New Anti-virus Ratings

PC World has new anti-virus ratings out for the New Year.
You can find the article here.

The article talks about how well the top paid anti-virus suites are doing not just in protecting you against known threats, but also emerging threats, such as banking-related malware.
Still the top rated paid security program: Norton 2011

PC World also rates the performance impacts of these program.
Lowest total memory use: Trend Micro, Norton, and Kaspersky.
Highest total memory use: PC Tools, G Data, and Bit Defender.

What does those Blue Screen numbers mean?

If you've ever gotten the Blue Screen of Death you know that there are always numbers there; numbers like 0x000000C. Often these numbers come right after the word STOP.

I found a website that lists, in order, all of those stop error numbers and the words that are most often associated with them.

You can find it here.

Why you should always encrypt your smartphone

Ars Technica has a great article on why smart phone encryption is a good idea, and also why limited government is a good idea.
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/guides/2011/01/why-you-should-always-encrypt-your-smartphone.ars

New phone coming to Verizon Wireless

In case you haven't heard, the iPhone is coming to Verizon. I can't wait.

I'm in the market for an upgrade to my phone and this came at just the right time.

I'll let you know the progress.

How to fix desktop shortcuts after uninstalling Google Chrome

If you have used Google's new web browser, Chrome, and decided you dont like it enough to want to uninstall it, you will an unexpected consequence:
None of your desktop shortcuts will work. Windows will give you a polite error message about not finding the program you had clicked the shortcut for.

A little bit of clicking around and you will find that nothing is missing, the programs, web pages and all of your data are still there, it's just that the shortcuts dont work.
What's more, you will find that even if you create new shortcuts, they dont work either.

So, what to do? Turn on Internet Explorer, go to Tools, then Internet options and click on "Make Internet Explorer the default browser", click Apply then OK and close Explorer.

Your shortcuts will now work.

A New Year, A New Chance to Keep Posting

This is my third year of promising to post more and more often. Do you suppose this year I'll actually do it? They say third time is the charm; I hope so.

Now on to the post.
Ten Threats for 2011

Bob Sullivan's Red Tape Chronicles has presented his ten threats for 2011 that Web users will have to watch out for.
They are:
1: Geolocation (apps like Foursquare and Latitude)
2: More Internet connected gadgets (Anti-virus for your TV, anyone?)
3 & 4: Mobile phones, iDevices and Tablets
5: URL shortening (tinyurl and bit.ly)
6: Friendly Fire (personalized attacks pretending to be someone you trust)
7: Less spam (but more infected Facebook posts and tweets)
8: The Cloud (If Amazon can delete Wikileaks, they can delete you)
9: Hactivism (Hacker Activism)
10: Government sponsored virus/spyware.

If you wonder how likely these are, you can check out last years predictions here.