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Very recently my Office 2013 software generates a message stating my software has not been activated and features have been disabled. I have been a marginally happy PAYING Office customer for YEARS/ I have NO idea what my MS account log in is. I *NEVER* contact them. I logged in to MS to get the issue resolved and they wanted to charge me $42 to fix the problem!!! HOW do I get this fixed without paying ransom to MS?

Amazon's #PrimeDay launched on Wednesday as the company bragged the sales would be even better than Black Friday's. However, Amazon users were not impressed with the sales the e-commerce site offered, and many users took to Twitter to express their displeasure. #PrimeDayFail and #PrimeDay both trended as the complaints poured in. "Either I'm missing something or the @amazon prime sale is a joke. Everything I want is full price. #PrimeDayFail," said one user. "This #PrimeDay sucks ... its like a digital garage sale," said another.

A Watch, Water and Workouts The most common question I get about my Apple Watch is this: “Is it waterproof?”Everyone from followers on Twitter to Laguna Beach lifeguards have noticed that I wear my watch while swimming and want to know how this new device holds up when it comes in contact with 71% of the Earth’s surface. If you look closely, you’ll see that I just completed my exercise goal with a swim in the Pacific Ocean. This report will explore how well the watch works when it’s exposed to water. I’ll also make some recommendations for Apple to...

Adobe Flash, the much-loathed, bug-plagued relic of a browser plugin, just got a big nail driven into its coffin. Mozilla blocked Flash by default in its Firefox browser late Monday night, a day after Facebook's (FB, Tech30) security chief called for Adobe to kill Flash once and for all.

Microsoft has completed work on Windows 10, and the new OS is ready to go, according to reports from The Verge and Neowin. The final release to manufacturing (RTM) build, number 10240, is the version customers will receive on launch day on July 29.After today, Redmond's developers will be moving towards working on updates. Microsoft's plan is for Windows 10 to be the last version of Windows ever. That means the company will release regular updates, Android style, instead of giant releases once every few years.The news comes on the same day Office for Windows 10 removes the beta...

Wow. That was quite a spectacle. It was as if someone dropped raw meat into a piranha tank.The raw meat was a report by a company called Slice Intelligence, claiming that Apple Watch sales were off a whopping 90% from launch week. The piranha were a few hundred news services and blogs who’d apparently been starved for weeks.Sometimes I wonder if people understand how organizations like Slice work. They make money by selling their services to client companies, and they attract new business by sending out press releases that become “news.” The more shocking the story, the more PR...

I have a laptop with Windows 7 Pro installed and a couple years ago on one of the MS monthly downloads IE 11 was installed. It corrupted my laptop and I had to take it in to where I bought it - got it fixed for $100. I just downloaded the July updates and again did not download IE 11. Is it now safe to download and use? When I had my problem they told me they had seen a number of similar problems with IE 11, and this was not uncommon with IE when the upgrades first come out....

Budweiser's first ever Bud & Burgers Championship delivered beer, burgers, and a champion as promised by the title — but some contestants are crying foul. According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 10 amateurs cooks from around the country faced off this past Saturday in St. Louis during the beer company's competition for a chance to win $100,000 and have their burger named the winner. Famed chef David Chang (Momofuku) was in town to judge the competition (though that shouldn't be a surprise since last year he publicly proclaimed his love of Bud Light in the pages of GQ). However, contestants...

Mozilla blocked Flash by default in its Firefox browser late Monday night, a day after Facebook's (FB, Tech30) security chief called for Adobe to kill Flash once and for all. The Flash-bashing picked up last week after revelations that the spyware giant known as the Hacking Team had been using Flash to remotely take over people's computers and infect them with malware. (That discovery took place after the Hacking Team was itself hacked. Documents revealed in the breach showed that the Hacking Team exploited two critical vulnerabilities in Flash's code.) "It is time for Adobe to announce the end-of-life date...

...my desktop Gateway(500 GB HD, 6 G of Memory, Windows 7) will not boot up, it just gets to the "Windows" Logo and sits and then just goes into the "Boot Up" process again and again. ---SIGH--- Any ideas would help.

Struggling to live in America's $1M city: Photographer captures lives of ordinary San Francisco residents who have been forced to live in cars, trailers, garages and tents following the tech boom Photographer Wenxin Zhang moved to San Francisco in 2011 Discovered a group of people online that had been forced to find alternative means of accommodation 'I visited them alone with mutual trust,' she said The subsequent photo essay is called Goodnight Stories A recent report said that a family needs about $200,000 a year to live comfortably in San Francisco, so long as their children go to public school....

The recent tidal wave of critical vulnerabilities in Adobe's Flash Player has prompted many security professionals to call for the much-maligned software's demise, and we agree. AppleInsider shows you how to uninstall Flash from your Mac, and what to do if you can't live without it. If you're running OS X 10.6 or later, download and run this Flash uninstaller. If you have OS X 10.4 or 10.5, use this uninstaller instead. Adobe has patched more than twenty Flash vulnerabilities in the last week — some of them days after active exploits were discovered in the wild — and issued over a...

Apple Watch online sales in the United States are estimated to have totaled 3,039,353 at an average price of $505 through July 10, exactly three months after Apple began accepting pre-orders for the wrist-worn device, according to the latest data from market research firm Slice Intelligence obtained exclusively by MacRumors. The entry-level Apple Watch Sport has been the most popular model among early adopters by almost a two-to-one margin, with an estimated 1,950,909 units sold at an average price of $381 since April 10. Meanwhile, stainless steel Apple Watch sales are estimated at 1,086,569 units to date, at an average...

With last week’s write down of $7.6 billion, Microsoft has finished the chapter of its corporate career marked ‘Nokia’, and arguably the book titled ’Windows Phone’. With a renewed focus on software the need for a leading phone business has lessened at Microsoft, and the Finnish company’s former devices and services section is surplus to requirements. There is much to learn from this adventure, and anyone looking to make as serious play in mobile hardware and software in the future will find lessons in the story of the third platform. As CEO Satya Nadella said alongside the announcement, ”We are...

How does a cyber attack affect you? You may think that if you don’t spend your day working online, that an attack on our computer infrastructure isn’t that big of a deal. You may feel like it wouldn’t affect you at all. Unfortunately, there are very few people in the country that would remain completely unaffected in the event of a major cyber attack. Our economy, our utility grids, and our transportation systems are all heavily reliant upon computers. This makes us very vulnerable to such an attack. And by vulnerable, I mean that if it was done on a...

Updated -- Two more serious security holes in Adobe Flash that let miscreants hijack vulnerable computers have emerged from the leaked Hacking Team files – and crooks are apparently already exploiting at least one of them to infect machines. The use-after-free() programming flaws, for which no patches exist, are identified as CVE-2015-5122 and CVE-2015-5123. They are similar to the CVE-2015-5119 Flash bug patched last week. The 5122 and 5123 bugs let malicious Flash files execute code on victims' computers and install malware. The bugs are present in the Windows, Linux and OS X builds of the plugin. The 5119, 5122...

Crowder interviews Milo Yiannopoulos - very impressive!

[T]he Indian intelligence agencies could be looking to acquire know-how not just target-specific, but the ability to throw a sweeping net of surveillance over a large number mobile phones. ... This also means the agencies could be looking to side-step the need to get written permission of the Union home secretary before carrying out any interception. Every single case of telephone interception can be done only with the written permission of the home secretary at the Centre or his counterpart in a state.... ... In an email sent to Maharashtra police, one of its senior officials claims that their solution,...

Microsoft has released a new preview build of Windows 10 Mobile, the version of the new OS for phones, and it has the same build number as the current version for desktop PCs. That doesn't mean it's equally close to release, though. While Microsoft has committed to a July 29 release date for the PC version, it has made no promises about the mobile version. And with good reason; Windows 10 Mobile is still in much rougher shape than the desktop OS. Build 10166 of the PC version of Windows 10, released on Thursday, was mostly about "bug fixing and...

A few years ago, researchers from Chalmers University of Technology demonstrated that graphene could be used to cool silicon-based electronics. “But the methods that have been in place so far have presented the researchers with problems,” explained professor Johan Liu of Chalmers University of Tech. “It has become evident that those methods cannot be used to rid electronic devices off great amounts of heat [sic], because they have consisted only of a few layers of thermal conductive atoms.” According to Liu and colleagues, adding additional layers of graphene to the surface leads to less adhesion. The researchers have overcome this...