Computeractive 645

I recently set a new personal record of watching 17 films in a single month, having been tempted by Amazon Prime offering a free 30-day trial of movie channel Lionsgate+ (longer than its usual seven days). I timed signing up so I could blast through the films I wanted to watch, then cancelled on the day before my first £5.99 payment was due. Robert Irvine recommends such trials-witching tactics in his brilliant guide to paying less for TV (pages 50-57). Follow his advice and you’ll learn which TV stick best suits your budget, how to share your streaming subscriptions, and why pretending to cancel gets you a cheaper deal. Also look out for a couple of new things in this issue. Our ‘What Should I Download?’ section hops from page 19 to…

The public forwarded 6.5 million suspicious emails to the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the 12 months to September 2022, a rise of 20 per cent on the previous period. It led to the NCSC removing 62,000 scam URLs from the web, according to the organisation’s annual review (www.snipca.com/44061). Overall, the public has sent 15 million emails to the NCSC’s Suspicious Email Reporting Service (SERS) since it launched in April 2020, leading to 192,000 URLs being taken down. See the box below right for ways to report different types of scam. Lindy Cameron, CEO of the NCSC, said the rise in reported emails shows that the British public “are both becoming more cyber aware and contributing to our resilience”. The review also said that 18 ransomware incidents in the UK were widespread…

Kaspersky is to stop providing its VPN in Russia, removing one method for the nation’s citizens to get news from websites based in other countries. The antivirus company didn’t give a reason for closing the Secure Connection tool, but it may have been responding to pressure from Russian authorities. In December 2021, the country’s telecommunications watchdog, Roskomnadzor, banned 15 VPNs, including NordVPN and ExpressVPN, after they refused to allow the Russian government to control their connections because they said it amounted to state censorship. Kaspersky’s decision came a few days after Russia’s Ministry of Digital Transformation requested all state-owned companies to declare which VPNs they use and why. The company closed its free VPN on 15 November, and will stop selling the paid-for version at the end of December 2022. You’ll like this… Virgin has…

Lenovo has released emergency updates for many of its best-selling laptops, after flaws were detected that can allow hackers to deactivate the UEFI Secure Boot. This is a part of your computer that stops malware running during the boot process, before the operating system has loaded. All the affected laptops are from the company’s IdeaPad, ThinkBook and Yoga ranges, and include both Windows 10 and 11 machines. To check whether your laptop needs updating, you need to know its model number – find this by typing system information in the Start menu, clicking Open, then looking next to ‘System Model’. To fix the flaw, Lenovo recommends using its Vantage tool for updating system drivers, available to download from www.snipca.com/44041. Alternatively, update your laptop manually by visiting www.snipca.com/44030, then scrolling down and looking for your laptop…

Microsoft is planning to add a search bar to Windows 11’s Task Manager to make it easier to find processes running on your computer. It added the tool to Build 22623.891 of the operating system, available to Windows Insiders. In a blog post (www.snipca.com/44043), the company called the feature a “top request” from users. It showed the example of searching for Notepad (1 in our screenshot), with results appearing below on the same page 2. Pressing the keyboard shortcut Alt+F takes your cursor to the search box. Microsoft is also adding separate light and dark modes to Task Manager, so it can be different to the main mode you’ve set for the rest of Windows. It’s not known when Microsoft will bring the tools to the full version of Windows 11, but they’re…

NEW-LOOK CALENDAR IN THUNDERBIRD Thunderbird’s developers have unveiled a preview of the calendar that will be part of the email software’s ‘Supernova’ redesign, due for launch next year. They call it a “work in progress”, and stress that it will look more polished when it’s finished. The version number is expected to be 114 or 115, matching whichever is the current Firefox release at the time. Read more and see images on Thunderbird’s blog: www.snipca.com/44028. NO MORE PLURALS AS WORDLE ANSWERS Wordle answers will no longer include plurals of three- and four-letter words that end in ‘s’ or ‘es’, as part of changes to the game announced by owners New York Times (www.snipca.com/44031). It explains this means the answer will never be ‘Foxes’ or ‘Spots’, but it might be ‘Geese’ or ‘Fungi’. You…