How Secure Is Facebook?

Almost everyone with a PC or smartphone uses it, but how secure is Facebook, how safe is your data, and how can you protect yourself?

Facebook is synonymous with social networking and media, and it’s the centre of many people’s social lives, both online and off. It’s seen off sites like MySpace and has become the undisputed king of online interactions. While services like Twitter allow you to share short thoughts, and Instagram provides tools for sharing your snaps, Facebook is your whole life, distilled into an ever updating news feed.

Top 5 Spam Emails We’ve Had This Week

What’s been clogging our inbox most recently?

1 URGENT BUSINESS

This email from a Mr Dirk Moss starts well. Clearly wishing to show the urgency of his urgent business, he makes good use of his caps lock in the subject line. An exclamation mark might have been even more effective, but alas it was not to be. Anyway, Dirk is the “Chief Financial Officer of Bank in Europe”, and one his customers recently died, leaving $60 million just sitting in an account, with no next of kin to claim it. The only logical solution, of course, is to give it to us. And with our Christmas shopping yet to be completed, this windfall couldn’t have come at a better time.

Remembering… Type-in Program Listings

David Hayward has a try at entering hundreds of lines of BASIC again

Type-in programs, as found in the many magazines of the late 70s and early 80s, were once the only source – other than books loaned out from the local library – of technical programing resources we could get our hands on.

We’re willing to bet that many of you reading this spent many an hour in front of a burning hot ZX81, Spectrum, BBC Micro or Commodore with a magazine opened up on the BASIC or machine code listing, squinting from one to the other in an effort to type it all out with as few mistakes as possible.

Steam Controller

Has PC gaming evolved, or has Valve taken on too much?

Valve certainly savoured the media attention it got for the long-awaited Steam Controller. We were tantalised with brief images, we marvelled at the technical specifications, and we were bombarded with prelaunch videos of whooping gamers claiming it was the most marvellous thing ever created. But is it?

With the Steam Machines now here and the Steam Link on the shelves, the Steam Controller can finally have its day in the limelight and in your living room, It's a kind of Frankenstein’s monster combination of a keyboard, mouse and gamepad, designed to fill the gap between PC gaming and consoles.

Roccat Kiro

An ergonomic mouse, with some clever features

Roccat’s splendid line-up of gaming mice has a new arrival in the form of the Kiro, a modular ambidextrous gaming mouse with a unique design taken from the company’s Nyth range.

Looking to the technical specifications first, the Roccat Kiro is certainly an eye-opening mouse. Within its ergonomically designed body, you’ll find a Turbo Core V2 32-bit ARM-based processor at 75MHz and with 576KB of on-board memory.

Toshiba Satellite Click 10

Toshiba redefines the hybrid as the small and portable computing platform

I find it fascinating that Microsoft with the Surface range has convinced everyone that hybrid designs are the future, when there is no commercial evidence at all.

Lenovo, HP, Acer and Dell are all making them, and here we have one of Toshiba’s hats in that ring, the small and well-specified Satellite Click 10.

What printed pictures don’t well convey is how small a mobile PC the Click 10 is. It’s just 25.5cm wide, with a 10.1” display, making this a system that’s designed to travel easily at a few grams over 1kg.

Western Digital My Cloud Mirror 4TB (Gen 2)

Mirror, mirror on the wall. Who has the most personable cloud of them all?

Unboxing the Western Digital My Cloud Mirror (Gen 2), I experienced a degree of déjà vu, because it’s structurally identical to its previous My Cloud Mirror and My Cloud RE2 designs.

While the curved chassis is undoubtedly the same, what I was curious to discover was how much computing platform they also share. The first generation My Cloud Mirror had a single-core 1.2GHz CPU, whereas this has a modestly superior dual-core 1.3GHz Marvel ARMADA 385. With more processing power comes more possibilities, surely, and hopefully more features.

Plinth

Clever engineering makes this accessory stand out from the crowd

After a successful Kickstarter campaign, designer John Bull has finally managed to manufacture his unique tablet and phone stand, the Plinth.

The £32,000 raised through Kickstarter investment has already proved that the public are behind this design, but until now we haven’t had the opportunity to actually try out the Plinth for ourselves. So what’s makes this tablet stand better than the competition?

Asus Transformer Book T100HA

A two-in-one tablet/notebook that ticks all the right boxes

The two-in-one convertible tablet/notebook form is doing surprisingly well at the moment. Most, if not all, of the big names have a version released with some slight change in the processing power or in the way the keyboard section attaches to the tablet section. Generally speaking, they all work more or less the same. Or do they?