Ask.com is one of the internet’s oldest properties. It is not as well-known as the titans of the web (Google, Yahoo, etc.) but almost everyone who has spent any time at all on the internet is familiar with the brand, and its popular browser-based toolbar, distributed by the APN (Ask Partner Network) is used by millions.

Nobody likes CAPTCHAs. They’re annoying. They slow you down when you’re trying to log into a site that has data you need. Unfortunately, CAPTCHAs themselves proved necessary to help weed out bots and keep them at bay.

They come in a variety of shapes and sizes, but in Google’s case, they began using text digitized during the course of the company’s massive Book Indexing project.

If you’re a business owner, and you haven’t yet heard of BEC scams, it’s a term you owe it to yourself to get familiar with. The acronym stands for Business Email Compromise, otherwise known as CEO fraud, and it’s growing in popularity.

The basic idea is that a hacker spends time studying your business, how it operates and who you do business with.

The security company Checkpoint recently found a critical security flaw in both the Whatsapp and Telegram services that could have spelled big trouble for their users.

Fortunately, it has already been patched with no apparent damage done, but below, the details of the flaw are outlined because this may not be the last time we see a threat like it.

Google Maps has, for years now, been the savior of directionally challenged people everywhere, and it just got even better. Thanks to a new update that was made without fanfare, it will now help you remember where you parked.

When you get wherever you’re going, if you’ve got the app pulled up, you can simply tap the blue “pin” to mark your location and Google will save it, replacing the standard pin with a big red “P” on the map.

There’s a new technology being developed by researchers at Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU) that stands to be a game-changer. Dubbed “lip password,” the new tech utilizes machine learning to recognize lip motion, shape and texture for each user when you speak your password.

A brazen group of hackers calling themselves the “Turkish Crime Family” claims to have more than half a million user names and passwords for a variety of Apple-based services, including mac.com, me.com and icloud.com. Unless their demands are met and the company pays a hefty $150,000, the group is threatening to erase everything in all of those user accounts.

Everyone who knows anything about computers knows that Windows won the war for the desktop a long time ago. Even today, it holds an impressive 84.1 percent of that market. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the battlefield has shifted.

In 2012, Android could claim just 2.2 percent of the total OS market (desktop PCs, laptop PCs and smart devices), compared to a hefty 82 percent market share for Microsoft’s Windows.

If you’re one of the relatively few people still using Windows Vista, you should know that the OS is on life support. As of April 11, Microsoft will no longer be providing any kind of support. This means no critical security updates, no tech support and no patches of any kind for any reason.

The internet is beginning to resemble the wild west, thanks to this latest data breach, which has exposed almost a billion and a half email addresses and a full range of other personal information. The two things that make this particular incident noteworthy are its sheer size and the target of the hack.