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Tech News & Commentary
Jack in Los Alamos, New Mexico listening on KTRC 1260 – Santa Fe’s News Talk Leader asked: “I was wondering if there was any service available that when I get one of these phishing e-mails that I’m afraid someone on my family downloaded, that I could send it to them and find out if there is anything like a keylogger or whatever on it.”
There are sites that let you submit addresses that you suspect are phishing related. The most popular one is PhishTank.com, where you can submit links and either get a result, if it’s already known, or have the community vote on it, if it’s a new link.
The process is not really automated though, you have to copy the link from the email yourself, paste it on the site and either get a response or wait for one and remember to go check.
For most stuff, this is overkill. If you’re concerned that the email you got may be a phishing email, just don’t click on anything. Open a browser, go to the website that the email claims to be coming from and log-in as you would if you hadn’t received an email at all.
As for keyloggers, you will most likely either receive an email with malware attached, or a phishing attempt, but not both at the same time. A phishing email will just look like an official email from a reputable company to try to trick you into going to a site that looks official as well in an attempt to steal your login information and gain access to something valuable, typically your bank account. Bad guys don’t need to install anything on your computer to do that, they just need you to go to a website and use your credentials to sign in.
Sometimes your best practice is just hovering your mouse over the links in an email and looking down to the status bar where it should show you what web address that link is going to send you to. This may not work in all email clients, but if you’re using a web based email system like Gmail or Hotmail, it will. If anything looks suspicious at all, never click the link! You’re FAR better off entering the address manually or select it from your own bookmarks, to avoid being hijacked.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast
“Into
Gaming Update” Weekly Feature with Mark Lautenschlager
Daniel in Milbrook, Alabama asked: “I’m thinking about getting a tablet and I was wondering which is one of the better tablet that are reasonably priced? And I stress “reasonably.” What OS do you prefer on the tablets? Or do you think it would be better to get a small laptop. I’m kinda pulling between both. I like the tablets because they’re touchscreen and as I understand it, the inexpensive laptops are not.”
Well, if you’re looking for “reasonably” priced, you’re pretty much priced out of any tablet hovering around the 10” mark, you’re looking at smaller 7” tablets, like the Kindle Fire of the Nexus 7.
Of the 7” tablets, the Nexus 7 would probably be the first one we’d recommend, you can get it for $199, it comes with a quad core processor and a 12-core graphics processor and it runs Jelly Bean, the otherwise still unreleased version of Android.
The Kindle Fire is the other big contender, it’s OS is a little more limited, you don’t get access to the Google Play Store, you don’t get a dual core processor and you’re still paying $199 for it, but Amazon’s media and app library is good, and you do get access to that.
As for laptop or tablet, what are you going to be doing with your device? if you’re just gonna be consuming media and not doing an awful lot of typing, then a tablet would work for you, if you’re going to e working on documents or doing anything more involved than watching a movie, looking at pictures, reading a book or playing basic games then a laptop may be better for you, it all depends on your intended use of the device.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Foster in Henderson, Tennessee asked: “I work in an office where we have to send sensitive documents by e-mail. Is there an encryption program that we can implement that is not too expensive and is reliable? We are a very small office.”
You can actually do it for free. You can findPGP key generators online that will let you create a combination of public and private keys, you can email a recipient using their public key, which they can safely make publicly available, when they receive the email they use the private key and a password to decode the message.
PGP stands for “Pretty Good Privacy,” the name is mostly in jest, it’s a pretty secure standard and it will most likely serve you well unless you’re trying to keep the information safe from NSA or some foreign government.
If you want an easy, web based solution, you can use SendInc.com or LockBin.com for free or relatively cheap if you need more than one encrypted user, just know that you’re trusting those companies with your private data, some people may not be comfortable with that.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Everte Farnell, Political Blogger & Pundit & Voice of the Voiceless
“IFA History Feature” brought to you by Messe-Berlin
At the beginning of the last century, something absolutely stunning was invented: people could talk in a room somewhere, and somewhere else, other people could hear it. Music could be listened to which was played in a concert hall in another city. Radio transmission was born. But how to receive it somewhere else, through the air? Complicated equipment had to be developed, and it had to be shown to the people. So the idea of an exhibition was born. It would become the mother of all electronic shows. On December 4th, 1924 the Big German Radio Show premiered, that show is known today as IFA. And it shows off a whole lot more than just radios these days.
Greg from the Vergin Islands listens via the App says: “How can I open WMV video on my iPhone 5”
Greg, you have a few options, the most obvious one would be… get ready for the cryptic name: WMV Player… yes, it is that easy.
You can also look at a few other options, iMedia Player will play WMV too and it’s free, where WMV Player would cost you $1.99.
You do have options, but you may want to look into just converting the file. If you can get it to M4V or MP4 format, there are some free tools that will help you do that, and the iPhone’s native video player is probably better than most alternatives you’ll find.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
Tom in Albuquerque, New Mexico listens to the podcast – says: “I have noticed that when I transferred my photos of the hot air balloon fiesta from my phone to my laptop they are all Upside down and it’s turning into a pain to right side them up to see. Is this some kind of “special feature” of the iPhone or is there some kind of setting that needs to be slapped?”
You’re experiencing a known problem that came along with iOS 5. Apparently, if you take pictures or video using the volume key as your shutter, and the key is facing up the pictures and videos may import into windows upside down. Either Apple is adding EXIF – or Exchangeable image file format – information to pictures in a strange way, or Microsoft is not always reading EXIF information the normal way. Nobody seems to be very clear on which one’s the case.
The fact that it happens with videos as well as pictures points to Apple though, since EXIF doesn’t really work with videos.
For now it seems like you have two options:
1) the easiest option, is to either shoot with the volume button facing down at the ground and either release the shutter with your left thumb, or by pressing the on-screen button, which will be on your right.
2) if you don’t mind making things a little harder, you can manually rotate the pictures and videos when you import them into Windows.
And there’s an option 3 that is too drastically to mention seriously, but you could always stop using Windows, since it only happens in Windows, or an iPhone.
For more information, tune in to Hour 3 of our podcast.
If you have any questions about any of this week’s show info, please email us here.
This Week’s Prizes for Our Listeners
Audiofly: AF33 in-ear headphones
Covington Creations: Earbud yo-yo — Now with Dave’s face on them! — A clever solution to tangled earbuds.
HGST: G-Drive Mini – 500GB High Performance Portable Drive
Improv Electronics: Boogie Board rip — Paperless, LCD writing tablet that will let you save your notes and transfer them to your PC.
iolo: Copies of: Drive Scrubber – Erase data so it can NEVER be recovered.
Joos: Orange Portable Solar Charger — Charges cell phones, MP3 Players, GPS Devices and more