Wor­ried about the amount of inform­a­tion you have stored in Google ser­vices? Fear not. Just launched today is Google Takeout — which allows you to take a local backup of (so far, some of) the inform­a­tion stored in sev­eral of the Google services.

It’s not yet full–featured: it only allows backup from Google Buzz, […]

Using pub­lic WiFi is becom­ing risky, if you pass import­ant inform­a­tion insec­urely over it. There are freely avail­able tools out there that will listen in to all the net­work traffic, look­ing for pass­words — and now there are tools, like Firesheep, men­tioned below, that will hijack ses­sions you’ve already securely logged into.

Takeaway les­son? Any […]

It’s not often I’m post­ing com­puter or phone-related stuff here any more, but this one is clever and deserves wider attention:

Pre­vent deac­tiv­a­tion of Find My iPhone — Mac OS X Hints:

 
Cur­rently if you do not have a pass­word on your device a thief (or child) could deac­tiv­ate Find My […]

Over the past sev­eral years, secur­ity com­pli­ance require­ments have become more restrict­ive, while the tech­no­logy infra­struc­ture neces­sary to meet these require­ments has expan­ded greatly. Des­pite our strong desire to con­tinue provid­ing the Thawte Per­sonal E-mail Cer­ti­fic­ate and Web of Trust ser­vices, the ever-expanding stand­ards and tech­no­logy require­ments will out­pace our abil­ity to main­tain these services […]

The next ver­sions of both OSX and Win­dows are about to be released, and there are handy infograph­ics to let you know how to go about upgrad­ing from your cur­rent version.

First: the Win­dows version.

The OSX upgrade path graphic is after the jump…

One small prob­lem with OSX is that it does the same thing every time you plug in any cam­era — start­ing Aper­ture, for example. The trouble is, while that may be sens­ible when you’re plug­ging in your main cam­era, it’s a pain when con­nect­ing up your iPhone.

Cam­eras, a free pref­er­ence pane from

Tour­ist Remover:

Remove mov­ing objects such as tour­ists or passing cars from your pho­tos. Take mul­tiple pho­tos from the same scene and the «Tour­ist Remover» blends them into a com­pos­ite photo without any inter­fer­ing elements.

A free ser­vice from snampmania.com. I’ve not tried this yet as I don’t have a suit­able set to […]

Hack­ers crack Apple’s iTunes gift card algorithm:

$200 iTunes Gift Cer­ti­fic­ates are selling for less than $3 in China now that a group of local hack­ers has cir­cum­ven­ted Apple’s algorithm for cre­at­ing the digital vouch­ers and built their own gift cer­ti­fic­ate generators.

This was bound to hap­pen sooner or later. It’ll be inter­est­ing to […]

I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s integ­rated server products — Small Busi­ness Server and the new kid on the block, Essen­tial Busi­ness Server. They provide an incred­ibly robust and reli­able IT core for any organ­isa­tion — espe­cially because the in-built mon­it­or­ing and alter­ing lets you know about poten­tial issues that require your attention. […]

Post­codes are an essen­tial part of loc­a­tion ser­vices in the UK. How­ever, they’re not free – they are owned by the Post Office, who will charge you a hefty sum in order to get access to the database.

Ham­per­ing free and innov­at­ive location-based ser­vices? Likely. Easy to reverse-engineer? You betcha!

The Free the Postcode […]