Backpage News

Take a screenshot or a screencast, have it uploaded and get the URL copied to your clipboard with a single hotkey. ShareX supports over 50 different image, text, and file hosting services such as... Read more about ShareX 11.0.1 on Lunarsoft. View the full article

CCleaner – also known as Crap Cleaner – is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files,... Read more about CCleaner 5.18 on Lunarsoft. View the full article

The latest installment of the Nvidia GeForce drivers bring support for the following: Game Ready Learn more about how to get the optimal experience for Mirror’s Edge Catalyst and Edge of Nowhere Gaming Technology Supports the new GeForce GTX 1070 graphics card which delivers the incredible speed and power of NVIDIA Pascal™—the most advanced GPU ever created. This is the ultimate gaming platform. Virtual Reality Supports the new GeForce GTX 1080 and GTX 1070 VRWorks features including Lens Matched Shading and Single Pass Stereo Download: Nvidia Drivers View the full article

Take a screenshot or a screencast, have it uploaded and get the URL copied to your clipboard with a single hotkey. ShareX supports over 50 different image, text, and file hosting services such as Imgur, FTP, Dropbox, Pastebin etc. Also supports many URL shortening and sharing services. Upload any files using configurable hotkeys, clipboard upload, drag and drop or from the Windows Explorer context menu. Including useful tools like a screen color picker, an image editor, a ruler, a DNS changer, a QR code generator, a directory indexer and more. 11.0.1: Added annotation support inside region capture. In region capture you can right click to open menu which you c…

CCleaner - also known as Crap Cleaner - is a disk cleanup utility that goes beyond the scope of the built in Windows Disk Cleanup tool. Featuring the ability to clean up temporary files, browser history and cache, the Recycle Bin, along with Windows applications that you install. There is also a registry cleaner, uninstall helper, startup manager, System Restore manager and disk wiper. You can choose to have your data cleaned with a single pass or range up to the Gutmann 35 pass data cleaning sequence. There's even a cookie manager and free space wiper. One of the great things about CCleaner is that it automates all of these cleanings so you don't have to hunt down these …

Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and LinkedIn Corporation (NYSE: LNKD) on Monday announced they have entered into a definitive agreement under which Microsoft will acquire LinkedIn for $196 per share in an all-cash transaction valued at $26.2 billion, inclusive of LinkedIn’s net cash. LinkedIn will retain its distinct brand, culture and independence. Jeff Weiner will remain CEO of LinkedIn, reporting to Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft. Reid Hoffman, chairman of the board, co-founder and controlling shareholder of LinkedIn, and Weiner both fully support this transaction. The transaction is expected to close this calendar year. LinkedIn is the world’s largest and most va…

Facebook has a link problem. Earlier this week, a security researcher named Inti De Ceukelaire detailed a curious fact about how Facebook Messenger treats privately shared links. Through the right API call, De Ceukelaire was able to summon links shared by specific users in private messages. The links were collected by the Facebook crawler, where De Ceukelaire discovered they were easily accessible to anyone running a Facebook app. Those links could be anything from a popular news story to directions to an abortion clinic. As long as they’re shared in private messages, they’re logged in Facebook’s database, and accessible to API calls. It would be hard to exploit that…

Facebook has decided on quite the way to convince people to download Moments: by threatening to delete thousands of photos if they don't. The notice has to do with a photo syncing feature that was recently removed from Facebook's main mobile app. Starting in 2012, the core Facebook app was able to automatically upload photos from a phone's local camera roll to a private album on Facebook. They were kept there for storage, but also to make it easier to later share them publicly on Facebook. That syncing tool has now been moved out of the core Facebook app and into the photo app Moments. Facebook made it clear that this would happen — and in fact it happened month…

Global ad provider Google has come out in favor of the controversial Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade agreement. The web giant's general counsel Kent Walker noted in a blog post that the agreement "is not perfect" and decried the lack of transparency that has dogged the process, but argues that it "recognizes the Internet's transformative impact on trade." "The Internet has revolutionized how people can share and access information, and the TPP promotes the free flow of information in ways that are unprecedented for a binding international agreement," Walker writes. "The TPP requires the 12 participating countries to allow cross-border transfers of inf…

No matter how many times we tell you to change your passwords and make it anything but your birthday, “123456,” or “password,” many still aren’t taking the efforts to make their accounts more secure. So Microsoft is actively doing something about it by banning weak passwords entirely. The team calls it “dynamically banned,” which means that if your account uses a password that appears in the most-used/stolen password list, Microsoft will force you to create a more complex one instead. This will apply to Microsoft Account and Azure AD services. Here’s the screen to look out for, if your password is too dumb for Microsoft. In addition, Micr…

Facebook could be listening in on people’s conversations all of the time, an expert has claimed. The app might be using people’s phones to gather data on what they are talking about, it has been claimed. Facebook says that its app does listen to what’s happening around it, but only as a way of seeing what people are listening to or watching and suggesting that they post about it. The feature has been available for a couple of years, but recent warnings from Kelli Burns, mass communication professor at the University of South Florida, have drawn attention to it. Professor Burns has said that the tool appears to be using the audio it gathers not simply …

Not two weeks ago, LinkedIn made big data breach news when hackers claimed to have more than 100 million usernames and passwords up for sale. Fortunately, the data wasn’t new, coming from a breach that happened four years ago. What was new was the size of the list that was up for sale, nearly 20 times the size of the 6.5 million passwords that were reported to have been stolen back in June 2012. The LinkedIn breach was made worse by the way the passwords were stored, using unsalted SHA-1 hashes. What that means is that although LinkedIn didn’t keep your actual password, it didn’t do enough to secure it against a breach. View the full article

Apple’s iTunes App Store is home to over 1.5 million apps and Google Play hosts over 2 million, but the number of apps that actually get installed and used on consumers’ devices is still quite small. We already knew that people only interacted with a small handful of third-party apps on a regular basis, and now, according to a new study on mobile app usage, we learn that about one in four mobile users only use an app once. Based on data from analytics firm Localytics, and its user base of 37,000 applications, user retention has seen a slight increase year-over-year from 34 percent in 2015 to 38 percent in 2016. However, just because this figure has recovered a b…

Chipset manufacturers have been boosting processing power by leaps and bounds in recent years. Now, Intel is going one better with the next-generation Broadwell-E chip family, its first ever 10-core desktop processor. You heard that right: Intel is going for "10-core" in its branding here, ditching the logical naming progression to "deca-core." Apparently, we don't need Latin with speeds like this chip promises. The company is targeting power users with its next "Extreme Edition" of Core i7 chips, saying they've been designed with gamers, VR fans, content creators and overclockers in mind. Intel calls these users "mega-taskers." Apparently if you're still just m…

Security researchers have discovered critical vulnerabilities in popular off-the-shelf HP, Acer, Dell, Asus and Lenovo laptops that make it possible for hackers to hijack and compromise the PCs in less than 10 minutes. Among cybersecurity professionals, it's commonly known that if you want to have a secure PC, you probably shouldn't use a regular off-the-shelf consumer laptop as they come with 'bloatware', or third-party pre-installed software that users don't really need. However, no one has ever definitively proved that consumer laptops aren't that secure, so researchers from Duo Security in the US decided to test out 10 different laptops by HP, Acer, Dell, As…

Samsung Electronics, the world leader in advanced memory technology, announced today that it has begun mass producing the industry’s first NVMe* PCIe solid state drive (SSD) in a single ball grid array (BGA) package, for use in next-generation PCs and ultra-slim notebook PCs. The new BGA NVMe SSD, named PM971-NVMe, features an extremely compact package that contains all essential SSD components including NAND flash memory, DRAM and controller while delivering outstanding performance. “Samsung’s new BGA NVMe SSD triples the performance of a typical SATA SSD, in the smallest form factor available, with storage capacity reaching up to 512GB,” said Jung-bae Lee, senior v…

Starbreeze AB, an independent creator, publisher and distributor of high quality entertainment products, today announced its agreement with 505 Games to acquire the full rights to the PAYDAY-franchise. The consideration for the acquisition amounts to 10.9 million B-shares in Starbreeze, equivalent to 30 MUSD (approx. 249 MSEK). After the transaction Starbreeze will own the full rights to the PAYDAY-franchise for any future developments or commercialization, including PAYDAY 2 and PAYDAY for mobile platforms. Starbreeze will retain full net revenue from PAYDAY 2 on the Steam platform starting retroactively from May 1st, 2016. Revenue generated by the console game PAYD…

Facebook will now display ads to web users who are not members of its social network, the company announced Thursday, in a bid to significantly expand its online ad network. As The Wall Street Journal reports, Facebook will use cookies, "like" buttons, and other plug-ins embedded on third-party sites to track members and non-members alike. The company says it will be able to better target non-Facebook users and serve relevant ads to them, though its practices have come under criticism from regulators in Europe over privacy concerns. Facebook began displaying a banner notification at the top of its News Feed for users in Europe today, alerting them to its use of cookies as…

While we’ve spent a lot of time over the past year talking about Windows 10 (including new roadmap details), we know that organizations are still working with Windows 7 too, regularly updating their Windows 7 SP1 images to include the latest updates, app versions, and more. For those that are involved in that process, you’ve probably seen a display like this too many times: New Windows 7 SP1 convenience rollup makes image creation much faster We’re happy to announce today that we’re making available a new convenience rollup for Windows 7 SP1 that will help. This convenience rollup package, available to download from http://catalog.update.microsoft.com/v7/site/…

Flash storage is too slow for your device's main memory, but RAM is expensive and volatile. Thanks to a breakthrough from IBM, phase-change memory (PCM) might one day replace them both. The crystal-based storage has been used in optical disks and other tech for at least 15 years, but the technology has been limited by the cost and storage density -- cells are either "on" or "off." However, IBM researchers have figured out how to save 3-bits of data per cell, dramatically increasing the capacity of the original tech. To store PCM data on a Blu-ray disk, you apply a high current to amorphous (non-crystalline) glass materials, transforming them into a more conductive cr…

Samsung has just announced a 256GB microSD card, raising the bar for storage on the format. SanDisk recently released a 200GB microSD card — that up until now was the highest capacity microSD card — back in March, but it'll have to settle for second place for now. The EVO Plus 256GB microSD card has read and write speeds of 95MB/s and 90MB/s respectively, and can store up to 55,200 photos, 12 hours of 4K video, 33 hours of full HD video, or 23,500 songs. Samsung says the card will come with a 10-year limited warranty and will be available in over 50 countries beginning in June for $249.99. Source: The Verge View the full article

Microsoft is removing part of its controversial Wi-Fi Sense feature from Windows 10. "We have removed the Wi-Fi Sense feature that allows you to share Wi-Fi networks with your contacts and to be automatically connected to networks shared by your contacts," says Microsoft's Gabe Aul. "The cost of updating the code to keep this feature working combined with low usage and low demand made this not worth further investment." Wi-Fi Sense was originally introduced on Windows Phone and then updated and included with Windows 10. It's a feature that lets you automatically connect to open hotspots, and share your Wi-Fi passwords with contacts. Some security experts had expresse…

A commissioner at the US Federal Trade Commission who is leaving the agency after six years of working on consumer privacy issues has some critical words for the ad industry. Speaking with Ad Age, departing FTC commissioner Julie Brill lamented the current state of consumer tracking and data collection on the web, linking the rampant rise of ad blockers with the ad industry's foot-dragging and non-cooperation in the commission's efforts to create privacy systems based on user consent. "We've seen an incredible rise in consumers taking matters into their own hands, which is precisely what I said would happen back then," said Brill, who has tackled a host of consu…

I got whiplash this afternoon doing a double-take on the improbable announcement that Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker has seen fit to appoint David Cohen, senior vice president and chief lobbyist at Comcast, to the first-ever Digital Economy Board of Advisors, which counts among its goals protecting a free and open Internet. He will be joined by AT&T’s chief lobbyist, the omnipresent Mr. James Cicconi. Neither has much patience for Net Neutrality. Cicconi and Cohen have both lobbied Congress and regulators to keep Comcast and AT&T free from regulation and oversight, even as Comcast imposes usage-billing and data caps on a growing number of its customers, wh…

By now, usage caps on both fixed and wireless networks have grown increasingly common. And while broadband carriers are endlessly looking toward caps and zero rating for a competitive and financial advantage, overlooked is the fact that a huge amount of a user's monthly bandwidth allotment is now being eroded by good old advertising. How much? According to a new study by Enders Analysis, anywhere from 18% to 79% of your monthly data bucket can go toward delivering advertising. Previous studies had pegged this between 10% and 50%. Looking at individual page elements, between the ads and the Javascript used sometimes to deliver them, this data consumption can be substa…