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Antivirus is dead, says maker of Norton Antivirus

December 20th, 2014 | Edited by | software

Dec
20

Antivirus is dead.

So sayeth Brian Dye, Symantec’s senior vice president for information security, in a weekend interview with The Wall Street Journal. The words sound shocking—Symantec and its Norton antivirus suite have been at the forefront of PC security for years and years. But don’t let the stark claim fool you: Norton isn’t being retired, and Dye’s words merely reflect the new reality in computing protection.
While detecting and protecting against malicious software installed on your computer still plays a very vital role, many of the sophisticated attacks of today still manage to penetrate PCs with antivirus programs installed. In fact, Dye told WSJ that he estimates traditional antivirus detects a mere 45 percent of all attacks. That’s not good.

antivirus_is_dead

Making matters more difficult—and driving the point home even further—security provider FireEye says that 82 percent of all malware it detects stays active for a mere hour, and 70 percent of all threats only surface once, as malware authors rapidly change their software to skirt detection from traditional antivirus solutions. “The function signature-based AV serves has become more akin to ghost hunting than threat detection and prevention,” the firm says, though it should be noted that FireEye sells active defense IT security services.

Read: Security Showdown 2014: 10 suites compared

To combat new threats, Norton and other security software companies are rolling out new offerings designed to shut down specific attack avenues, such as tools that protect against spam and phishing attempts, malicious websites, and social media shenanigans. Security companies have also begun dabbling in supplemental software like password managers, mobile VPN apps, and secure cloud storage services—none of which fall under the classic “antivirus” banner.
In other words, antivirus isn’t quite dead, despite the bold words of Symantec’s VP—it’s still important to have AV protecting your PC. Only now, antivirus is just one of many tools needed to keep your computer safe against increasingly savvy attackers. If you want more information about how to stay safe in today’s AV-dodging age, check out PCWorld’s guides to building the ultimate free security suite and how to protect yourself against the web’s most dangerous security traps.

Source: www.pcworld.com

How to know when it’s time to replace your router

December 18th, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Dec
18

How’s your home network these days?
Does it seem slower than usual, or just plain slow? Do you find that you don’t get good coverage in all corners of your house? Do you intermittently lose your connection to your ISP?
Any of these issues may be a sign that it’s time for a new router. I say “may” because there are lots of other reasons you’re getting slow or inconsistent performance.
That said, let’s talk about that router, which is as good a place to start as any. The big question: How old is it?
If your router is more than four or five years old, you should definitely think about replacing it. Three reasons why:
1. Over time, heat can damage the internal components, which may explain symptoms like intermittent outages or slow performance. You might try pointing a small fan at your router, or moving it somewhere there’s good airflow, and seeing if that makes any difference.
2. A router that old may not support 802.11n, the most widespread Wi-Fi technology. Indeed, if your router tops out at 802.11g, you’re definitely not getting the speed and range you could be. But some 802.11n models are out of date as well, especially if they were made prior to 2009.
3. It probably doesn’t offer dual-band wireless. It’s possible that some of your other household products, like cordless phones and even your garage-door opener, operate on the same 2.4GHz wireless band as your router, and interference from them can tank your connectivity.
All this is not to say you should run out and buy a new router — but at the very least you should think about it. You could always buy one that comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, try it out, and see if it makes a difference. If not, return it, no harm done.
As fate would have it, PCWorld recently reviewed the latest and greatest 802.11ac routers, a good place to start your search for a new model. Of course, those may be overkill for some home users, as the 802.11ac standard has yet to be finalized. You might be better off with one of last year’s top-rated 802.11n routers, like the Asus RT-N66U.

asus_RT-N66U

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com, or try the treasure trove of helpful folks in the PC World Community Forums. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Microsoft’s giving 100 more insanely great music albums away for free

December 16th, 2014 | Edited by | software

Dec
16

Put away those Bitcoins, folks. After dishing out 100 free, full albums during Black Friday Weekend , Microsoft’s at it again, giving away another 100 full albums for the low, low cost of absolutely nothing through December 15.
Some of the albums overlap with the previous giveaway, but there appears to be numerous new freebies in there as well, and all of the songs are stuff you’d actually wantto listen to, rather than the garbage tunes usually handed out as freebies. Here are just some of the albums available:

  • Babel by Mumford and Sons
  • Watch the Throne by Kanye West and Jay-Z
  • All That You Can’t Leave Behind by U2
  • Exodus and Catch a Fire by Bob Marley
  • Believe Acoustic by Justin Bieber
  • Unapologetic by Rhianna
  • 2Pac’s Greatest Hits
  • Quadrophenia by The Who
  • Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science
  • Born to Die – The Paradise Edition by Lana Del Rey
  • Slippery When Wet by Bon Jovi
  • The Fame and The Fame Monster by Lady Gaga

microsoft-holiday-freebies

The Microsoft Music Deals app highlighting the free albums is also offering 80 percent off numerous holiday albums and many of the top albums of 2014, selling the latest music from Maroon 5, Lana Del Rey, Weezer, and others for $1.99.
The terms of the deal are the same as before. You’ll need access to Microsoft’s Music Deals app to see the freebies, which then bumps you over to the Xbox Music app when you select a free album—meaning you’ll need Windows 8 or Windows Phone 8. You’ll also need a Microsoft Account to snag the songs. The last giveaway was a U.S-only deal, and it’s very likely this one is as well, though I’ve yet to confirm that.
Once you claim the albums as your own you’re able to download the tracks as DRM-free MP3 tunes, so you’ll be able to listen to them on virtually any device—even ones that Xbox Music fails to call home.

Source: www.pcworld

How to download audio from any streaming video

December 13th, 2014 | Edited by | software

Dec
13

Streaming video is great, but sometimes it’s more than you need—or more than you canrun, if you’re away from an Internet connection. If you like to listen to podcasts, lectures, or other audio while you drive, work, or exercise, you should be able to take advantage of the huge amount of content published online every day.
In this article, we’ll show you how easy it is to download just the audio file from any streaming video and save it to your hard drive for offline listening.

Option One: Audio from YouTube videos

If the stream you want to capture is on YouTube (and let’s be honest: most of the time it will be), you can save time and use a tool designed specifically for that platform. There are a number of apps that will do what you want, but a great, free choice is Peggo.co, a web app that makes it easy to capture audio from a YouTube video.
video-capture
The interface at Peggo.co is about as simple as you could hope for—there’s nothing but a big address bar, where you can copy the URL of the YouTube Video you want to capture and hit enter. You’ll now see an embedded view of the video, along with a few simple controls:

  • From and To: Drag the sliders if you don’t want to record the entire video.
  • Title and Artist: Use these two input boxes to choose a filename for your download, as well as to set the artist metadata—very useful for any software that organized media files.
  • Remove Silence: This option just clips any silence from the beginning or end of the video. A lot of YouTube videos have a splash screen at the beginning or end that won’t come across well in an audio-only file, so it’s worth leaving this checked.
  • Normalize: Keeps the volume of the video in a consistent range, so it won’t sound out of the place with other audio files.

And that’s about it—click on the Record MP3 button to save the audio stream to your disk. Incidentally, if you want to record a video, you can do that from the same Peggo.co interface. Just click on one of the video links directly below the video window.
Note: I was having difficulty getting Peggo.co to correctly download files in Chrome until I temporarily disabled my extensions. This fixed the problem, and I had no issues with either Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Option Two: Audio from anything else

If you want to grab audio from a source other than YouTube, your options are a little more limited. I haven’t found a good audio-only downloader for non-YouTube videos (if you have, please share in the comments), but there are several general-purpose FLV ripper extensions that install into your browser and easily save streaming video as a file on your disk. If you use Chrome, a good option is Video Downloader. And if you use Firefox, tryDownloadHelper.
Once you have the video file saved to your machine, you can use any number of programs to save out the audio track. For reference, here’s how you would do that with the popular VLC player:

  1. Open VLC
  2. Click Media -> Convert/Save
  3. In the next menu, click on the Addbutton next to the File Selection box and browse to your downloaded FLV file. Click Ok.
  4. Next, click Browse next to the Destination box, and choose a location and file name for your completed audio file.
  5. Click on the dropdown box marked Profile and choose “Audio – MP3”
  6. Click Start

VLC will open a new playback window, with the progress bar displaying how far along the transcode is. When it’s complete, you’ll find your finished MP3 on your hard drive wherever you told VLC to save it.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Windows 10 no ‘loss leader’ for Microsoft, but making money may rely on services

December 11th, 2014 | Edited by | software

Dec
11

Microsoft won’t talk about what Windows 10 will cost until next year. But it’s looking unlikely that it will be completely free, either for users or for PC makers building larger devices, after Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner said that Windows 10 won’t be a priced to keep users in the Microsoft ecosystem.
“We haven’t announced the Windows 10 pricing framework yet. But the one thing I can tell you that we’ve not had any conversations on is Windows 10 being a loss leader for us,” he said at the Credit Suisse technology conference.
The way Microsoft makes money from PCs is changing. Windows hasn’t been the biggest earner for Microsoft for some time: Turner said it was in third place behind the Office and enterprise businesses.

Windows10

He also gave indications that Microsoft would look to extend the kind of deals it’s done with makers of smaller devices who get Windows for free but are encouraged to bundle deals like Office 365 subscriptions that bring income for Microsoft. Notebook makers can already get a cheaper licence for Windows 8.1 if they make Bing the default search engine. But Turner seemed to suggest Microsoft would extend that even further.
“We’ve got to monetize it differently,” he explained. “There are services involved. There are additional opportunities for us to bring additional services to the product in a creative way.”
Unlike analysts, who have suggested that low-priced PCs may undermine the Windows 10 market, Turner was notably enthusiastic. “It’s wonderful to see these 9-inch and below devices explode, because that was an area where candidly, I was blocked out and I had no share of what was being built. The $199 laptop, the HP Stream, is an amazing device.”
Turner confirmed that Windows 10 will ship “by late summer and early fall” of 2015. And, he said, Microsoft will reveal what the Windows 10 business model will be “in the early part of 2015.”

Source: www.pcworld.com

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