Facebook says it will no longer accept advertisements that link to "low-quality" web pages. It's also going to reduce the likelihood that people see user-posted links to such pages. The system Facebook uses for identifying such pages will be ... automated but is based on guidelines developed from manually reviewing "hundreds of thousands" of pages that Facebook had linked to. After staff decided which of these sites were low quality, its computers looked through those pages to spot patterns of common characteristics. (Source: fb.com ) Toenail Fungus Unwelcome Facebook isn ... (view more)

Microsoft has suffered a hugely embarrassing security flaw that takes advantage of a bug in Windows' built-in security software. But, security experts have praised its extremely rapid response. The bug, spotted by Google's Tavis Ormandy, was in ... Microsoft's own malware protection tools (including Windows Defender), which is built directly into Windows. Such tools have been so successful that for many users, third-party security tools are no longer necessary. The problem was specifically with a tool known as MsMpEng, (short for Microsoft Malware Protection Engine) that is enabled by ... (view more)

An estimated one million people around the world received a recent phishing email, though it only posed a risk for around an hour before Google stepped in to stop the scam in its tracks. Victims of the scam may have inadvertently given attackers ... control of their email accounts. The attack involved a bogus email claiming that a contact tried to share a document with the recipient using Google Docs. While only a small proportion of people use Google Docs, the attackers appear to have been playing the numbers game. Attackers Accessed Emails and Contacts Unlike most phishing scams, the attackers ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Shelly T. writes: " Dear Dennis, I'm trying to uninstall Winzip, but it failed during the uninstall. Now there doesn't seem to be any way to uninstall this annoying program! When I searched Google, I came across instructions on ... Winzip's website that says in order to uninstall Winzip, go to Control Panel -> Programs and Features and uninstall from there. The problem is that Winzip isn't listed anywhere - and yet, the program remains on my computer. For example, I've installed 7zip (after attempting to uninstall Winzip), and had even had 7zip registered to open my .ZIP ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader George F. writes: " Dear Dennis, I just purchased a new AMD Ryzen 1700 CPU, motherboard, and RAM for my computer - wow what a speed difference! Before I installed the new hardware I backed up all my data using Macrium Reflect. I ... would like to move Firefox to my new computer. I just read your article about moving Thunderbird to a new computer and was wondering if the steps are the same? " My response: Moving a Firefox user profile over to a new computer (or new user) is almost identical to moving over a user profile in Thunderbird, though the folder locations are different. ... (view more)

Microsoft has unveiled a new variant of Windows 10 known as Windows 10 S. It has some key benefits for price and security, but with some major drawbacks. The new variant of the system will be built in to several machines, ranging from more basic ... $189 laptops to a $999 Microsoft Surface, which combines an ordinary laptop with a touch screen. The name doesn't stand for something specific, but rather Microsoft has thrown around terms such as security, simplicity, speed and streamlined. Devices running at the system will be billed as loading and running more quickly than many rivals and all ... (view more)

Facebook is rejecting claims that it let advertisers target users based on their current mood. It says research into the technology was carried out, but not used for advertising. "The Australian" newspaper report was based on leaked internal data ... that says Facebook could figure out mood swings based on combined data from user posts and pictures, the interactions they had with other users, and other activity on the site. Some of the moods which Facebook could reportedly discover included feeling anxious, defeated, nervous, overwhelmed, silly, stressed, stupid, useless or a failure. ... (view more)

The National Security Agency (NSA) is to revise a controversial program that let it read emails from US citizens without a warrant. It also says it will delete many of the messages it collected in this way. The program has been dubbed "Section 702 ... activities", named after the relevant part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Such activities are significant because they are an exception to the general principle that the NSA doesn't carry out surveillance within the US, something that would normally bring constitutional rights to privacy into play. Section 702 allowed ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Suzanne S. writes: " Dear Dennis, I just purchased a new Windows 10 PC and I would like to move my Thunderbird emails over to my new computer and new user account. I've looked in the 'Tools' menu of Thunderbird for an 'export' ... feature of some kind - hoping to export my user data for re-import on the new machine - but, there does not appear to be such an option. Can you help? " My response: Moving Thunderbird to a new computer or user account is fairly easy to do using Thunderbird's built in "Profile Manager". All you need to do is copy the Thunderbird user data ... (view more)

Infopackets Reader Neil S. writes: " Dear Dennis, I am trying to access a mapped network drive via an administrative command prompt in Windows 10, but I keep receiving the error that 'The system cannot find the drive specified.' The strange thing is ... that if I run a regular command prompt, I can access the mapped network drive. I am trying to write a batch script to perform maintenance on the network drive, and I need administrative access to be able to do it. Can you help? " My response: I have run into this problem a number of times. There are two ways to get around this issue: one is to try ... (view more)