PC Magazine February 2022

Publications like ours have a mostly one-way ongoing conversation with readers: We tell you stuff, you read it and maybe comment on it or, even more rarely, write us a letter. Well, PCMag aims to be more interactive than that. As you know, we review lots of products. But we don’t use most of them after testing; that would be impractical, unless we had a much larger lab and many more analysts! So the things we review go back to the companies who loaned them to us right after we’ve tested them. Readers, on the other hand, buy what we review and use it in their daily lives. So you’re the best experts on long-term reliability and quality. That’s why we ask you, through our ongoing Readers’ Choice surveys, to report on…

Google Docs makes it easy to collaborate via comments that can be used to spark conversation, object to a particular turn of phrase, or indicate when a revision has been made. But attackers are once again using Google Docs comments to spread malicious links. Security firm Avanan said it “observed a new, massive wave of hackers leveraging the comment feature in Google Docs, targeting primarily Outlook users” starting in December 2021. Attackers reportedly created Google Docs and left comments using tags (the “@” symbol followed by the victim’s name) so Google would notify the intended recipient via email. “In that email, which comes from Google, the full comment, including the bad links and text, is included,” Avanan says. “Further, the email address isn’t shown, just the attackers’ name, making this ripe for…

Fifteen years ago, on January 9, 2007, I sat on the floor of a Las Vegas Convention Center entryway and pondered the iPhone. While I was running around the Consumer Electronics Show looking at the latest LG Chocolate, Steve Jobs was over at Macworld changing the world. I’d been covering smartphones for three years by then, and they were complex gadgets for road warriors. With the iPhone, Apple simplified the smartphone and made it a must-have for everyone. This wasn’t solely about Steve Jobs’ brilliance. He struck when several other technologies were becoming available—3G for the mobile web and capacitive touch screens for finger-friendly interfaces. And he worked without the legacy-software hangovers that Microsoft, Nokia, and Palm all struggled through from the first generation of proto-smartphones. The iPhone has made a huge number…

What would you see if you could look at the world through the eyes of Jeff Goldblum? Science and metaphysics don’t quite have the answers yet, but a Disney+ show does its best to answer the question. The World According to Jeff Goldblum, in its second season, follows various topics through Goldblum’s meandering musings. “Geez, I love science,” Goldblum says in the first episode of the series. And while there’s mystery in each episode, there’s science and technology, too. Sometimes they’re one and the same, as in an episode that captures the surrealness of street magic while also showing the neuroscience behind Goldblum’s own eyes deceiving him as he watches Penn and Teller do their thing. Both the trick and the tech that unveils it are treated with the same wonder…

Who runs spectrum policy in the US? We used to say it was the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). But as wireless carriers buckle under Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) complaints about new C-Band networks once again, it’s clear the answer is really “anyone but.” Historically, the FCC has had the final word on who gets which slices of the nation’s airwaves. There’s big money behind this, too, with spectrum auctions raking in tens of billions of dollars for the US Treasury. But all that’s been upended by the FAA putting its foot down to stop AT&T and Verizon from launching their new C-Band 5G networks. Verizon was scheduled to have a big event on January 4, but the carriers agreed to kick the can down the road another few weeks. To recap the…

Shortly after joining the PCMag team in 2021, I started receiving weird emails. They weren’t from readers or Twitter reply guys, as I expected. Instead, they were from Instagram, informing me that people in Brazil, China, or Iran were trying to access my long-dormant account. The warnings prompted me to log in, change my password, store it in a password manager, and enable multi-factor authentication on my account. The process took less than five minutes from start to finish, and I even decided to start posting and interacting on Instagram again. So what happened? After entering my email address into the form on the Have I Been Pwned website, I determined my information surfaced as part of a data breach. And because I’d reused my Instagram password for another account on…