John Lister

Microsoft says it will backtrack on one of the most controversial elements of its campaign to push users towards Windows 10. It will no longer interpret clicking a close window button (the "X") as authorizing an installation of the new operating ... system. Since launching the system last year , Microsoft has been slowly ramping up its efforts to get people installing Windows 10. It's moved from the original position of having user actively seek out the system through a "pre-registration" tool to eventually reaching the point when Windows 10 was considered a recommended ... (view more)

Microsoft has agreed to pay $10,000 to a woman who says her computer was wrecked by an unwanted Windows 10 upgrade. The terms of the payment means there's no guarantee others in the same situation would prevail in court. Teri Goldstein says her ... computer automatically downloaded and attempted to install Windows 10 just days after it was released last July. If that's the case, that timeline certainly suggests some form of technical mistake as its only in recent months that Microsoft has stepped up its program of pushing the system out as an automatic update to many users. Broken ... (view more)

A newly-publicized take on a long-running scam involves on-screen messages that falsely appear to be from a user's Internet service provider. It's a trick with a variety of ways to profit from the customer. For many years, scammers have been calling ... people on the telephone claiming to work for Microsoft or other computer companies, saying the person receiving the call has a virus. The scammer will then usually try to get the victim to pay for bogus tech support services. While most people realize it's a scam, the idea is to call enough people so that even a small percentage of ... (view more)

Users of remote access tool GoToMyPC will need to reset their passwords as a security measure after an attack by hackers. Although creators Citrix describe it as a "very sophisticated" attack, it's simply another case of hackers targeting people who ... continue to re-use passwords on multiple sites. GoToMyPC is a tool that lets users remotely access their PC or Mac using another computer or mobile device. As with most such tools, the computer being remotely accessed must be switched on and connected to the Internet. The actual system that powers GoToMyPC, and its database of login ... (view more)

Microsoft claims its Edge browser uses far less battery power on laptops than rivals such as Google Chrome. The claims come as it publishes details of further tweaks to the browser's power demands. To back up its claims, Microsoft has released the ... results of tests it carried out using its own Surface Book computer, along with data gathered remotely from Windows 10 computers. As with any such non-independent tests, it's always worth remembering that not only could the setup of the tests be designed in a way that favors Microsoft, but there's no way of knowing that Microsoft hasn ... (view more)

A man once dubbed the "Spam King" has been jailed for two and a half years. However, Sanford Wallace's sentence is for emails which were fraudulent rather than simply unwanted. Wallace first came to infamy by sending unwanted faxes before it became ... illegal. In the late 1990s he became one of the first mass spammers and was sued by several Internet providers, including AOL. He was so open about sending spam, that at one point he even got the attention of lawyers at Hormel Foods (the company which makes Spam - a meat product), in which they claimed Wallace was breaching trademark ... (view more)

An appeals court has upheld rules on net neutrality that stop broadband providers blocking or slowing web traffic. The legal battles will likely continue, but this week's verdict is a big blow to those arguing to block the rules. Net neutrality is ... the principle of treating all Internet traffic in the same way with the only exception being illegal content. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has tried several times to bring in rules to enforce the principle, with bans on carriers deliberately slowing or blocking some types of traffic (such as streaming video) or taking payments ... (view more)

Microsoft has agreed to buy business networking site LinkedIn for $26 billion. Analysts are less than certain about what it plans to do with the site. For those not familiar, LinkedIn works a little like Facebook but is designed primarily for ... business rather than personal contacts. It has a reported 100 million active users that access the site at least once a month. That compares to reports of 1.65 billion active users for Facebook. One of the most popular uses is to find potential clients or employers through mutual contacts. It's also possible to "endorse" a contact for ... (view more)

Belgian computers are most exposed to hacking according to a new study, with the US in 14th place. It's all because of millions of computers having open, unsecured connections to the Internet. Research firm Rapid7 looked at the full range of data ... connection services on the Internet beyond just the more familiar HTTP that most users use while browsing the web. These include FTP (file transfer protocol) SSH (secure shell for remote connections), and SMTP (simple mail transfer protocol), used for many email services. To carry out the research, the company embarked on the massive task of ... (view more)

Management at TeamViewer, a remote access computer tool, have confirmed that a "significant number" of users have fallen prey to hackers. However, the company insists that all evidence suggests that there is no flaw in the system, but is instead ... pointing fingers at its users. TeamViewer allows users to login to a remote computer (even their own) from anywhere with an Internet connection. Once connected, users can operate the computer just as if they had physical access to the machine. The security for the system works in two ways: first, users get a reference number that identifies ... (view more)