Author: Summer Powell

Once upon a time, Ask.com (formerly Ask Jeeves) was primarily a search engine and was even competitive with the likes of Google and Yahoo. Sadly, in the years since then, Ask hasn’t aged so well. In 2005 Ask was acquired by a company named InterActiveCorp, an umbrella organization that owns many other popular websites like Dictionary.com, Match.com and About.com. InterActiveCorp is also notorious for pushing toolbar downloads through many of its properties, the most well known of which is the Ask.com Toolbar. While this toolbar is not technically malware, since it does ask permission to install, it is most commonly…

I was a little surprised when I found out iTunes was one of the programs people most often search for help uninstalling. But after I thought about it for a minute, it made a little sense. iTunes is installed on millions of computers and one of the first and easiest troubleshooting steps when working on an iTunes error is to uninstall and reinstall it. Sound simple enough. Actually, it is pretty simple, but if you’re trying to uninstall everything that is installed with iTunes it’s not quite as straightforward as you might think at first. Here’s how to completely uninstall…

I was going to write a big long introduction about why you would want your search results to be private, but I honestly don’t think I need to anymore. We’re all aware that the NSA and probably other government agencies are in the habit of collecting both private and public conversations. And we know that massive internet companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo and others are built on a foundation of advertising, where knowing as much about your potential customer as possible is the name of the game. These days it seems like everybody wants to know as much as everybody…

Today I’m going to show you how downloading a single program and spending 2 minutes configuring it can substantially improve the security of your computer. With this software installed, your PC will be almost completely hacker-proof. First, you’ll need to download the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) from Microsoft and install it. It’s best to use the Recommended Settings option. This will enable recommended settings designed to protect against the exploitation of the most commonly vulnerable programs. These program include Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Outlook Adobe Reader, the Java plug-in, and Wordpad. Next, open the EMET GUI (which can…

The operating system is the most important piece of software on your computer. Every other program on your computer relies on the operating system in order to run. Most people know Windows is an operating system, and many also know Macs have their own operating system that is not based on Windows. But did you know there are a lot of other operating systems available for your computer, most of which are completely free? You’ve probably heard of Linux at some point. It’s the operating system that most servers on the internet use, and a lot of other connected devices…

I test a lot of software. A LOT of software. Literally hundreds, maybe even thousands, of programs both for my professional work and because I really like playing with computers. But installing  and then uninstalling hundreds of programs on a single computer can cause unintended consequences. I really don’t like having a cluttered PC, and doing all that software testing is a good way to cause a lot of clutter. Fortunately there is a way to run two (or even more) completely different operating systems on your computer at the same time using a technology called “virtualization”. Virtualization technology basically…

Let’s say you have a friend on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram or whatever that always posts horrible hilarious pictures. These pictures are so horrible hilarious, in fact, that you’d like to find out where your friend is getting them from. A couple years ago this meant you’d have to randomly surf the internet looking for pictures similar to the one your friend posted, hoping you’d eventually find the right website. But now many search engines have added a “reverse image search” feature. This feature actually lets you search the web using an image instead of a search term. It…

Online advertising is a trillion dollar industry. It is arguably the life blood of the internet and the fuel for almost all of the web’s most popular destinations. Google alone is valued at nearly $400 billion and the vast majority of that is from online advertising through its AdWords platform. Facebook, Twitter, and most other search engines are also backed almost entirely by the advertising revenue they generate. If online advertising were to disappear tomorrow, most of the internet as we know it today would disappear with it. Except maybe Wikipedia. With that in mind, it’s easy to see why…

We truly are living in the future. Google has working self-driving cars, Microsoft is testing software that does automatic instant voice translation, and NASA’s Voyager spacecraft has left our solar system and entered interstellar space. All of these developments were merely science fiction 20 years ago. And now you can even search the web without ever touching your keyboard. OK, maybe that’s not quite as unbelievable as cars that drive themselves and the other stuff I just mentioned, but it’s still pretty cool and would have been hard to believe 15 years ago. To search the web using your voice,…

According to YouTube, more than 100 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute and more than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month. That’s more than 680,000 YEARS of video watched every single month on YouTube. While I’m sure most of those views are from people who only watch a video once, I’m also pretty confident many of those views are from people watching the same video more than once, maybe many times. If there’s a video you’d like to save for offline viewing, so you’re not having to visit YouTube every time you want to…