At Computer Courage, we help a lot of customers recover data and passwords, remove viruses and spyware, and restore computer systems. One thing we can’t help you with, however, is stolen identity and/or stolen funds. The modern age of computing has brought us many conveniences – I pay almost all of my bills online. Along with those conveniences come new responsibilities and risks, and having seen the worst of these risks, I’d like to devote this newsletter to helping our readers understand the risk of a dangerous technique called Phishing.
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As most of you know, we at Computer Courage are quite fond of our iPhones and the applications that can be downloaded for the iPhone. We’re currently using a slew of new applications such as WootWatch, Facebook 2.0, Sportacular, and FlyCast (listen to radio over WiFi or cellular network – very cool!)
Barack Obama says he represents a new set of ideas for America – that’s something we’re all pretty excited about. Watching the politicians, particularly Senators Obama and McCains, from a technonological perspective has also been interesting. Issues like net neutrality (learn about it here) are never going to make the TV debates, but they affect all of us and the presidential hopefulls have very different views. See this article by tech crunch for an overview.
Views aside, Obama just pushed the envelope with a new iPhone app that lets you take part in his campaign. This is pretty impressive. It encourages you to help out directly by donating (it helps you call a hotline, doesn’t let you enter your payment directly) and calling friends to pitch your option. It even goes so far as to prioritize your address book so you can call friends in battleground states first – very smart. Additionally, the application will allow you to see pictures and videos, read articles, receive updates, and do research on the issues. Naturally, the application is free for all iPhone users.
We highly recommend everyone check out this app – if you don’t have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you can head over to www.barackobama.com to get a lot of the same content (and maybe make a donation?)
Computer Courage is proud to announce that we’ve moved our office to 1700 Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Berkeley. Our old office was wonderful (thanks to the Grace North Church) but our new office is going to provide us with the breathing room we’ve needed for a while.
Come visit (or just send us flowers) and see our new space, our conference
As our loyal customers know, we at Computer Courage are big fans fo AVG Antivirus Free Edition. We also like to educate everyone about viruses, spyware, and virus removal.
Some of our customers have been complaining about AVG’s update warnings recently. Sure enough, we’ve also noticed that AVG doesn’t always manage to successfully update its virus definitions every day. This can be pretty annoying. The good news is that as AVG always eventually gets the job done, and it’s probably not too dangerous to be a day or two behind on virus definitions.
Still, we’ve come up with a quick guide to make AVG a little less annoying. Follow these steps to disable the AVG warnings. This way, you won’t be notified every time AVG can’t do an update. Caution – use this power tip at your own risk and always pay attention to AVG’s status – you want to take action immediately if AVG does find a virus.
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Everyone is trying to do their part for the environment these days, and we get a lot of questions about the impact of computers on the environment. Here are a few tips that can help you out.
The biggest environmental impact your PC makes is power. Every hour your PC is on is more energy burned. So the number one trick for reducting environmental impact is TURN IT OFF. If you can turn off your PC at night, you’re already reducing the power consumption by half.
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