Despite that there are still a shocking number of Windows 7 users spread around the world, Microsoft has kept with its previously published end of support schedule, and is no longer supporting the venerable product.

The company has also begun quietly pulling the plug on applications that were central to the Windows 7 user experience, including (according to updated support documents) Windows Media Player and the Windows Media Center from versions 7 and 8.1 of the OS.

One of the most notable changes from a user's perspective is the fact that audio and video meta data will no longer be updated.

At one point or another, everybody has done it.  You open a browser and type in the URL of a site you visit frequently.  In doing so, your finger slips and you mistype it.  Sometimes, nothing comes of it except that you get an error message. Knowing that, increasing numbers of hackers have gotten into the habit of buying up domains that are slight misspellings of popular, mainstream brands.

One of the unfortunate truths about apps is that many developers use deceptive practices to try and confuse consumers.

They try to mislead them about how much custom features cost and when in-app purchases occur.

Many attempt to hide or obfuscate the particulars of subscription details.

In the world of hacking, steganography ranks as one of the most difficult methodologies to detect.

If you're not familiar with the term, it is the practice of embedding executable code inside images, which makes it virtually impossible to detect.

Google has kept no secret of their plan to eventually put an end to their social media experiment, Google+.  In case you haven't been keeping abreast of the company's announcements where the service is concerned, be aware that it will be shutting down on April 2nd of 2019.

The closer we've gotten to that deadline, the more details we've gotten from the company about how the shutdown will go.

On paper, UltraViolet seemed like a great idea.  It was (and still is, for the moment) a service that stored your license information for various digital media you purchased.

You could buy a movie from Amazon Prime, buy something else from some other online vendor, and watch them on any number of devices without having to log into individual services.

The first browser update of 2019 is officially out. Both Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers are getting a raft of security fixes that will help make Mac, Linux and Windows users safer and more secure.

The latest build of Chrome addresses nearly sixty CVE-level flaws, seventeen of which are rated as being "high" severity, and one rated as 'critical.

Apple's latest iOS release contained a feature that wowed and excited its massive user base.  Group FaceTime.  It was heralded as 'the next Big Thing' in the Apple ecosystem.

Unfortunately, there are problems, and the company has been forced to temporarily disable the feature while they wrestle with a major security flaw.

When was the last time you conducted a company wide audit on all the software running on all the machines tied to your firm's network?  If you're not sure the answer to that question, it's almost certainly been too long.  The risk, at least according to the latest survey from Avast, is that there are almost certainly programs running on those PCs that are outdated.

There's a new strain of ransomware making the rounds, and it's a nasty piece of work. Called Phobos by its creators, the latest threat on the ransomware scene first made an appearance in December of 2018.

While details are sketchy, what we know so far about it is grim indeed.