Old Time Cyber Christmas

It's Friday and it's the Solstice. Tomorrow the days begin to get longer and the nights shorter. Plus it's the Friday before the long Christmas weekend! So, Happy Solstice and Merry Christmas!

 Today is just a web site. While most people are flocking to Spotify and Sound Cloud for their music online, there are other forms that have existed for much longer and they often cater to very specialized audiences.

 I've been a listener of Shoutcast streams for a long time. They have a plethora of Old Time Radio broadcasts that I absolutely love and they give a variety of ways to listen. It's a matter of searching and trying different terms and keywords until you come up with the right station.

At this time of year it's easy to find streams for seasonally themed streams of all kinds! Most can be played on your desktop in whatever media app you are using. Or you can just use the web site. And it is free.

Just click the logo below!

Prancing Toward Christmas

New Wallpaper Post!

Your Internet Connection Isn't Really Yours

CenturyLink briefly disabled the Internet connections of customers in Utah last week and allowed them back online only after they acknowledged an offer to purchase filtering software."

According to CenturyLink, it was shown in error - They misunderstood a new law regarding filtering software. It's a bit bizarre. Why would they think that they needed to go to such great lengths to fulfil the requirement of the new law? Other providers managed it handily less invasive methods.

Read the rest of the article at ArsTechnica.

Just had @CenturyLink block my internet and then inject this page into my browser (dns spoofing I think) to advertise their paid filtering software to me. Clicking OK on the notice then restored my internet... this is NOT okay! pic.twitter.com/NtCZUeJF8I

— Rich Snapp (@Snapwich) December 9, 2018

Free Friday - Ice Cream Apps PDF

Free Friday is here!

PDFs. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Adobe has been the ruler in the land of PDFs for nearly as long as computers have existed, mostly because it distributed its PDF Reader with new computers.

Now Adobe no longer has downloadable software and pretty much only offers PDF software as a monthly subscription. I'm sure that we all wish them well.

😐

Thankfully, there's a new kid in town. Icecream Apps! They have made the perfect PDF app for Windows. Seriously. I hate PDFs (admittedly that was because of the bloated, klunky, unintuitive Adobe programs). But this program might change my mind about them. I sat down with it last night and was able to create and edit PDFs without breaking a sweat or reading an instruction manual.

Can you imagine what I could do if I read the directions?

There are tons of features without the bloat. There are too many to list here. The download and installation is a breeze straight from the site.

Uninstall Adobe and get Ice Cream PDF Editor now. Go on. You really should. And while you are there, check out their other apps. I'm pretty sure I need some of the others.

New Opinion Post

We have a new opinion post up at our main website's blog, Sayre-Computer.com:

Data Aggregation and a Breach

Free Friday Is Back with Photopea

Today's Freebie is Photopea. It serves as a replacement for the quite expensive cloud-based Adobe Photoshop. (Doesn't replace the free and open source native program GIMP. I love GIMP.)

If you are a user of Photoshop, Photopea is super easy to use and it is full featured.

As a GIMP user, I had to do my usual tinkering around. But aside from the usual trips to the FAQs to figure out how to use some of the tools, it wasn't hard.

The tutorials are very good. There are only a few of them, but they are nice to have.

The FAQs are excellent. The FAQs are excellent because the Develops respond to questions. Seriously. They actually pay attention to the comments and respond. I know, right? There should be some kind of dev award for that.

Go ahead, give the free version a whirl. If you like it and want to get rid of the ads or just support the developer, you can upgrade to the paid version. The free version is great and the only tool you can't use is converting Sketch to PSD (no other program does that), which most people do not need.

Very, very cool online app! Click on the image to get to the app!

Freebie Friday - Evernote

Freebie Friday! Today we are going to take a look at Evernote!

Evernote is a handy note-taking app that has spread its wings to nearly every platform around. There are versions for Android, iOS, Mac, Windows and an unauthorized versions for Linux.

There are a ton of uses for Evernote. Basically, if you once used a notebook to write something down, you can now use Evernote to keep track of it. Organize your day, collect and store information for a task, highlight the important matters, share with friends and family.

I use Evernote to store and organize recipes that I find online. I copy and paste the recipe into Evernote with a thumbnail picture of the dish and when I'm in the kitchen, my phone has the information! I keep the recipes in two categories - Yummers and Untried. If the Untried are horrible, they get deleted. If delicious, they go to the Yummers category! I also use it for little things like instructions for simple crafts.

The basic, free version of Evernote includes 60mb of new uploads a month and syncing on two devices. If you need more than that, you can get it for around $35 a year. I've never bumped up against the limits of the free version of Evernote though.

Give Evernote a try!

KRACK AKA WPA-2 Vulnerabilities

Some of you may have heard about the KRACK (Key Reinstallation AttACK) Vulnerability by now. It's widespread and it effects any platform or device that connects over wifi. It's a serious vulnerability because the flaw lies in the connection (Wireless Protected Access - WPA and WPA2) rather than the platform (Android, Windows, iOS, Linux). Platforms can be hardened against attacks, but updating the router is the main way to protect the data sent over wifi.

It is important to note that devices are only vulnerable to attackers if they are within the range of your network.

It only effects routers that are connected in bridge mode. Most routers are not in bridge mode as it is not a default setting.

One of the ways that you can protect your data when browsing the web is by installing the HTTPS Everywhere on your browser. You can find links to the extensions for Firefox (Firefox for Android is also included), Chrome and Opera browsers at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. There is currently no extension for Edge or Internet Explorer.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere

The response from tech companies has varied widely.

Microsoft, Apple and Ubuntu have all patched vulnerable systems and rolled out the fixes.

Google's response:

"We're aware of the issue, and we will be patching any affected devices in the coming weeks."

A slew of other devices that have not yet addressed the problem. I looked for a statement from Samsung and Verizon (my mobile device) this morning and could find none. I found a couple of customer inquiry messages on the Samsung community forum on a search engine, but when I went to the site, the messages had been deleted. I couldn't find anything on social media for either company.

Netgear's website is awesome. The directions for updating our router were crystal clear and up to date. It was easy.

You can find a brief description of the problem and list of devices effected here:
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/228519

Note that the statements from various manufacturers do not seem to be current. Your best bet is to go to the company's website and look for a statement regarding KRACK.

The most important fix will be updating your router's firmware. Again, it's best to visit the manufacturer's website for that.

If that is unsuccessful, try a search.

Of course, if you want help with any of this, give us a call and we'll be happy to help!

570-882-8851

CCleaner Compromised by Malware

If you use CCleaner, update to the latest version. From Bleeping Computer:

In an email to Bleeping Computer, Avast CTO Ondrej Vlcek said that updating CCleaner to the most recent recent versions fixes any issues, as "the only malware to remove is the one embedded in the CCleaner binary itself."

The malware is only executed if the application is run on the administrative account level. That should leave out non-rooted Android phones, but it's always a good idea to update anyway. Avast (the giant security company) bought out Piriform (the original owners of CCleaner) in July of this year.

Free Friday! Zero Dollar Movies

What could be better than two hours of Betty Boop Cartoons?

I found it by using Zero Dollar Movies. It's an awesome little website that scours YouTube for free movies in different "languages". Okay, Bollywood is not a language, it's a category, but that's what the drop-down list specifies. I selected English. I jumped on two hours of Betty Boop. Awesome. You have a choice of watching the movie of your choice sandboxed on the Zero Dollar Movies website or on YouTube.

There's a wealth of Bollywood movies too!

Enjoy!