New window tricks in Windows 7 and 8

There are new tricks in Windows 7 and 8 that make it easier to move windows around and get them to the size you want them. An earlier article shows you how to do lots of other tricks to get your windows set up.
This article shows you how to get the full vertical height of your screen without having to carefully move the top and bottom of your window to each edge.
To do this move your mouse to either the top or the bottom edge of the window you want to size. Be sure to place your mouse pointer on the edge, not just on the title bar. You will know you have the edge when the mouse pointer turns into an arrow that points both up and down.
Once you have a double-sided arrow pointing up and down click and drag the window to the edge of the screen. If your mouse is on the bottom of the window drag it to the bottom of the display. If you are at the top of the window drag it to the top edge of the display. Once you are at the top or bottom of the display you will see an animation showing you that you have contacted the edge of the display. Let go of the mouse button and your window will automatically stretch from the top to the bottom of the display. The left and right edges of the window will not adjust, just the top and bottom edges.
Once the window is stretched from the top to the bottom of the display you can drag the title bar to move the window left and right. If you want to restore the window to its size before it was stretched double click the title bar. Another way to restore the window is hold the WINDOWS key and hit the DOWNARROW key.

Malware presence on internet rises by 159% in 2014

The presence of malware, software intended to damage or disable computers and computer systems, on the internet has significantly increased in 2014, according to a new research report.
Cyber security firm, CYREN Security Lab, in its latest annual Cyberthreat Yearbook, said there was a 159% increase in malware URLs tracked by it in 2014. The firm says it monitors 17 billion transactions each day to protect more than 600 million users.
The report also showed that average daily number of emails containing malware increased by 50% to 2.5 billion.
In relation to spamming, the report noted that 42.34% of all spam was pharmacy related with the most frequent topic followed by job offers. However, there was a 30% decline in the average daily amount of spam to 54.6 billion.
"In December, CYREN observed its largest email attached malware outbreak for the year, with 10.7 billion emails sent on the 18th of the month, followed by another 10.7 billion malware-embedded emails on the 23^rd," Lior Kohavi, chief technical officer at CYREN, said in a statement.
"In the first and second quarters of 2014, CYREN began to observe macro-malware belonging to the Trojan families of Zbot and Dridex. Then in early November, CYREN observed an outbreak of over 3.02 billion emails containing advanced second generation macro-malware."
He added that macro malware was created in response to increased security measures, and its authors are trying to repurpose older tricks that users may have forgotten.
In 2014, big companies such as retailer Home Depot and film studio

Sony

Pictures suffered sophisticated hacking attacks. The Home Depot breach yielded about 110 million stolen pieces of sensitive information, including social security numbers and email addresses. Meanwhile,

Sony

suffered significant brand damage in addition to losing sensitive emails and employee social security numbers. CYREN noted that enterprises of all sizes are now besieged by cybercrime at an alarming rate.
It added that cybercriminals are now increasingly targeting smartphone users as well by authoring mobile malware. During 2014, there was 61% increase in the amount of mobile malware targeting Android devices, according to CYREN.
Organisations that use the Industrial Internet of Things are also not safe from cyberattacks, according to the firm. It warned that such firms will become more vulnerable if they fail to properly secure their latest technologies.

FREAK security flaw: Apple and Google users being spied on for a decade

Flaw has been around since late 1990s, and companies are scrambling to fix it

A huge security flaw in Apple and Google devices, dubbed FREAK, leaves phone and computer users vulnerable to hacking when they go to supposedly secure websites, according to researchers.

Those using most major computing devices could be listened in on when they go to websites, allowing them to steal passwords and other information.

The flaw seems to have come from an old US government policy that didn’t allow companies to export products with “export-grade” encryption, according to researchers, which meant computers and software sold outside of the US had weak security.
Though that rule was lifted in the late 1990s, the weak security had already been built into many computers and so continued to allow hackers and other people to gain access to computers.
Hackers were able to exploit the way computers connect to secure sites. Internet browsers exchange “keys” with sites so that they can be identified. But those keys must be encrypted, or hackers can crack them and intercept communications.
More than one-third of secure websites were vulnerable to the attack according to tests. There is no way of knowing how much it has been exploited.
Companies running secure and sensitive websites have mostly corrected the problems, according to researchers, though the NSA’s website remains insecure.
Apple is preparing a fix for the problem for the Safari browser on its computers and phones. Though Google Chrome is not vulnerable, the browser that comes bundled with Android is — though Google has developed a patch to fix it, it will be up to manufacturers when to push that out to users’ phones.
Researchers have named the flaw “FREAK”, for Factoring Attack on RSA-Export Keys.
Most experts thought that the technology behind it had fallen out of use. But the US restrictions, which were put in place as part of the “Crypto Wars” of the 1990s, meant that it continued to live on.
The problem arose because the systems continue to use 512-bit encryption — as opposed to the 1024-bit codes that are used now — which has for years been considered far too weak to use. One encryption expert said that the technology was “basically a zombie from the ‘90s”.
The discovery could be a warning to governments about the dangers of calling on technology companies to install “back doors” in software that allow them access, according to the Washington Post, which first reported the flaw. Officials including David Cameron have called for encrypted software to be weakened or banned so that authorities have access to communications.
Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the paper: “You cannot have a secure and an insecure mode at the same time… What we’ve seen is that those flaws will ultimately impact all users.”

 

DOWNLOAD A FULL MOVIE IN LESS THAN A SECOND

Researchers have achieved wireless speeds of 1 Tb per second

That’s fast enough to download 10 full-length movies in less than a second... wirelessly.

 

Researchers at the University of Surrey in England have achieved 5G speeds of 1 Terabit per second (Tbps) over 100 metres in the lab - by far the fastest wireless connection to date.The 5G, or fifth generation, mobile network will eventually replace our current 4G technology, with its comparatively poxy speeds of around 15 Mbps, and it's hoped that it will revolutionise how we use mobile devices.
It’s previously been estimated that speeds of 50 Gbps could be achieved on the 5G network, but now the University of Surrey’s 5G Innovation Centre (5GIC) has gone and smashed those expectations.“We have developed 10 more breakthrough technologies and one of them means we can exceed 1Tbps wirelessly,” Professor Rahim Tafazolli, the director of 5GIC, cryptically told Dan Worth for UK technology news site V3. “This is the same capacity as fibre optics but we are doing it wirelessly.”To put that into perspective, a US Internet provider last year rolled out the fastest home Internet ever in the Minnesotan city of Minneapolis, which reaches speeds of 10 Gbps. So this would be 100 times faster - which means you could download around 100 feature films in less than a second and stream multiple TV shows at once - all from your phone.However, we’re still a long way from showing that these speeds could be achieved in the real world. The tests were conducted in lab conditions over a distance of 100 metres, using transmitters and receivers created at the university.The team is now hoping to trial the wireless connection outside of the lab and onto the university campus over the next two years. If all goes to plan they want to open it up to the public in 2018. But even though the researchers have achieved such impressive speeds, their focus now is on improving the latency, the time it takes for information to travel to its location, and the reliability of the system.“An important aspect of 5G is how it will support applications in the future. We don’t know what applications will be in use by 2020, or 2030 or 2040 for that matter, but we know they will be highly sensitive to latency,” Tafazolli told Worth.“We need to bring end-to-end latency down to below one millisecond so that it can enable new technologies and applications that would just not be possible with 4G.”Bring on the future.