PC Magazine October 2021

Happy Cybersecurity Awareness Month! Yes, I know: Every month, week, and day of the year has loads of dedicated “fake holidays.” For instance, October is also Bat Appreciation Month, National Dental Hygiene Month, and Spinach Lovers Month. Those are all great things to focus on and celebrate. But we’re PCMag, and we take cybersecurity very seriously—it’s a particular focus every October. One (and perhaps the most) successful strategy for staying safe online is keeping a low profile. Our cover story is a buffet of methods for reducing your digital footprint—everything from deleting social media accounts to installing VPNs and firewalls to anonymous browsing. If you need to dig into any particular topic, head to PCMag.com, where you’ll find loads more advice, how-tos, and reviews of security products and services. By the way,…

EMAIL ME BY MY NAME I have never been able to get an email address with my name and surname … Since my name is used a lot in Turkey, others took it before me. I’ve been obsessed with this for a while … I can get my first and last name only on Outlook.com using underscores, but … I really want to use Google because of the features. For some reason, I can’t trust the Microsoft system.—Ertan Eric Griffith’s reply: Thanks for the question. I actually have strong feelings about this! I, too, have a very generic ‘egriffith@’ email with a big service. Fifteen years ago, this seemed like a good idea, but now, it seems, every person in America and beyond who has my last name and a first name…

Demand for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband system may push wait times into 2023. Users in the US can currently place a pre-order for the system on the official website, Starlink.com, which offers an estimate of when the order will be fulfilled. In most cases, the site tells you the service won’t arrive until 2021 or late 2022. But one user on Reddit noticed that the Starlink website is showing a 2023 or later fulfillment date for users in certain areas of northern Virginia. PCMag also encountered that fulfillment date when attempting to pre-order from a random address based in Round Hill, Virginia, which has a population of 674. “Starlink is currently at capacity in your area, so your order may not be fulfilled until 2023 or later,” the page read. (After this…

When the Paper Cats project launches, it should be a continually affordable non-fungible token (NFT) avatar. The goal is to attract first-time NFT buyers by keeping the price under $10 with an infinite number of cat drawings so anyone can buy in and learn about the technology in a non-intimidating way, complete with a comic book-style walkthrough. Other successful NFT projects, like Cool Cats, may have an inviting and fun art style, but with the current buy-in price above $10,000, it’s inaccessible for those on a budget. “For cryptocurrencies to have mass adoption I believe there needs to be an easier way for people to wrap their head around all the complexities,” said a Paper Cats and Cool Cats developer who goes by the name xtremetom. “NFTs have the power to present…

Amazon announced in mid-September that it’s planning to introduce “a new, intuitive, and easier Kindle reading experience” via software updates that are expected to start rolling out soon. The first update will introduce smartphone-like navigation that’s supposed to make it easier to perform common tasks. Amazon says that swiping down from the top of the screen will reveal controls for airplane mode and display brightness, while swiping up from the bottom of the screen will provide quick access to the Home and Library pages or the current book. The second update is expected to improve those same pages. It seems that the update to Home will be minor—Amazon says only that it will display up to 20 recently opened books with a left swipe. But the Library will be updated with “new…

My biggest project of every year is out, and I’m really excited. For the first time in 12 years of testing, 5G matters, and for the first time, T-Mobile won PCMag’s Fastest Mobile Networks study (see our September issue for the full story). If you’ve been following 5G news, that shouldn’t be a big surprise; T-Mobile’s breakneck pace of building mid-band 5G pulled it ahead of its two big competitors—Verizon and AT&T—which are waiting for their new C-band spectrum to become available at the end of this year. That means next year will be wild, too. This project is a lot of fun. It’s certainly more fun than that stretch of 4G in the mid-2010s, when Verizon won every year, and the only real surprise was seeing how badly Sprint would do. T-Mobile’s…