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The Nintendo 3DS will have a price and release date in two months, YouTube may change user video uploads to 15 minutes, and Amazon releases a new version of its Kindle e-reader.
While web-surfing, I tend to have lots of tabs open on several web-browser windows. Being able to switch back and forth between various pages in an instant is great, but with so many open it’s sometimes difficult to find the specific tab I’m looking for. Fortunately, Mozilla is working on an answer: Tab Candy.
Tab Candy is still in the very early stages of testing, but appears to be exactly what’s needed to organize and maintain browser windows and tabs. Tab Candy will allow you to zoom out to get a satellite-view of all your open windows and tabs, and will allow you to arrange and group certain tabs and windows together.
If organized into groups, you can select a group and see only the tabs you put in there. Other open tabs in other groups are still open, but not visible when you’re focused on a different group. You can resize groups, making osme larger to highlight them, or even put a group of tabs inside another group!
Watch the demonstration, below. If you want to test Tab Candy yourself, you can download a preview version of Firefox 4 that has Tab Candy included. If you do, remember that it’s a beta version, so there may be bugs or performance issues.
References:
Firefox 4 beta releases
According to the Wall Street Journal, Amazon said its Kindle device and e-book sales business were accelerating, with sales of electronic books outstripping sales of hardcovers. They sold 180 e-books for every 100 hardcover books last month. It’s still too early to know if this is showing a trend or if e-books will over come paperback sales, too.
A new Facebook scam promises to tell you the truth about Coca-Cola, Ford Sync can do almost anything you ask it to, and Google Earth has a new layer that might just frighten you into recycling more often
It’s being reported at Mercury News and on Microsoft’s security website that there is a growing trend of people receiving unsolicited phone calls from someone purporting to be a Technical Support Specialist from either Microsoft or other large computer company. But the instructions they give people to “fix” their computers actually installs remote access software without the owner’s knowledge which allows the scammer to take control of the computer at a later time for either collecting personal information, sending spam, or worse.
This is very unfortunate and disconcerting for folks, like myself, who are in the Support business as it can make current and potential clients leery of Support calls as well as some of the tools we use to provide service. The ability to access a client’s desktop remotely saves both time and money for both the client and support personnel.
Legitimate tech support folks should never install any program or application without the approval and knowledge of their client. Especially remote access software. In fact, in most cases where remote access software does get installed, we set it up so that the client must purposely start it before we can connect to their desktops to help them. It’s only in those cases where a client wants us to have odd hour and ad-hoc access to system is the remote access software left running.
As for unsolicited support calls, my advice is to validate the caller. If you don’t know them, either check with someone who should, or ask the support technician to call back through their regular contact or liaison with your company.
Sony lets you mix and match your laptop keyboard, mouse, and frame color; a bicycle lock messages you if someone is stealing your wheels; and the Facebook panic button may not be as effective as one would hope.
It sounds like something from the movies, but there have been several incidents in the last few months of High School students hacking into their schools’ computer systems to change grades.
In New Jersey, three Haddonfield Memorial High School students used keystroke capture software to get passwords that allowed them into secure areas of the schools computer system where they changed their grades. In California, a Tesoro High School student hacked into a database to change grades for himself and other students, and at Winston Churchill High School in Maryland, several students stole password and tampered with grades. And at Ocean Lakes High School in Virginia, a student was caught printing a list of names, ID numbers, birth dates, and Social Security numbers of other students from the schools computer system.
It’s a typical problem for school administrators. Students have a much better grasp of technology and it’s inherent strengths and weaknesses than the majority of adults do. So it’s important for school officials to maintain good working relationships with the district IT folks and for instructors to keep a close eye on students using school computers while maintaining open communication between students and teachers.
It’s also important for parents to monitor what their children are accessing on the Internet from home.
Technology can help at the schools. Something as simple as using different background colors of student and faculty computer screens and pages will make it obvious at glance where a student has logged in to, or providing faculty with information when they login of the last several login attempts can also help identify accounts that have been tampered with. There are many ways schools can help to reduce the risks and opportunities for students to hack their systems.
At home, there are also a number of ways parents can monitor computer usage, from the installation of “Nanyware” to using routers with built-in web proxies and filters. But probably the easiest and quickest way would be to move the computer into the most trafficked room of the house, either the kitchen or family room, so it’s easy to simply glance at the screen while walking past.
Google News gets a makeover, Microsoft has no love for its Kin, and Amazon is updating and cutting the price of its higher-end e-reader.
