Hello everybody. Almost all of us do it every single day. You open your computer, laptop, smart phone or tablet to see what is new on Facebook. In fact, many of you do more
communicating on social media then in real life.
Social media sites have become not only a way to communicate but also a means by which we spread the word about our own business or that of a company of which you are a fan. The security settings in most of these sites are very confusing and often hard to configure. Even when they are configured as expected you would be surprised how many prying eyes are watching.
One of the features of Facebook that is getting a lot of backlash from users is the ability for the social giant to “listen” with the microphone while you are listening to music on your smart phone and can automatically update your status and post the song you are listening to without any effort on your part. In other words, it is automatic. The media can come from an assortment of places such as music, You Tube or maybe a TV show on HBO Go. I don’t know about you but a social network that can “listen” to what I am doing sounds pretty bizarre at the very least.
The function can supposedly be disabled but the question is how many folks do not even know that it is activated? There have been numerous complaints about the option but if history holds true, most of them will never be read.
The truth is that if you want to have an account on a social networking site, you can expect privacy. It simply is not going to happen. If you want total privacy, delete your Facebook account entirely.
With the end of support for Windows XP well into its third month, I have not heard of any major issues affecting the OS. In fact a couple of updates were released after the official end of support. I doubt that any more updates will be received for XP, at least not for the average user. Many companies have paid a fee to Microsoft to keep the updates flowing so there is without question a team that is creating these patches. In fact, many ATM machines are using Windows XP as their primary operating system.
Users have actually found a hack that can allow you to tap into the updates being offered to the ATM machines. This hack has been reported to work but I have not tested it myself. The hack can make your XP computer think it is an ATM machine and receive the updates that are offered.
The flavor of XP being used in these devices is not the same as what we use in our computers so there are some dangers in using this approach to keep receiving updates. The updates, since they are not tested on a conventional XP machine, could create operational issues as well as simply not offering the protection that is needed for surfing the web.
We do not endorse anybody trying this since the issues that could result are unknown and you could wind up with a non-bootable operating system.
The hack is extremely simple and it only requires a user to create a simple registry entry.
According to PC World, all you need to do is create a new text document and then add the following 3 lines:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESYSTEMWPAPosReady]
“Installed”=dword:00000001
Save this file as a .txt extension and then rename it to a .reg using the right click rename option. Now double click the file and it will be added to your registry.
Although users who have done this have not reported any negative issues, we strongly do not recommend trying this hack unless you have a real good backup of your system. We include the hack mainly for reference so you know what it is and how it works.
By Joe Z
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