and around every two years, you probably upgraded your phone from 8 gigs to 16 to 32 and so on and so forth. This incremental technological progress we’ve all been participating in for years hinges on one key trend, called Moore’s Law. Co-founder of Intel, Gordon Moore made a prediction in 1965 that integrated circuits, or chips, were the path to cheaper electronics. Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors, the tiny switches that control the flow of an electrical current that can fit in an integrated circuit, will double every two years, while the cost will halve. Chip power goes up as cost goes down. That exponential growth has brought massive advances in computing power… hence tiny computers in our pockets! A single chip today can contain billions of transistors, and each transistor is about 14 nanometres across! That’s smaller than most human viruses! Now,

Moore’s Law isn’t a law of physics, it’s just a good hunch that’s driven companies to make better chips. But experts are claiming that this trend is slowing down. Granddaddy chip maker Intel recently disclosed that it’s becoming more difficult to roll out smaller transistors in a two year timeframe while also being affordable. So, to power the next wave of electronics, there are a few promising options in the works. One is quantum computing. Another currently in the lab stage is neuromorphic computing, which are computer chips that are modeled after our own brains! They’re basically capable of learning and remembering all at the same time at an incredibly fast clip. Let’s break that down and start with the human brain. So, your brain has billions of neurons, each of which forms synapses or connections with other neurons. Synaptic activity relies on ion channels, which control the flow of charged atoms like sodium and calcium that make your brain function and process properly. So, a neuromorphic chip

copies that model by relying on a densely connected web of transistors that mimic the activity of ion channels. Each chip has a network of cores, with inputs and outputs that are wired to additional cores, which all operate in conjunction with each other. Because of this connectivity, neuromorphic chips are able to integrate memory, computation, and communication all together. These chips are an entirely new computational design. Standard chips today are built based on von Neumann architecture… where the processor and memory are separate and the data moves between them. A central processing unit runs commands that are fetched from memory to execute tasks. This is what’s made computers very good at computing, but not as efficiently as they could be. Neuromorphic chips however completely change that model by having both storage and processing connected within these “neurons” that are all communicating and learning together. The hope is that these neuromorphic chips could transform computers from general purpose calculators into machines that can learn from experience and make decisions. We’d leap to a future where computers wouldn’t just be able to crunch data at breakneck speeds but could do that AND process sensory data in real time. Some future applications of neuromorphic chips might include combat robots that could decide how to act in the field, drones that could detect changes in the environment, and your car taking you to a drive through for ice cream after being dumped… basically these chips could power our future robot overlords. We don’t have machines with sophisticated, brain-like chips yet but they’re on the horizon. So get ready for a whole new meaning for the term “brain power.”

The post Moore’s Law Is Ending… So, Now What? appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

Everyone who is interested in the news has heard such a term as trading, but not everyone knows what it really is. Now everything will change. Now we will consider what trading is, what kinds it has, and who it does below in this article.

What is trading?

This is a kind of activities which is realized by the way of good money. This kind of work is done on special exchanges by some people. These people are always called traders (participant of the trades). In most cases, here are represented people who have money to invest.

Who is involved in trading?

For instance, someone has the good job or successful business. So, he has a lot of funds (money) to provide sufficient material means for his family, while he has savings or available funds that can be invested in some profitable business. Should he give these funds to become interest-bearing? At this time any bank can suddenly go bankrupt, and if not – then inflation will “eat” a small part, which does not stimulate to rely on such financial institutions in the crisis. Kept in a safe at home? Start to create an own start-up? Invest in real estate? This is often dead-end ways with a lot of shortcomings – it takes a lot of money (buying real estate, for instance), then a lot of time – is your business … And serious risks.

Trading – is what for?

This is to earn. This is a kind of activity, due to which you can multiply your financial resources many times. Actually, of course, you need to proceed – fools with money cannot survive there.

You have two ways – to trade on your own or give money to management. Money management – in fact, the same risks, which specialist will you get, and what will be the “kitchen” whether your brokerage company.

After all, a trader, basically, is an ordinary seller. The one who buys at a lower price and sells at highest as he/she can. But since trading is commerce on the stock exchange, without a direct agreement with the client, the task seriously becomes complicated. The trader conducts a constant analysis of the value of the goods, which today is predicted to sell well, find a way to invest in this product as small as possible money and by the end of the set time to get the maximum amount of profit from the trade operation.

However, for those who are familiar with the exchanges for a while, it is no longer a secret that trading is a work that penetrates the network more and more like a computer, soon it will be in every house. After all, you can get to the stock exchange via the Internet, which allows you to try yourself in this area for all experienced Internet users.

Previously, access to a closed trading network could be obtained through brokers, who in turn opened it only by request and, of course, for good money. Of course, financial trading for normal people was something unattainable. Brokers played mostly large-scale or were useless (profitability went into a negative if the profit from the long-term transaction was less than 15 thousand dollars). So there was a necessity for traders. They invest their savings in the goods which they chose as desired. The trader determines the time period when to trade and he will take his profit. No mediation, excluding the stock exchange.

Necessary skills

So, what does a trader need? Good theoretical basis, knowledge of the trading rules, trade algorithms, understanding how the stock exchange works, an ability to plan, accrued capital, permanent analysis of transactions on the exchange. It is necessary to keep statistics of your transactions and notice your mistakes, and develop new trading strategies, draw the conclusions.

What the feature of Internet trading?

Nowadays many exchanges have convenient access via the World Wide Web. This provides more effective monitoring of prices and turnover, opens up new opportunities for beginning traders and colossal for professionals. Since the main tool of the trader is technical and fundamental analysis, the Internet is the best environment for the timely collection of information and operational forecasting of the charts necessary for accurate determination of goods and prices. The analysis, in turn, is necessary for the most profitable investment and the subsequent extraction of the maximum profit, and only Internet-trading is an opportunity to make profit remotely and in the shortest possible time.

For example, if Europe tomorrow will impose sanctions on the import of agricultural products to Russia, then there will be a shortage of this product in Russia. What does this mean? The fact that if a trader is immediately invested in the agricultural sector, where the prices have not yet managed to grow then tomorrow when they have already risen, he will get his profit. What was to be done? Follow the news, turn on your logic, have free funds and promptly respond at the exchange. That’s the whole job, and Internet trading is a universal tool because it was on the network that effective trading became possible, the complicated procedures that frightened brokers ever before it existed online.

Types of trading

There are several types of trading. We will analyze each of them in detail. The first type is a financial trading. This is a type of trading on the stock exchange, where traders work exclusively with securities or shares. Since the price is regulated by demand, a competent trader can easily determine what is better to buy or sell at the moment.

For example, if the demand for shares of one company will increase, it is clear that soon the price for these shares will raise – the main thing is to catch this connection. The trader takes everything in his hands and buys as much as he can on credit at the current, not yet raised the price. And it turns out that in his hands will get a net profit – the difference between tomorrow and today’s price. So, he sold the shares, in fact, not having them. He just bet on his analysis. He could lose and stay in debt. This is a real financial trading. Many people, probably, have repeatedly seen movies where ill-wishers of certain brokers or traders specifically, at a loss to themselves, “break” the forecasts of such traders to leave them in debt. Sometimes it happens.

The second type is high-frequency (algorithmic) trading. This is a type of trading, which is carried out by computers that perform millions of computing operations per second and, on the basis of these operations, independently execute all securities purchase and sale deals. Analysts say that this type of trading stabilizes the use of markets and reduces the cost of trade. But this method has many disadvantages. High-frequency trading is focused on short-term, even second-time operations, yielding such a small profit and working on small commodity turnover that has often led to a collapse of markets.

The third type of trading is Forex trading or playing in the foreign exchange market. After America moved away from the stable change in the currency in the price, it became possible to earn good money on it. Still, because its value can “float” in the range of four percent during the day. Then the world community under the general noise and created an international monetary system, that’s why it becomes possible to earn money. Nothing complicated. You know that if you had a lot of dollars a year ago, you would surely have sold them now when they cost twice as much. Traders also know this. Moreover, they can earn on it within a few seconds, making bets on a certain currency, based on their assumptions that the demand for this currency is about to rise, and it will rise in price, after which it can be profitable to sell. Therefore, today Forex trading is a powerful system for earning money for many Internet users and people who trust them to manage their money for managing and gaining profit.

But there are some shades. First are the levels on Forex which can float for a couple of cents because of a large number of applications and different brokers. Therefore, Forex trading is more difficult on a more relaxed Russian and European market. Secondly, large movements in currency pairs are less frequent than, for example, on the shares of the American market. Third nuance – thanks to the developed system of shoulders on Forex, where you can come with a minimum deposit and trade, literally starting with $100.

Resume

Trading means selling (trading) on the stock exchange, with the purpose of buying and profitable to sell. The computer can trade, a hired trader or you personally. In any case, to understand the basics of the stock exchange and learn at least the classic schemes of buying and selling it is necessary to control your assets, and to trade by yourself.

The post What is trading? (Easy to understand) appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

Although this might make things easier in the real world by not having to deal with a cheesy storefront, and high pressure salesman who’s desperate for a commission, the middleman or lady is actually very important in computer land.

You see the software that you use can be thought of as a club sandwich like stack of different programs, some of which sit between whatever program that you’re interacting with directly and the hardware itself, because without these layers, programmers and developers would have to code differently for every single hardware configuration on the planet, which would be impossible. Other layers sit between two different pieces of other software and help them talk to each other without needing to have tons of code in common.

These software layers help standardize the coding process so that programs can interface with lots of different stuff easily. While you might be most familiar with a layer called a device driver and that translates program instructions, and talks directly to your hardware. Another layer called an application programming interface, or API, can be just as important, but if a driver is already there then to serve as the link between your hardware and programs, then what does the API actually do? Well, think of it like this.

Windows Mac OS, and Linux all provide a graphical interface, your buttons, checkboxes, menus, etc, that are easy to click on. Without that, you’d be left tediously typing commands for everything you want to do like back in the days when DOS ruled the world. Similarly an API provides a simpler way for developers to interact with other kinds of software. A really good example of this is social media plugins that you see on certain websites, such as a news article that embeds tweets, or a page that for better or for worse lets people leave Facebook comments under it.

Both Twitter and Facebook have their own APIs that they make available to web developers, making it easy for them to bake Twitter and Facebook features into their own pages. Without these API’s, these social media giants would have to share code directly with owners of other sites, which would be tedious, difficult, and possibly give away certain trade secrets. But if you’re a PC Gamer, you might be even more familiar with graphics APIs such as DirectX, OpenGL, and Vulkan, which sit between the engine of whatever game you’re playing, and your graphics card driver. These APIs make it easier for game developers to code cool effects that bring your favorite characters, and stories to life, and have them work regardless of whether you have an AMD or an Nvidia GPU. Since the API can talk to any mainstream graphics card and as GPU technology advances, you’ll see new revisions of graphics APIs being rolled out that can take advantage of more powerful graphics chips. But even if you don’t game, or argue with random trolls in Facebook comments, you’re still taking advantage of APIs all the time if you’re a Windows user.

Windows has it’s own API, uninspirationally named the Windows API, commonly referred to as Win-32 or Win-64 depending on whether you’re running a 32 or a 64-bit application. Windows API makes it easier for programs to do things like talk to your devices, modify your registry, use screen elements like buttons, and status bars, and much more, without making the developer code these things directly, and also helping users by providing a more reliable and consistent experience. I mean, can you imagine if every single program on your computer had a different looking close button in the corner? So, while APIs might not be the usual star of the show when you’re doing whatever it is you do on your PC or phone, they make it possible for all of our disparate devices, and software to work well with each other, and enabled a massive amounts of quick communication, and high-end gaming that we’ve gotten used to.

The post What is application programming interface (API)? appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

But how exactly did these games come from seemingly nowhere to absolutely dominating the gaming marketing? Is there something they’re giving us that other titles just aren’t?

Well, as it turns out the answer appears to be yes, or at least that was the case when these games first hit the scene. You see, both PUBG and Fortnite are excellent examples of the ‘Battle Royale’ game genre, which has a number of hallmarks that distinguish them from other shooter titles. The basic premise is this, a whole bunch of players, usually 50-100 right now, with future games claiming support to up to 1000, get dropped into an arena with no or minimal supplies or weapons. Items are scattered randomly throughout the map, and overtime, the map shrinks, forcing the remaining players into a smaller and smaller area, with anyone caught outside of the safe zone getting killed. The last player or squad alive is declared the winner.

Sounds pretty simple, but many other shooters didn’t offer this kind of open exploratory, free flowing gameplay when PUBG, considered to the genre’s defining title, hit the scene in 2017, which is kind of funny because the game wasn’t even built from scratch. Instead, a player who went by the handle Playerunknown, hence the name, developed it as a mod for Arma 2:DayZ, taking inspiration from a year 2000 Japanese film called, you guessed it, Battle Royale. The fact that PUBG was a mod for an already popular game gave it instant exposure and popularity.

It presented a fresh twist on the shoot them up genre that had been dominated by the Call of Duty series and its clones for about a decade by that point. Oh, and it also didn’t hurt that the wildly popular Hunger Games film series sparked interest in games that offered a similar style of combat. But what exactly makes battle royale games so different from other shooters?

Well, part of it is the strong sense of player freedom in that you’re just fighting other individual players on a large, open map, which gives lots of leeway for different players to play the game their way.

So you don’t all have to go after this control point. Instead, some people might choose to aggressively try to blow away the competition, while others might prefer to hide away until everyone else is dead.

Regardless, there’s less of a feeling like you’re on rails. The randomness of item and weapon distribution also helps the game feel more accessible. With a number of other popular shooters, there’s often this sense that you’ve got to be an incredibly good crack shot in order to enjoy the game at all. But the more random somewhat less complex nature of PUBG and Fortnite have made the game more appealing to novices, yet with strategy and skill with a weapon, you’re still rewarded enough to appeal to the more hardcore sets of the gaming community. Furthermore, the matches themselves also tend to end fairly quickly. So there isn’t a huge time investment required in an age when all of us are busy and have short attention spans. Something that has actually led popular battle royale developers to make their games available on mobile devices, with, by the way, a great deal of success. On the subject of accessibility, lots of the popular shooters on the market were expensive triple A titles when PUBG hit the scene.

But PUBG was significantly cheaper with Fortnite and more recently Apex Legends, both adopting the free-to-play model, generating their revenue from micro transactions. Also, of course, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the social aspect of the game. The fast pace, elements of surprise, and the fact that it’s rather entertaining to watch a bunch of contestants fight it out until one is left standing makes games like PUBG and Fortnite engaging to watch.

So it’s no surprise then that battle royale games are very popular with streamers as well as in the eSports community. Not to be left out in the cold, other shooter franchises like COD have taken note of this and added battle royale modes to one of their games, and EA as well has recently gotten in on the action with the aforementioned, incredibly popular Apex Legends. With the way things are going though, I wonder how long it’s going to take for us to go down the same path as MOBA’s, where the battle royale space becomes so hopelessly crowded that we get to the point where developers are literally fighting it out for market share like a bunch of kids shanking each other at the Cornucopia.

The post What is “Battle Royale” game? appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

Oftentimes it isn’t obvious whether an app or a program features a dark mode, and it’s often a little unassuming option buried in a menu somewhere. But for those of you who are night owls, you’ll know that it works by reversing the usual color scheme of your windows, putting light colored text on a dark background.

But, it isn’t as simple as just inverting the colors on a webpage and calling it a day. You can see this if you have a browser extension that applies a dark mode, as some elements on the page often don’t look as nice, while other ones, such as images, won’t invert or dim properly.

Coding a good-looking dark mode, that is specific to a certain website, often requires a fair bit of finesse. However, this often ends up being worth it, as dark mode ends up delivering quite a few benefits. It’s pretty common these days for phones and computers to have a built-in night mode to reduce blue light. But the basic idea is that blue light from your screens can affect your ability to properly fall asleep.

Night mode reduces blue light emissions by giving everything a yellowish or a reddish tinge. This might not be a big deal if you’re just trying to read text, but it can result in nearly everything else looking noticeably discolored. That’s where dark mode can be advantageous. Particularly on phones. Many smartphones these days use OLED screens, which don’t require a backlight like a standard TV or a computer monitor would. Any fully black areas of an app in dark mode would just have their pixels turned completely off, so much less light ends up assaulting your eyes. Although you won’t get this effect if you’re using a regular monitor, as you’ll still have its entire backlight emitting blue light, dark mode can still make things much easier to look at during the night if you don’t have another way to reduce eye strain, such as bias lighting.

But it isn’t just about making screens easier on the eyes. On those phones with OLED screens that we just mentioned, having fewer pixels illuminated means that dark mode can extend your battery life, as having your brightness turned up is a notorious battery hog, leading some people to run their apps in dark mode even during the daytime. In fact, Google claimed a few years ago that having a predominantly white screen can use up to six times as much battery as a predominantly black one, on the original pixel.

So it might be worth switching to dark mode if you find yourself consistently fighting poor battery life. Android currently offers options to enable dark mode on frequently used apps, like phone, and messages, and iOS has a smart invert colors feature that switches Apple apps to a dark mode pretty elegantly, and also works with third party apps with varying degrees of success. On the desktop side of things, you can enable a dark theme in Windows 10 that can tone down the excessive white of the settings menu, and File Explorer.

So although dark modes aren’t universally present yet, it’s great to see developers putting some thought into saving our eyes, and that’s why it’s the first unsung hero.

The post About Dark Mode appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

Well, whether we like it or not, that’s basically been Microsoft’s approach for a very long time. In fact, it was way back during the Windows 98 era that Microsoft first introduced the concept of notifications whenever a critical update was available by having the operating system check which updates were already installed against a list of new updates stored on a Microsoft server every few minutes. And what a useful new feature to ensure that your Grandma isn’t gonna be victimized by the latest ActiveX vulnerability.

The problem is that as the years went on, more and more control was taken out of the hands of the user. Once Windows XP hit the scene, update notifications became much more frequent, especially that system reboot prompt after you installed the update that would bother you literally every 10 minutes to restart. Not to mention that the automatic update service was a massive resource hog for some reason, and often ground slower computers to a standstill.

So Microsoft did relax this hit-you-over-the-head naggy behavior in subsequent versions of Windows and they fixed some of the performance issues, but it’s still quite difficult to exercise full control over Windows Update. A huge source of frustration, especially if you have a slower PC or one that you only use occasionally, so that basically every time you sit down at it, it needs to perform a bloody update. I mean, imagine this: what if I just don’t want to be interrupted right now because I’m doing something?

Well, in Windows 7 and 8 you can delay an automatic reboot. But only for four hours and three days respectively. And then in windows 10, you actually can’t decline updates of any sort now, even patches that are considered non-critical. Now if you’re running a business version of Windows 10, you are allowed to delay your updates. There’s just no such luxury for the average Joe or Jane running Windows on his or her home computer. So why has Microsoft insisted on making the process so overbearing? I mean, do they think we’re all a bunch of idiots that can’t maintain our PC’s on our own?

You know what, let’s not get into that. Moving on, then. One of the most obvious reasons that updates are continually pushed out is to improve security. Although many folks wonder why Microsoft can’t just make a secure piece of software in the first place, and at times this has been a valid criticism, the fact of the matter is that with an operating system as large and complex as Windows, there are many points of failure that the developers might not even know about that can get discovered by hackers later on. I mean, you think about how a commercial airplane has lots of redundant safety systems because there are so many critical parts that could potentially have an issue that develops down the road, even if the aircraft was initially well-designed.

So it’s kinda like that. And in fact, Microsoft even offers cash bounties for folks that are skilled enough to find and report security holes in Windows before the hackers do, so that they can push out a fix. The fact that this is one of the very rare examples where Microsoft actually pays their users and not the other way around shows what a big deal patching security bugs is to Microsoft. But even so, this doesn’t quite explain why all of the updates, rather than just the security fixes, are treated as mandatory in Windows 10. Well, here’s where we get into the big mentality shift. It’s a business decision. Microsoft treats Windows as a service now, meaning that with rising Internet speeds and reliance on cloud computing, the company wants to insure their place as the dominant platform by delivering significant upgrades in order to keep up with advancing technology and consumers who frequently buy new devices.

So you combine that with the fact that users have gotten used to their mobile devices following this similar paradigm of free updates, and Microsoft even went as far as to describe Windows 10 as the last version of Windows, in that it’ll just be continually updated rather than replaced by another version that you’ll have to pay to upgrade to down the line. So, to insure that users aren’t getting left behind with this new business model, plus their desire to make writing software easier for developers than it used to be back when Windows versions were much more fragmented, Microsoft has gone the route of making Windows 10 updates mandatory across the board. So like, I get it. It’s just that this can be a huge problem when Microsoft forces users to install buggy updates, like that one that deleted a bunch of people’s data. For better or for worse though, it looks like this automatic, mandatory version of Windows Update is here to stay. That is, unless of course, you switch to Linux.

The post Why are WIndows Updates Important? appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

But what about the Internet? In just two decades, we’ve gone from 28K connections to speeds of 100 megabits per second being the norm. And with demand for even faster performance and more connectivity thanks to streaming video, digital game distribution and Internet-enabled smart gadgets, the question becomes, where exactly is the roof on this thing? Well, let’s start by having a look at the fastest current internet speeds. And I’m not talking about the handful of people in Estonia or North Carolina who have 10 gigabit connections at home. You gotta think much bigger than that. The Internet backbone that forms the main highways for the world’s data. Although there are plenty of routes that boast speeds of 100 gigabits per second, or even higher, that is actually child’s play compared to the most advanced infrastructure in the system.

As of the time we shot this video, the fastest portion of the Internet backbone is an undersea cable called MAREA, stretching from Virginia Beach to Bilbao. It can transfer data at an astonishing 160 terabytes per second. I mean, that is about every single person in Portugal deciding to stream a 4K video at the same time. And get this: the cable isn’t much wider than your average garden hose. So how exactly does it move data so quickly?

Big undersea cables like MAREA use optical amplifiers at specific intervals to keep the signal strong as it flows down the pipe. So just like an un-amplified light from a cheap laser pointer won’t go on forever and hit the moon, light can get attenuated inside an optical fiber as the materials inside do not reflect light perfectly, scattering and absorbing it to some degree. So by using amplifiers, combined with using several fibers in one cable and multiple wavelengths per fiber to represent different data streams, these undersea cables can be tasked with carrying huge amounts of information. So back to our original question, though. Can we go even faster?

Well, as technology improves and we deploy materials that can reflect light more effectively and find more efficient ways of using the light spectrum, maybe by cramming more wavelengths into a single fiber, we could actually see speeds of over a petabyte per second and even higher on just one fiber. And then you could actually multiply even that by several times by putting several fibers into one cable. As long as the rest of the infrastructure can handle processing and separating all of the different signals passing through it.

And keep in mind that most modern optical networks use infrared light, which is relatively low frequency, and therefore can’t carry as much information as more energetic, high-frequency forms of radiation. So in the future, we may even see information carried via UV light if we can find an effective way to transmit it using materials that can stand up to its higher energies and keep it from being attenuated too much. Though we probably wouldn’t wanna use it to replace Wi-Fi unless y’all want a bunch of skin cancer. So the answer, then. Well, you can always build a fatter pipe or use higher frequencies to go faster, meaning that, in theory, there isn’t really an upper limit that we can identify quite yet. But of course, in the real world, concerns about cost, practicality, signal strength, energy consumption and safety will provide concrete challenges.

And do remember, of course, that your home internet connection will always be several orders of magnitude slower than whatever Microsoft is installing on the ocean floor.

The post What is the maximum Internet speed? appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

I mean is there just a Walmart for cyber criminals where they go and buy your personal information at rollback prices? And if your information is indeed part of a massive breach, how do you find out? What are the appropriate precautions?

One thing that’s helpful in understanding what happens after a data breach is to realize the sheer scope of many of them. It’s not uncommon for these breaches to affect tens of millions of people at once, and sometimes even more.

That means that it isn’t particularly easy for an individual user to search through large databases of stolen information, especially considering the source of places that information ends up. Often times, this data actually will appear on dark web markets that require special software to access them where it is indeed bought and sold by cyber criminals hoping to rack up fraudulent charges, drain someone’s bank account, or even commit outright identity theft. But it turns out that this isn’t the only place where personal data can appear.

In fact, sometimes it’ll show up in a much more public pastebin site. What’s a pastebin site, you might ask? Well, it’s the digital equivalent of the inside of a bathroom stall wall. They’re designed for anyone to just dump a large amount of data as plain text.

These things can be great for folks like coders who want others to check their code for errors, or I mean just anyone who needs a place to quickly jot down a non-sensitive information. In recent years though, some pastebin sites have become hotbeds for stolen data procured from data breaches.

Now, some of this data is put there by hacktivists who don’t seek to make much, if any, money off of their exploits. While other leaks are partially dumped to pastebin sites by attackers as a free sample of a larger data set that they expect to get paid for on one of the aforementioned Darknet markets. While anyone can bring up data that’s dumped to a pastebin, it’s not exactly easy for the average consumer to go hunt for their credentials one-by-one after they heard about the latest big data breach on the news. There is good news though. There are easier ways to keep tabs on your logins and passwords.

There are services that try to catalog Darknet leaks, and that automatically detect when large data dumps appear on pastebins, then organize them into databases, and save them even if the original data gets taken down. One of the best known of these services is, Have I Been Pwned?, which works by having you enter your email address, which it then checks against the database of billions of leaked account records to see if you’ve been affected by a breach. Have I Been Pwned?, uses a bot to monitor pastebin sites for new submissions containing credentials, and passwords. It offers email notifications if the site finds your info in a recent breach, and it also allows users to enter their own passwords to check against the database as well, which sounds like a terrible idea, but don’t worry.

Have I been Pwned?, employs an algorithm that keeps your password secure when you test them by hashing them, then only sending the first five characters of the hash to a server that contains the database of known breached passwords. After any matching hashes are found they’re sent back to your PC, which can then determine if your entire hash password is the same as any of the passwords found in the database. This functionality has actually also been built into some password managers, which can even tell you if your credentials have been found in a recent data dump, so that’s cool. But then, what if you follow these steps and your details have been compromised?

Well, step one is to change your passwords. Step two is to contact your bank and credit card companies, if your email was tied to those accounts, and get in touch then with step three, one of the major credit reporting agencies. Once you’ve contact them, you can do basic things like freezing your credit for free, or if you want something a little less intrusive than having your credit frozen, you can pay for credit monitoring, which will send you a report when anyone tries to open a new account, or apply for credit in your name.

The post Hackers and Your data appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.

Why do internet trolls advise deleting it? Let’s start with the first pic, many of the files inside of System 32 take the form of dynamic link libraries, or DLLs. These files contain code and data that can be accessed and share by many programs, including Windows itself. The DLLs inside the System 32 folder enable functionality from Control Panel options to error checking, system updates, streaming media support, encryption services, audio and video playback, Direct X rendering, and even the Windows interface itself. I mean it wouldn’t be very easy to use Windows if you couldn’t freaking see what you were doing. System 32 also includes most of your drivers, which you can learn more about up here.

As well as elements of the Windows Kernel, the fundamental code that interfaces Windows with your hardware. Allowing it to work. What that means is that many of these files simply can’t be deleted after you boot into Windows, since they’ve already been loaded into memory. Even deleting other System 32 files will probably end up breaking a number of obvious things on your system. In result your computer refusing to boot the next time you try to turn it on.

Meaning you’ll end up having to run some system recovery of some sort to have any chance of getting it back up and running without a full reformat. This all sounds like stuff you obviously wouldn’t want to get rid of, so why is anyone trying to do it? Well, not surprisingly many non computer savvy folks have no idea what the System 32 folder is at all. Leading to some enterprising trolls spreading a meme that says deleting System 32 will make your system run twice as fast. This particular piece of meme-ry has been making its rounds on the internet since at least the early 2000s. The way it’s usually presented still fools many computer novices. Typically there will be a bit of copy pasta describing System 32 as a folder that Microsoft uses to intentionally hobble your computer’s performance as part of some conspiracy to get you go buy PC tune up software or something. Or even claiming that System 32 is just straight up malware, then using step by step instructions that are designed to look like more credible system tuning tips. Directing users to enter one or two lines on a command prompt to delete the folder.

To be clear there are many people on the web that offer honest advice about how to speed up a slow computer, but in this particular case it’s a giant hoax. The moral of the story is don’t delete System 32

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DDR5 aims to have twice the density of DDR4, which is no mean feat, because packing that much memory into such a small space makes it more difficult to keep things stable due to like weird interactions that can happen between atoms, but it seems they found a way to do it, meaning that an individual DDR5 chip could contain up to 32 gigabits of data. But wait. Hold on a second. I mean, most of us with desktop computers have more memory slots than we actually need. I mean, it isn’t exactly difficult to put 16 gigs of RAM on a standard board, so why do we need another revision of DDR? Well, although DDR5 will undoubtedly be relatively expensive when it hits the market, over time it will make the per-gigabyte cost of RAM cheaper, and although RAM has historically been one of the more inexpensive components for PCs, recent DRAM shortages have resulted in price increases that have hung around for quite some time, so even if users find themselves needing just 8 or 16 gigs of memory, once DDR5 becomes widespread, they should be able to enjoy some savings.

DDR5’s improved speed will also bring benefits in certain scenarios. Now, RAM was kind of overlooked for a long time by PC enthusiasts, like me, simply because it didn’t give tangible performance gains in many applications, particularly in games, but there’s been a renewed interest in having speedy system RAM, as AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are known for being more affected by memory speeds than their Intel counterparts, with noticeable frame rate increases being reported in certain titles when you pair your CPU with faster RAM and a high-performance discrete graphics card. What kind of performance can we expect, then? Well, DDR5 frequencies are expected to clear 6,000 megahertz, which will be a huge improvement over the 3,200 megahertz max speed of the official DDR4 spec. This could end up helping AMD users a lot, and also any folks who are gaming on integrated graphics cards that leverage main system memory as VRAM, so laptop users, rejoice. This increased bandwidth will also come in handy in server and cloud applications. But when exactly will we reap these benefits?

Well, we could see DDR5 kits towards the end of 2019, believe it or not, but the first ones that hit the market will likely be aimed at the enterprise. Consumer-grade DDR5 probably won’t be available until 2020, and even then, we might still be in for a year or two transition phase before it becomes really widespread and more affordable.aw is just how much capacity manufacturers should be able to squeeze onto one chip. DDR5 aims to have twice the density of DDR4, which is no mean feat, because packing that much memory into such a small space makes it more difficult to keep things stable due to like weird interactions that can happen between atoms, but it seems they found a way to do it, meaning that an individual DDR5 chip could contain up to 32 gigabits of data. But wait. Hold on a second. I mean, most of us with desktop computers have more memory slots than we actually need.

I mean, it isn’t exactly difficult to put 16 gigs of RAM on a standard board, so why do we need another revision of DDR? Well, although DDR5 will undoubtedly be relatively expensive when it hits the market, over time it will make the per-gigabyte cost of RAM cheaper, and although RAM has historically been one of the more inexpensive components for PCs, recent DRAM shortages have resulted in price increases that have hung around for quite some time, so even if users find themselves needing just 8 or 16 gigs of memory, once DDR5 becomes widespread, they should be able to enjoy some savings. DDR5’s improved speed will also bring benefits in certain scenarios.

Now, RAM was kind of overlooked for a long time by PC enthusiasts, like me, simply because it didn’t give tangible performance gains in many applications, particularly in games, but there’s been a renewed interest in having speedy system RAM, as AMD’s Ryzen CPUs are known for being more affected by memory speeds than their Intel counterparts, with noticeable frame rate increases being reported in certain titles when you pair your CPU with faster RAM and a high-performance discrete graphics card. What kind of performance can we expect, then? Well, DDR5 frequencies are expected to clear 6,000 megahertz, which will be a huge improvement over the 3,200 megahertz max speed of the official DDR4 spec. This could end up helping AMD users a lot, and also any folks who are gaming on integrated graphics cards that leverage main system memory as VRAM, so laptop users, rejoice. This increased bandwidth will also come in handy in server and cloud applications.

But when exactly will we reap these benefits? Well, we could see DDR5 kits towards the end of 2019, believe it or not, but the first ones that hit the market will likely be aimed at the enterprise. Consumer-grade DDR5 probably won’t be available until 2020, and even then, we might still be in for a year or two transition phase before it becomes really widespread and more affordable.

The post DDR5 MEMORY appeared first on Computer Geek Blog.