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Telling a website to stick its cookies someplace else might not be enough to keep it from tracking you across the web—there are other identifiers that can help narrow down who you are and what you're doing as you travel the silicon superhighway. These techniques rely on tracking the exact configuration of hardware you're running inside your PC, though researchers suggest this form of hardware tracking could be done with even greater accuracy through something known as GPU fingerprinting.Outlined in a research paper [PDF warning] from co-first authors Tomer Laor of Ben-Gurion University and Naif Mehanna from University Lille, CNRS,...

I know that Zero Hedge is banned here for a reason, namely its anonymous authors and potentially unverifiable information, but this subject matter was a little too important for me not to share. For those of you who have kids or grandkids who own one of these or who want one, there has apparently been a problem with child sexual grooming in VR chat. A user started a documentary on this subject, and I think it's necessary to share it. This is the link, where video of the documentary can be viewed. (CONTAINS DISTURBING SUBJECT MATTER): https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/dark-side-metaverse-exposed-why-your-kids-need-stay-away-vrchatBut I will post...

Lenovo unveiled two new laptops made out of materials including recycled aluminum and “recycled black vegan leather,” delivered in packaging made from compostable bamboo and sugarcane. But beneath the environmentally friendly hardware there’s another innovation: Microsoft’s Pluton security processor. The new Lenovo ThinkPad Z13 and Z16, announced Tuesday at the International CES tech show in Las Vegas, are the first PCs to be unveiled with Pluton since Microsoft announced the security architecture in November 2020. Pluton takes security technologies that otherwise exist in a separate hardware component in Windows PCs and integrates them directly into the central processing unit. In...

I just increased the SSD in the desktop computer soon to be my primary machine to a 1 TB SSD. All went smoothly, except that Macrium Reflect* left me with the following for "Disk 0": 1st Partion = System 100 MB (Healthy) 2nd Partition = HP6300-I5-2-new.SSD-2 222.64 GB NTFS (Healthy) (Boot, Page File, Crash Dump, Primary Partition) 3rd Partion = 848 MB (Healthy) (Recovery Partition) 4th Partion = 707.95 GB (oops) (Unallocated)** -------------------------------- The Data disk (D:) is a 500 GB HDD -------------------------------- Backups presently go to a nearly new 500 GB Toshiba external drive. -------------------------------- Once I free it...

I'm transferring to a newer computer and having difficulty with various things. I've got everything fixed now except my sound. The computer was working before but I upgraded from Win 7 to Win 10 and added a new video card to feed 3 monitors, About the time I put the 2nd video card in I noticed the noise in my speakers. I've tried headphones and the noise is there. I've tried USB speakers and the noise is there. I used a Bluetooth speaker and the noise is gone. I've changed the sound drivers 3 times with and older driver and...

The Twitter executive responsible for blocking stories about Hunter Biden's laptop is one of several advisers to the Aspen Institute's disinformation commission. Yoel Roth is one of several questionable advisers to Aspen's Commission on Information Disorder, which on Monday released its much-anticipated report. Commission members include Katie Couric, who recently acknowledged that she edited comments on National Anthem protests out of a 2016 interview with Ruth Bader Ginsburg to preserve the justice's reputation with liberals. Another commissioner, Rashad Robinson, helped fuel actor Jussie Smollett's hate crime hoax. Commission members' censorship of legitimate news stories could undercut their lofty mission. The...

Sticking to just a major feature update for Windows 10 would have been a positive move for Microsoft and for us PC users. "Windows 10 is the last version of Windows," says Microsoft's Jerry Nixon just ahead of the launch of the then-new operating system. It was a bold statement and now, in the face of the faltering Windows 11 launch, I can't help but wish Microsoft had followed through on that promise instead of giving in to the powerful lure of marketing bull. It's a quote that was widely circulated at the time, continued to be shared around during...

State Health and Human Services computer system failure A widely-criticized rollout of a new computer network system for the Rhode Island Executive Office of Health and Human Services dubbed the "Unified Health Infrastructure Project" (UHIP) in September 2016 saw scores of people without access to gov programs food stamps, child care due to glitches in software by Deloitte. This computer crash created a backlog of more than 20,000 cases. The Raimondo Administration received several letters from the federal government in 2016 warning UHIP not ready to be launched. On orders of Raimondo, the UHIP launch occurred as planned despite federal...

An Australian/German company is developing powerful quantum accelerators the size of graphics cards. They work at room temperature, undercutting and outperforming today's huge, cryo-cooled quantum supercomputers, and soon they'll be small enough for mobile devices. Superconducting quantum computers are huge and incredibly finicky machines at this point. They need to be isolated from anything that might knock an electron's spin off and ruin a calculation. That includes mechanical isolation, in extreme vacuum chambers, where only a few molecules might remain in a cubic meter or two of space. It includes electromagnetic forces – IBM, for example, surrounds its precious quantum...

Quantum engineers from UNSW Sydney have removed a major obstacle that has stood in the way of quantum computers becoming a reality. They discovered a new technique they say will be capable of controlling millions of spin qubits—the basic units of information in a silicon quantum processor. Until now, quantum computer engineers and scientists have worked with a proof-of-concept model of quantum processors by demonstrating the control of only a handful of qubits. But with their latest research, published today in Science Advances, the team have found what they consider "the missing jigsaw piece" in the quantum computer architecture that...

I was just reminiscing over palmtops, becuase in some limited ways, they had their charm over cellphones and I found a site where you can still buy a modernized one.

60-year-old Mark Herring was a tech guy. “He was so smart,” recalled Corinna Fitch, one of three daughters who says their father was always ahead of trends. “I think he joined Twitter the day or the week Twitter came about.” He grabbed a handle that reflected his love for the state where he was born and raised his family. “He just wanted to be @Tennessee because he loved the Vols,” said Fitch, with a slight smile. As Twitter grew, it was clear to all that Herring owned prime internet property. “He would just in passing say, I got another offer...

Needing some Windows 7 help. It won't start and has been on "Start up repair is checking your system for problems" for 14 hours.

ox News host Tucker Carlson was mocked on social media this week for stating that he had been told that the National Security Agency was reading his private emails and spying on him. The usual suspects called Carlson paranoid, because there are so many checks and balances to assure the feds would never illegally target a vexatious Biden critic. However, on Tuesday, a dissent by Travis LeBlanc, a member of the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, revealed that one of the NSA’s most intrusive surveillance engines, XKeyscore, may be violating federal law and Americans’ rights and privacy. In...

Southwest Airlines grounded flights across the country Tuesday for the second time in less than 24 hours, amid reports of nationwide computer issues.

Inmates in the Oklahoma Department of Corrections (ODOC) began receiving tablets this week as part of a plan to supply all state prisoners with secure tablet computers. More than 21,000 inmates at over 20 facilities will receive tablets that will give them access to books, college classes, music and even a way to communicate with their families. "The tablets represent a critical update to the communications and technology services we offer inmates here at the department of corrections," ODOC spokesman Justin Wolf told CNN. "This sort of technology shows how we interact with our inmates and allow them access to...

In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian. So many readers had questions in response to the tweet that I thought it was worth a blog post exploring this one weird cyber defense trick.The Twitter thread came up in a discussion on the ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline, which earlier this month...

The Committee on Liberatory Information Technology has announced a long-standing Chromebook bug that could reveal user location history. Evidently already on the radar of Google, the platform has a feature allowing anyone with physical access to your device to connect as a guest and view your Wi-Fi logs. Of course, once said intruder has accessed these logs, they would then need the technical knowhow to make sense of them. However, if they are skilled enough, they may be able to track your place history by viewing your Wi-Fi network access over the past seven days. It turns out the bug...

A fire at a French cloud services firm has disrupted millions of websites, knocking out government agencies’ portals, banks, shops, news websites and taking out a chunk of the .FR web space, according to internet monitors. The fire, which broke out on Wednesday shortly after midnight at OVHcloud, destroyed one of four data centres in Strasbourg, in eastern France, and damaged another, the company said. There was no immediate explanation provided for the blaze, which erupted just two days after the French cloud computing firm kicked off plans for an initial public offering. Europe’s largest cloud services provider told clients...

The Nebraska Legislature will once again look at a bill on the Right to Repair. Introduced by Senator Tom Brandt of the 32nd District on Jan. 19, LB543, entitled the Agricultural Equipment Right-To-Repair Act, will, if passed, offer farmers a way to repair their equipment without having to wait on a dealer. A similar bill had been introduced in 2017. Lydia Brasch of the 16th District introduced LB67, “Adopt the Fair Repair Act,” but the bill was indefinitely postponed in 2018. Brandt said he spoke with other senators and decided the previous bill had been too broad. “The opposition it...