Rick's Daily Tips

Q&A: What happened to the ‘View Image’ button on Google Images?

Posted on February 16, 2018

Question from Byron L.: I’m a photographer and I use Google Images a lot to check out photos taken by other photographers. I get a lot of inspiration from looking at their photos.

I’ve always heard that it’s safer to view the photos in Google Images by clicking on the “View Image” button instead of visiting the websites directly, and that’s what I always do.

But this morning I noticed that the “View Image” button is no longer available on Google Images.

Why is it missing, and is there any way to get it back?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I turn off “Posts You Haven’t Seen” on Facebook?

Posted on February 14, 2018

Question from Kayla C.: Every time I go to a friend’s page on Facebook it shows “Posts You Haven’t Seen” with all their new posts at the top.

I hate having to scroll down the page to find their most recent posts. I’d rather just look at the posts on their Timeline in their natural order like it used to be.

How do I turn “Posts You Haven’t Seen” off? Thanks.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

‘HiJack Hunter’ helps you determine if malware has taken over your PC or changed critical system settings

Posted on February 13, 2018

Do you suspect that malware might be slowing down your PC or putting your data at risk, yet nothing is detected during a virus or spyware scan?

Or do you suspect that malware that was found and removed changed some of your Windows settings and/or disabled certain features such as the Task Manager, System Restore or the ability to boot into Safe Mode?

Even the best anti-malware programs have a difficult time catching all the viruses, trojans and spyware that is out there today. That’s why it helps to have a low-level system scanner that can root out and report every single running process and detect any suspicious system activity. [Read more…]

Think password managers are safe? Truth be told, they’re quite dangerous.

Posted on February 12, 2018

Many of the web’s most widely respected tech experts recommend using a password manager such as KeePass to store all of your online passwords. I don’t recommend them however, and after reading this post you will understand why.

A typical password manager will store all of your passwords in an encrypted database. In order to “open” the database to extract a needed password you’ll have to enter a master password.

This sounds like a great idea for storing and protecting a bunch of unique passwords without having to remember them all, and the concept is indeed a great one. But unfortunately it is seriously flawed. Here’s why: [Read more…]

ATTN Bloggers: You MUST enable SSL Encryption on your blog(s) before July 2018!

Posted on February 12, 2018

I’ve been sounding the alarm about the need for bloggers to enable SSL encryption on their blogs for some time now, and the time window for getting it done is closing fast.

All the major web browsers are now labeling any non-encrypted page with a form on it as insecure, and Google is planning to completely drop the hammer on insecure sites in July.

The folks at Google have just announced in this post on their Chromium blog that they’re planning to release Chrome 68 in July 2018.

That post also states that that new version of Chrome is going to mark every page with a URL that starts with http:// instead of https:// as an insecure (and thus dangerous) page.

That means starting in July your blog’s traffic will likely fall off the edge of a cliff if you haven’t enabled SSL encryption on it by then. Here’s why: [Read more…]