December 2009

Bits from Bill Pytlovany: Who Gets Your Personal Information on Facebook?

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By Bill Pytlovany

Are you one of the 350 million Facebook users? I’m a big fan of Facebook and like many I connect daily to see what my friends are doing and to share photos. As a security professional I am very careful about what I post and what information I allow to be shared. In that respect I’m unique. It surprises me how many of my friends will refuse to allow companies to share their information but eagerly give away their personal information to application developers on Facebook.

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Technologizer: The State of Windows 7 Satisfaction

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By Harry McCracken

Windows 7 is scarcely more than a month old. Most of the people who will eventually use it haven’t gotten around to trying it yet; those that have are still settling in. And the Win 7 experience will change rapidly as remaining bugs are squashed, missing drivers arrive, and compatibility glitches are ironed out. Even so, it’s not too early to start gauging what real people think of Windows Vista’s replacement.

So to riff on Ronald Reagan’s famous question from his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, Are Windows users better off today than they were a few weeks ago, back in the Vista era? We decided to ask the Technologizer community, a group of tech enthusiasts with a high propensity to acquire new operating systems quickly and push them to their limits. Starting on November 16th, we surveyed our readers (and Twitter followers) about their experiences with Windows 7. Our goal: to do a reality check on the mostly favorable initial reviews of the new OS (as well as our own survey of largely enthusiastic Windows 7 beta testers back in March).

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Black Screen of Death or Boatload of Advertising?

20091204Blak-Task

“Black Screen woes could affect millions on Windows 7, Vista and XP”, is the title used for a post to Prevx’s website describing what they feel is a very troublesome problem. Prevx offered a download to fix the bug, and within a day fear was blogged far and wide blaming the problem on Microsoft, of course, and their darned security patches. Prevx has since backed off a little from their initial claim but you can get a taste here.

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