Nowadays many of us have phones or tablets with cameras in them. We happily snap away taking pictures and probably give no regard to where they are stored and whether they are safe. If you have received a nice new tablet or phone for Christmas and want to make sure you keep hold of your pictures then this month’s article is for you.
Most people, in my experience, have a computer as well as their tablet or phone, one of the ways in which you can ensure that you keep your pictures safe is to regularly copy them over to your computer or laptop and then make sure that they are backed up using whatever normal backup system you use. If you want more information about backups then have a look on our website and do a search for “backup” and you’ll find loads of helpful articles on the subject. Read this entire article »
If you have a business here on the Costa’s then you should already know about the power of Facebook, especially if you market to the ex-pat market here as most brits here on the Costa Blanca are very familiar with Facebook, they use it for everything from finding local businesses, rating the service that they have received to catching up with friends and family here and back “home” in the UK.
I would go as far as to say that retired people here in Spain are much more “teched up” and familiar with how technology and Facebook work than their peers back home; of course this ability, I think, comes from the need to use technology to keep in touch that wouldn’t be necessary back in the UK. Whatever the reason, if you’re a business owner then you should know that your core customers use social media. Read this entire article »
We are seeing an increase in this type of computer compromise, so this month I thought that we should spend some time looking at ways in which you can protect yourself from this new and worrying form of virus.
Ok, so first let’s define what we are talking about – ransomware is a type of virus that will encrypt your files (documents, emails, pictures etc.) and then ransom you usually 100’s of euros to get them back. There is no reliable way to get your data back directly once it has been encrypted without paying the ransom. Paying up has two downsides, firstly you’re losing money and secondly in some cases you are handing over your credit card details to criminals. Read this entire article »
I have been contacted by quite a few, understandably sceptical, customers when they saw a “strange” icon appear in the bottom right of their computer screen. When they hover over or click the icon, they receive an unlikely offer from Microsoft. The offer is for a free upgrade to the latest operating system – Windows 10.
Yes, believe it or not (and you should because its true) Microsoft really are offering all of the current Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 customers a free upgrade to Windows 10 and users will have 12 months from the release date of the 29th July to take advantage of the free upgrade offer – after this time Microsoft say that the upgrade will be still available although users will have to purchase it. Read this entire article »
Well it’s warming up! It is always tricky to write about the weather 2-3 weeks before you read my article so I hope that its not pouring down when you read this. It’s mid April at time of writing and and the days seem to be getting warmer and warmer, ramping up to what hopefully will be a lovely summer.
Summer is traditionally a quiet time of year for BlueMoon Solutions; as many of our customers either go back to the less stifling weather of the UK or just sit in the sea or pool cooling off. Quite understandably, it seems a bad time of year to be sitting inside using technology when you can be outside enjoying the long warm sunny days with family and friends – let’s face it, that’s why many of us moved to the Costa Blanca in the first place. Read this entire article »
Wow, what a year! It doesn’t seem two minutes ago that we were complaining about how hot it was – now we have the log burners on and are sitting shivering under the blankets at night! This month, given its a New Year I thought it might be nice to review what we covered last year in our monthly articles. Read this entire article »
There, I said it – three times in fact! It’s simply the most important thing that you could be doing when using your computer. Every day I see people who have lost precious photographs, important documents and music collections, all becase they didnt take the time to back up their data.
The story is often the same, “I didn’t have time”, “I didn’t know what to do” or “I was going to do it next week” and the concequence is often the same, i.e. the loss of some or all of your important or personal data. Read this entire article »
I was recently asked to give a talk to the association of retired police officers (ARPO) about Internet security i.e. Anti Virus and all that sort of stuff – they must have been stuck for someone interesting to talk to them so in a fit of panic asked me to!
Anyway, in doing research for the talk I came across a very interesting fact – AVG is no longer the best free antivirus out there – and I thought you should know about it.
I regularly review statistics on anti-virus products in an attempt to keep up with current trends and to offer my customers the best advice that I can. Every time that I have checked over at least the past 8 years, either AVG or Avast have been the best free antivirus products with Kasperskey usually topping the list of products that you have to pay for. Well this month to my suprise there is a new guy that has knocked AVG and Avast from the top free positions – its name is Panda antivirus. Read this entire article »
A reader in the UK forwarded me an article from the BBC this week – it relates to the Crypto Locker virus that we have dicsussed a few times before.
It seems that some security experts have managed, by luck really, to gain access to the encryption key used to encrypt unfortunate victims data, enabling them to use this information to help other victims decrypt their own data!
If you are unfortunate enough to have been affected by the Crypto virus and still have your encrypted data, you can visit the portal at www.decryptcryptolocker.com and use the information there to gain access to your data again. The portal asks for your email address and one of the encrypted files. It then uses the information found by the security team to generate a recovery program (an antidote) that will repair all of your infected files – great stuff! Read this entire article »
Ok, so unless you have been living under a rock for the last few weeks, you will have heard about this bug (also referred to as SSL or secure certificates). A bug is a mistake in the programming code that has been around for over 2 years. This is the first thing that you should be aware of. The problem has already been around for over 2 years, so although it’s now receiving a lot of publicity, the chances are that if it was going to affect you then it would have already done so. Read this entire article »