tinsleyNET IT Services Consultant

SSD's are slowly but surely replacing their mechanical counterparts, the HDD, in modern computers, they offer more storage per square-inch and can read/write data to and from memory significantly faster than the spindle and articulator arm of a standard HDD, and of course, they are not prone to shock and data head crashes. So all good? well, yes... but.... SSD's are essentially a block of electrical gates used to represent the binary of your data, and those electrical gates can loose their charge if they are not regularly refreshed. this process is speeded up the warmer the drive is, so if you copy your backup onto a SSD then store it away in a cupboard, it could be that in 3 months time when you come to recover a file from the drive, that there's been sufficient loss of charge that the data is irrecoverable.

New rollouts to Google internet search add quick links to your Android phone Over the past few weeks Google have been adding some functionality to the Chrome desktop browser, allowing you to interact with your phone even if it's not near you. At the moment the browser commands only work for American users, but it's easy enough to get them to work for you, just add the "&gl=us" tag to the end of the URL.

Several new exploits have been identified recently that are designed to attach your home or business router from inside, and install code to allow hackers a backdoor to your network and your data. The exploits are designed to get into a network either by infecting devices that go outside of your firewall, such as mobiles, tablets and laptops, or by tricking the user into downloading a malicious file. Once inside the network, the malware gets to work on your firewall, attempting to inject code into the firewall that will allow external code to be added to innocent web pages. So you might be viewing the BBC site for example, and the code adds advertising and other unwanted scripts to the page as it passes through your firewall, meaning the page you see if very different from the one served up by the BBC servers.

Twitter users are going to start seeing a new 'check-in' feature in their geo-tagged tweets soon, provided by Foursquare, one of the first geo-check-in providers. The new partnership will mean twitter users can see reviews and tips for places they check in to, and gives businesses a chance to advertise specials and offers to passing potential clients who use the foursquare what's nearby feature.

Having lived and worked in Shropshire for most of my life, I am fully aware of the issues of rural connectivity. But that's changing as part of the the governments Broadband Delivery UK which aims to have 90% of the UK connected to superfast broadband by next year, and basic broadband access for everyone.

Do the FREAK It seams like only yesterday we were all being told about the Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL, and how to avoid affected sites until they had been fixed, then there was the Shellshock or Bashdoor vulnerability that meant the servers running your favourite websites were being broken into, you may even have heard of the Poodle attack that could allow an attacker to break into your SSL 3 connection, and now Freak, exploring another SSL vulnerability, albeit one that this time was practically imposed on you

"The Cloud" So what is this cloud thing that everyone is talking about, where did it come from and what do I need to know about it? The Cloud will often be described in different ways by different people. Sometimes their definition might contradict, sometimes they will be talking about different situations or services. The confusion is because 'The Cloud' is not a thing, it's a collection of things that work mostly seamlessly in the background allowing you to share information across different devices without having to worry too much about how you're going to get your information from point A to point B. The cloud was used to represent the internet in computer network diagrams, though originally nothing was kept in the cloud, it was just a means of transferring data from servers to users.