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When I compose a comment here or on Facebook, the spelling check function underlines every single word in red. Problem began about 1 week ago and occurs only when I am using Opera. I went to the Opera settings, but I could not find a way to correct this. Sorry, I am not tech savvy, and I would appreciate advice from someone who is.

The iconic image of the American farmer is the man or woman who works the land, milks cows and is self-reliant enough to fix the tractor. But like a lot of mechanical items, tractors are increasingly run by computer software. Now, farmers are hitting up against an obscure provision of copyright law that makes it illegal to repair machinery run by software. Take Dave Alford. He fits that image of the iconic farmer. "I do farming on the family ranch," says Alford, standing on a piece of grassy earth with a white barn behind him. "I've been farming for the...

Last weekend I loaded Windows 10 on an old laptop I rarely use. I immediately noticed several privacy issues with new open windows (pun intended) for spying on what I do, where I go and what I say online. After reading some to the reviews and discussions I think it's time to revert back to Windows 7 ASAP. Thanks, but no thanks Microsoft! The police state is doing a fine job without any additional help from you and me. I haven't turned the laptop on since I loaded Windows 10, but the next time I do, it will be for...

A neighbor's estranged Ex has possibly installed spyware and a key logger onto a new notebook given as a 'gift' to both neighbor and teenage daughter. The neighbor is the custodial parent of the one teenage daughter who recently received the new 'spy loaded' notebook computer from her estranged parent. The notebook runs Win 8.1 and is to be eventually upgraded to Windows 10. The teenager was told directly by the estranged parent that everything the custodial parent does could be seen and recorded and then messaged out clandestinely. The neighbor would like to know the following: 1. How to...

OS X Yosemite vs Windows 10 It's been a rough few years for Microsoft.  Sure, it still makes more money than several European countries but the issue has been one of relevance. It missed the boat when it came to mobile and their efforts to repair the situation with Windows 8 were met with laughter at best, but sometimes even hatred.  The all-new Windows 10, which was released on 29 July, is designed to stem the blood loss. We took a look at the latest preview (Microsoft took the wraps off the new operating system at a developer event in...

My own experience

Dear Valued WOW! Customer, Please accept my sincere apology for any problems you may have recently experienced with your WOW! Internet service. On Sunday, 07/12, 2015, there was a malicious and coordinated action from an external party or parties that disrupted Internet service for our Michigan customers. What happened is known in technical circles as a Denial of Service or DOS attack. Essentially, these external sources intentionally overloaded the servers we use to route Internet traffic and created the access problems you may have experienced. As soon as the issue was detected, our engineers and technicians were immediately dispatched to...

Computer hackers likely working for the Syrian regime and Hezbollah have managed to penetrate the computers of Israeli and American activists working with the Syrian opposition, exposing sensitive contacts between the sides. Al-Akhbar, a newspaper serving as Hezbollah’s mouthpiece in Lebanon, published a series of articles over the weekend purporting to divulge correspondence between Mendi Safadi, a Druze Israeli and former political adviser to Deputy Regional Cooperation Minister Ayoub Kara, with members of the Syrian opposition around the world, taken from taken from Safadi’s computer. The article also contains screenshots of word documents and text message exchanges saved on Safadi’s...

A few weeks ago, Google researchers announced that they had peered inside the mind of an artificial intelligence program. What they discovered was a demonic hellscape. You’ve seen the pictures. These are hallucinations produced by a cluster of simulated neurons trained to identify objects in a picture. The researchers wanted to better understand how the neural network operates, so they asked it to use its imagination. To daydream a little. At first, they gave the computer abstract images to interpret — like a field of clouds. It was a Rorschach test. The artificial neurons saw what they wanted to see,...

Two heads are better than one, and three monkey brains can control an avatar better than any single monkey. For the first time, a team has networked the brains of multiple animals to form a living computer that can perform tasks and solve problems. If human brains could be similarly connected, it might give us superhuman problem-solving abilities, and allow us to communicate abstract thoughts and experiences. "It is really exciting," says Iyad Rahwan at the Masdar Institute in Dubai, UAE, who was not involved in the work. "It will change the way humans cooperate." The work, published today, is...

Just when you thought you were safe, a new hacking toy comes along and rocks your world. Imagine a tool exists that lets hackers pluck encryption keys from your laptop right out of the air. You can’t stop it by connecting to protected Wi-Fi networks or even disabling Wi-Fi completely. Turning off Bluetooth also won’t help you protect yourself. Why? Because the tiny device that can easily be hidden in an object or taped to the underside of a table doesn’t use conventional communications to pull off capers. Instead it reads radio waves emitted by your computer’s processor, and there’s...

Researchers have shown that machines are inching closer to self-learning, and perhaps even copping a little attitude. Over at Google, a computer program using a database of movie scripts was asked again and again by researchers to define morality. It struggles to do so, and in a conversation recorded by its human engineers, becomes exasperated and ends the conversation by lashing out at its human inquisitor. Here’s part of the exchange, as related in a paper presented this week: Human: Tell me the definition of morality. Machine: I don’t have ethics. Human: Look, I need help; I need to know...

An Office of Personnel Management investigative official said Tuesday the agency entrusted with millions of personnel records has a history of failing to meet basic computer network security requirements.Michael Esser, assistant inspector general for audit, said in testimony prepared for delivery that for years many of the people running the agency's information technology had no IT background.

On Friday, the second day of its annual developer conference, Google I/O, one of the search giant’s semi-secretive research divisions announced a project that aims to make conductive fabrics that can be weaved into everyday clothes. The effort, called Project Jacquard, is named for the French inventor of the Jacquard Loom, which revolutionized textile manufacturing and helped pave the way for modern computing. Much like the screens on mobile phones, these fabrics could register the user’s touch and transmit information elsewhere, like to a smartphone or tablet computer. They are made from conductive yarns that come in a rainbow of...

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — A writer desperate to get a movie script read suffered the ultimate rejection Thursday when police blew up a briefcase he said contained the screenplay after an agent refused to read it, police said. The bizarre story was set in Beverly Hills, where a man visited the office of a literary agent and left behind a briefcase that he said contained a computer, police Sgt. Brad Cornelius said. The man left instructions for it to be delivered to someone at the business, who told another person in the office, "This guy's been kind of pestering me...

An ultracompact beamsplitter – the smallest one in the world – has been designed and fabricated by researchers in the US. Using a newly developed algorithm, the team built the smallest integrated polarization beamsplitter to date, which could allow computers and mobile devices of the future to function millions of times faster than current machines.

Millions of routers and other embedded devices are affected by a serious vulnerability that could allow hackers to compromise them. The vulnerability is located in a service called NetUSB, which lets devices connected over USB to a computer be shared with other machines on a local network or the Internet via IP (Internet Protocol). The shared devices can be printers, webcams, thumb drives, external hard disks and more. NetUSB is implemented in Linux-based embedded systems, such as routers, as a kernel driver. The driver is developed by Taiwan-based KCodes Technology. Once enabled, it opens a server that listens on TCP...

Turns out, there are a few savvy (and super-easy) keyboard tricks that can do just that. Your desktop, browser, Gmail, and even Facebook all have simple keyboard-based shortcuts you can press to more quickly accomplish things you do all the time — things like creating a new tab in Chrome or favoriting a tweet. We’ve rounded up 10 super-handy keyboard hacks that will help you zip through your daily grind, so you can spend more time on things that matter — or at least save your index finger from repetitive stress syndrome. And, we've organized them from the most basic...

A Californian start-up is seeking funding to make a computer that will cost $9 (£6) in its most basic form. Next Thing wants $50,000 to finish development of the credit-card sized Chip computer. The first versions will have a 1Ghz processor, 512MB of Ram and 4GB of onboard storage. The gadget, due to go on general release in early 2016, could become yet another rival to the popular Raspberry Pi barebones computer.

Such glitches emerge with surprising frequency. It’s suspected that the reason why Nasa lost contact with the Deep Impact space probe in 2013 was an integer limit being reached. And just last week it was reported that Boeing 787 aircraft may suffer from a similar issue. The control unit managing the delivery of power to the plane’s engines will automatically enter a failsafe mode – and shut down the engines – if it has been left on for over 248 days. Hypothetically, the engines could suddenly halt even in mid-flight. The Federal Aviation Administration’s directive on the matter states that...