Tech tips – summer reading

By Malcolm and John Harding, of Compu-Home

It seems unfair to be assigning summer homework, but here are a few current (and demanding) subjects that may require your attention this season.

We mentioned the prospect of tech price increases back in the winter, and that has certainly come true. Continued tariff instability, along with increased demand for more sophisticated components, all confused by supply chain complications, are resulting in a hijack of your chequebook when you need new equipment. Prices generally are up by more than 10% but there are still pretty good sale prices being offered occasionally, and so try to be pro-active and shop carefully for a replacement before it becomes an emergency. Keep in mind also that as the devices become more powerful and sophisticated, you may find that a lower-end model is more than adequate for your needs. After all, the cheapest laptop on a store’s shelf today was science fiction five years ago and unless your expectations have amplified greatly, a budget model will do the job just fine.

Now is a time when Macintosh users can smile and skip to the next paragraph. For the past several months, Windows computers have been attacked by pop-ups rampant on their screens with fraudulent warnings about viruses detected, subscriptions elapsed, vulnerabilities, and other doomsday scenarios. These come from an abuse of a Windows 10 and 11 component called “Notifications,” which was originally designed to allow Microsoft and other trusted sources to pass on helpful information. These days the bad guys are as smart as the good guys, and Notifications has been usurped by criminals on a quest for your money. We suggest that you do a Google search for “Turn off Notifications in Windows” and follow the few steps to rid yourself of this blight.

Multi-factor identification (MFI) now dominates most online security. Email and any sort of activity that involves finances is now demanding more than a password, often for every login, or sometimes just occasionally. It is becoming less common to be able to opt out of MFI. Some organizations have set up their MFI so that having a cell phone to accept a texted code is mandatory, which is an unwanted and complicated expense for many. It is very common for instructions on setting up your MFI to be grossly unclear, so that what you thought would be proper credentials later turns out to be useless – having designated a landline that cannot accept texts, for example. Furthermore, even if you have successfully set up your MFI, it is important to bear in mind that you must keep it updated if there ever is any change to those credentials, such as adopting a new cell phone number, or stopping your use of a backup email address.

Has your email address book been hacked recently? If not, it seems like you are among the lucky few. Gone are the good old days when we thought we were smarter than the “I’m in jail in Spain and you’ve got to send me $1500 bail,” ploy but the fraudulent emails that are sent to all of your correspondents when your address book is hacked, are considerably more sophisticated (and frequent) nowadays. A clever example we saw recently was a very good facsimile of the Evite-style party invitation. Of course, these messages are riddled with links that allow access to the new recipient’s account, thus perpetuating the process. When these attacks happen, it is common for the crooks to access the settings of your email account and set up filters that will divert or reject your new incoming messages so that for a time you are not aware that anything bad has happened. If you are a victim, you can log into the web page access to your email account, click on Settings and remove the filters that have been set up to interfere with receiving your incoming messages. Settings is probably also the place to change your email password, which is always a good idea. One thing NOT to do, is to write to all of your friends with a warning about this having happened. Most of those messages will not be received.

AI declaration: Artificial Intelligence may have been used along with other resources in researching some columns. It is never used in the writing.