John Lister

A recent Windows 10 update appears to have broken the Alt-Tab feature. Thankfully there's a simple fix that doesn't involve compromising security or performance. Holding down the Alt button and then hitting Tab is one of the more long-standing and ... useful Windows keyboard shortcuts. For those who've somehow missed out, it lets users quickly switch between open windows, including those not currently visible at the foreground. In later editions of Windows, including Windows 10, the shortcut displays a small image of every open windows showing its current content. That's useful when running two ... (view more)

Internet Explorer 11 users will start losing access to Microsoft 365 this week. It's the latest step towards the browser being phased out altogether. Microsoft 365 is the subscription version of Microsoft Office. Rather than buy a one-off edition, ... users pay an annual fee and will always have access to the latest versions of tools such as Word and Excel. That's because Microsoft 365 works online rather than the bulk of the software being installed and running on the user's hard drive. Internet Explorer 11 was released in 2013 and became the default browser for Windows 8.1 and earlier. It was ... (view more)

T-Mobile is investigating claims a hacker stole sensitive data about more than 100 million customers. It hasn't confirmed or denied claims. The haul included social security numbers and driver license information. The alleged breach was first ... reported by Motherboard, which spotted a hacker forum post from somebody attempting to steal the data. The would-be seller says it comes from multiple T-Mobile servers and contains "full customer info" on US customers. The seller claims the haul includes names, phone numbers and physical addresses, along with IMEI numbers that identify individual ... (view more)

Firefox has added a new feature letting users remove all traces of visiting a website, including cookies. It builds on the browser's existing technology that makes it harder for a single site to track users across the web. Both features aim to ... tackle the problem that tracking and other records of online activity come from a variety of sources. Visiting a particular site creates several pieces of data on a computer, while cookies are made more complicated because the site that places them on a computer isn't always the same as the site that access and uses the cookie. Total Cookie Protection ... (view more)

Apple has admitted it scans iPhone images for pictures of children being abused. It says it will refuse any government request to use the facility for other purposes. The scans cover any photos uploaded to the iCloud Photos backup service rather ... than scanning the entire phone. This feature is switched off by default. Once it's switched on, any photo added to the device is automatically uploaded to iCloud and will therefore be covered by the new scans. When Apple scans the image, it doesn't try to figure out the content. Instead it compares it to a database of known child abuse images. If it ... (view more)

A government agency says three "random" words make for a better password than many other approaches. It says other strategies such as adding symbols and numbers can be counterproductive. The advice comes from the National Cyber Security Center ... (NCSC). That's a body in the United Kingdom that deals with major security breaches and gives advice to businesses and other government organizations. According to the NCSC, the advice is aimed at people who try to remember passwords. It says password manager tools are a good solution but remain widely unused. (Source: gov.uk ) Predictable Appr0@ch! The ... (view more)

A Senate committee has slammed cyber security in eight federal government agencies. The committee said most were failing basic security standards and had shown minimal improvements since a previous report. The report comes from the Committee on ... Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. It followed up on a similar report from another committee in 2019. Both reports looked at issues including: Whether the agencies adequately protected personal information. Whether they kept track of the various IT equipment and systems they used. Whether they installed security patches quickly enough. Whether ... (view more)

At least 175 countries have some form of online censorship according to a newly-published study. The degree varies wildly, however, and is somewhat dependent on definitions. The report comes from Comparitech, which ranked the 175 countries for ... "censorship" in six categories of Internet use: file sharing torrents, pornography, political media, social media, virtual private networks and apps for messaging or voice over Internet protocol (such as Skype). For each category it gave the country one point if it had some form of legal restriction and two points for an outright ban. That ... (view more)

Microsoft has explained the thinking behind some of the main changes in Windows 11. It's also tweaked a notification feature that could have been unnecessarily annoying. According to Microsoft it used a "new approach" in designing Windows 11. It ... suggests that the "new approach" was to give users what they wanted. The move to "human-centered design practices" involved giving users several pieces of paper marked with different operating system features and asking them to arrange them in order of importance. In an amazing coincidence, Microsoft says "the research matched up perfectly ... (view more)

A security company has warned that scammers are using bogus copies of Windows 11 to distribute malware. Kaspersky reminds users that Microsoft's Windows Insider test program is the only place to get the real deal. While the average user can safely ... wait until the system's official release, tech enthusiasts may be eager to get their hands on Windows 11. That interest may well rise in the coming days with the first release of a beta edition that, in theory at least, is complete and much less likely to crash than the currently available "dev" edition. Kaspersky notes that several rogue sites are ... (view more)