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Microsoft really wants everyone who uses their OS to upgrade to Windows 10. In fact, this desire is so strong, that they’ve taken a remarkable step. Going forward, all new chipsets produced by Intel, AMD, Qualcomm, and others will only support Windows 10. You won’t be able to upgrade your old hardware with newer, faster, better chips, unless you also upgrade your OS.

There is a small but vocal minority of users that have been upgrading their hardware to stay current, but have kept using older (now outdated) operating systems.

Another week, another critical security flaw in Adobe Flash. This one isn’t quite as bad as the flaw found last year, but it’s close. If you haven’t been following the trials and tribulations of Adobe’s beleaguered Flash Player, last year, the company unearthed so many critical security flaws in their system that the best advice they could offer users was to simply uninstall the software until they could address them all.

In recent months, Apple has been increasingly on the receiving end of unwanted attention from the hacking community. Apple’s OS offerings have long been touted as being more robust and secure than Microsoft’s Windows, and so far, the company is living up to that reputation.

If you haven’t heard the term “whaling attack,” as it relates to the hacking community, you’re not alone. It’s a fairly recent phenomenon, and is a subset of the standard phishing attack, where hackers will contact employees of a company in an effort to get user IDs, passwords, or other sensitive information out of them.

One of the nation’s largest firms engaged in assisting other companies in dealing with data breaches has now confirmed that they themselves have suffered a data breach, this one affecting 1.5 million business clients. In a formal statement, a company spokesman announced “Verizon Enterprise Solutions recently discovered and fixed a security vulnerability on our enterprise client portal.

One of the worst things about taking business trips is the airplane WiFi. It’s a lesson in patience. More often than not, owing to the slow speeds and anemic bandwidth available, you’re better off not even trying to get anything productive done in-flight.

File this one away under things not to do. Not that you’d ever have a need to do this, but whatever you do, do not set your iPhone’s date to January 1, 1970. If you do, you stand a good chance of turning your cherished smartphone into a very expensive paperweight.

The short answer to the question posed by this article’s title is yes. Yes, your smart TV is listening to your personal conversations. It’s simply a part of the way the technology works. If you spend the money to buy a smart TV, then you’re going to want to use its voice activation features.

Is nothing safe from the hacking community? It seems as though everything is under assault these days. Antivirus and malware blocking software is struggling to keep pace. When those security holes get plugged, the hackers simply shift gears and switch tactics, going after SSL or other core components of the internet itself.

MasterCard has been experimenting with a new facial biometrics app, and is poised to roll it out in force later this year. The basic idea behind the technology is that it will employ facial recognition in the place of traditional passwords, on the thinking that while it’s possible to guess at your password, a hacker’s going to have a really hard time faking your face.