPhone....

AirDroid for Android replaces your USB cable with your web browser. Transfer files back and forth, send text messages, play music, view your photos and manage applications — all without installing anything on your computer. AirDroid is completely free; it doesn’t even contain ads. It functions as a web server, allowing your Android device and your computer to communicate over the network. Getting Started AirDroid is available for free from the Android Market....

Are you creating a very long document, but hate the thought of dealing with Word’s master document feature? The Master document feature in Word has been known in the past to corrupt documents. There is a way around using a master document. You can keep a separate file for each section of your document and create a common table of contents in another file. It requires some manual formatting, but it’s not that hard....

The idea of adding chaos to a system is generally credited to Netflix. In 2011, the company published Chaos Monkey, a tool that it built to disable parts of its production infrastructure. By inducing random failures in monitored environments, Netflix found that it could discover hidden problems that went unnoticed during regular tests. Chaos engineering provides an immune response effect. It’s similar to how we vaccinate healthy people. You purposefully introduce a threat, potentially causing brief but observable problems, in order to develop stronger long-term resistance....

Choosing a ringtone volume can be hard – there is no one setting that is right for all environments. What works perfectly at home may be too quiet for when you’re on the train, but too loud for the office. Intelligent Ringer can be used to adjust ringtone volume according to ambient noise levels. When your phone rings you need to be able to hear it. Enabling vibration is helpful for when your phone is in your pocket, but this does not help you to hear your phone in noisy environments if you just have it on your desk....

Kubernetes Jobs create Pods repeatedly until a specified number of containers terminate successfully. Jobs are often used with the higher-level CronJob mechanism that automatically starts new Jobs on a recurring schedule. Regular use of Jobs and CronJobs usually leads to a large number of objects lingering around in your cluster. Jobs and their Pods are intentionally kept indefinitely after they complete. This is so you can inspect the Job’s status and retrieve its logs in the future....

Do you want to save time when installing Windows 7? You can create a customized installation disc and have it perform an installation without asking you questions, integrate updates and drivers, tweak Windows, and remove Windows components. We’ll be using RT Se7en Lite for this – if you’ve used nLite with Windows XP or vLite with Windows Vista in the past, it works similarly. RT Se7en Lite is a sort of vLite or nLite for Windows 7....

Enable Bold Text To get started, open the “Settings” app. If you can’t find it on your iPhone or iPad Home screen, swipe down on your display and search for it with Spotlight. Next, scroll down and select “Display & Brightness.” Lastly, scroll to the bottom of the menu, and then toggle-On “Bold Text.” After you enable the “Bold Text” option, you should see a larger font in both first- and third-party apps on your iPhone or iPad....

The latest version of Firefox adds support for native Facebook integration, however the setting to enable it is hidden in about:config. Here’s how to enable it. How to Enable Facebook Integration in Firefox Open Firefox and head over to about: config. You will be given a sarcastic warning about voiding your warranty, just click on the I’ll be careful button to continue. Now type social into the search box, you should see a setting called social....

There was recently a lot of noise in the tech news world about the iPhone and iPad keeping a tracking log of your location, and while that’s now in the past, you might want to consider encrypting your backups anyway. Here’s how to do it. You can force iTunes to encrypt all your backups easily, but you’ll need to also delete the old backups that aren’t encrypted. Keep reading for how to do both....

There may be times when you need your PC to retain the same local IP address every time it boots up. Forwarding ports, sharing content on your network, and other things can all be made easier when your computer’s IP address never changes. Photo by felixtriller. DHCP DHCP stands for Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and is the recommended method for forcing your computer to use and reuse the same local IP address....

Some Android apps on Google Play claim to be incompatible with various devices. There’s a good chance that these apps will run fine on many of these devices – you can bypass this check with root access. Some apps won’t actually work after you install them, but many will. This also solves problems with games that will install but refuse to play – for example, Gameloft games with the “this device is incompatible” message....

Apple introduced a default browser selection feature in iOS 14 and iPadOS 14. When you set a third-party browser as the default, the operating system will always use it for browser-related tasks, like opening a link from an email. RELATED: How to Sync Microsoft Edge Tabs Across Devices If you’re already a Microsoft Edge user on your Windows PC or Mac, it makes sense to use it on your iPhone or iPad, too....

Files are in a constant state of flux on any operating system. Sometimes they get created, sometimes they get deleted, sometimes they get changed, and those are all normal things for an operating system to do. Sometimes when a file gets changed, it can cause instability in another application that depends on it, such as changing a port number in a properties file, a parameter in a deployment manifest, or even fixing code in production without going through source control....

Windows 8’s Family Safety features allow you to monitor your children’s computer usage, get weekly reports, set time limits for computer use, filter inappropriate websites, block children from using certain applications, and more. When you create a new user account in Windows 8, you’ll be able to designate it as a child’s account. This enables the Family Safety feature. Creating Children’s Accounts Use Windows 8’s PC Settings application to create a new user account for a child....

While Docker is much lighter weight than traditional VMs, too many containers can quickly consume your host’s resources. Here’s how to check hardware utilization and monitor the process counts inside your containers. The Docker Stats Command Docker’s built-in mechanism for viewing resource consumption is docker stats. This command gives you a tabulated view of your containers. Each container displays a live feed of its critical metrics. The command’s output includes CPU consumption and a measure of each container’s network and storage use during its lifetime....

You’ve spend some time researching a product on your phone, then you open your laptop and find ads for that product plastered all over the place. This has happened to everyone—it’s called targeted advertising, and there are steps you can take to reduce its effect on you. What Is Targeted Advertising? You can probably assume as much by its name, but targeted advertising is a way for advertisers to target potential consumers based on a number of factors....

Got a bunch of files that need to be edited the same way? You can automate the process to save time and effort using Audacity’s Chain feature and modify tons of files at the same time. Batch processing is really useful when you want to make the same edits to multiple files. It comes in handy if you want to remove background noise from a series of audio lectures, remove clicks from recorded vinyl albums, or apply normalization to a bunch of sound clips....