Recommendations

Recently, many of the laptops I get in for repairs have been difficult to upgrade and service. The reason for this, at least from the reports from manufacturers, is that to make technology smaller, sacrifices need to be made in the device’s repairability. From my technology research and recommendation experience, I have found that design decisions boil down to cost savings to increase profits. In some cases, it’s cheaper for the manufacturer to design hardware that integrates many of its components, I....more

An Authenticator App is a app that you install on a smart device, in most cases a mobile smart phone, that turns your smart device into a electronic authorization device for your on-line accounts. It does not replace the password sign-in part of the authentication, rather, the Authenticator App acts as a secondary conformation that -you- are in-fact the person who is signing in with your associated password. Many sites are including this feature as part of their 2-factor authentication processes....more

Remote Utilities is remote desktop software. I have tried many products and many of them work great, are simple to use, but expensive, or cloud based. I use to use Team Viewer, its worked really good, but they charge $1200 a year for a license, and there terms of service transparency regarding their polices around subscription billing in my mind is unethical. If you do not cancel the subscription 30days before you want to cancel it, your locked into another subscription for the following year....more

Here is my recommendations for Password Managers. I look for solutions that are cross-platform, reliable, and since many of them store your private information on a cloud service, the provider needs to have good security practices. Also, the password manager should not have too many features that complicate the use and performance of the solution. The solution should also have the ability to sync your passwords in an encrypted form to a 3rd party cloud service, instead of including its own cloud solution....more

Web of Trust is a unique community-based safe surfing tool that uses an intuitive traffic-light rating system to help Web users stay safe as they search, surf and shop online. The WOT add-on tells you which sites you can trust when using Google, Yahoo!, Bing, Wikipedia and other popular sites. Web site ratings are powered by a global community of millions of trustworthy users who have rated millions of websites based on their experiences....more

NoScript provides essential protection for Firefox, and other Mozilla-based browsers. Most web browsers, by default, do not give you the option to customize what kind of web site content you want to be viewed in your browser. This causes major problems because sites often use 3rd party code to insert multimedia content and ads. Many of these 3rd parties can be compromised resulting in your computer becoming a victim of a security attack....more