Category Archives: Software

Biden Bans US Sales Of Kaspersky Software Over Russia Ties



The Biden administration on Thursday announced plans to bar the sale of antivirus software made by Russia’s Kaspersky Lab in the United States, citing the firm’s large U.S. customers, including critical infrastructure providers and state and local governments, Reuters reported.

Moscow’s influence over the company was found to pose a significant risk, Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said on a briefing call with reporters on Thursday. The software’s privileged access to a computer’s systems could allow it to steal sensitive information from American computers or install malware and withhold critical updates, enhancing the threat, a source added.

“Russia has shown it has the capacity and … the intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans and that is why we are compelled to take the action that we are taking today.

Kaspersky Lab and the Russian Embassy did not respond to requests for comment. Previously, Kaspersky has said that it is a privately managed company with no ties to Russian government.

TechCrunch reported the U.S. government announced on Thursday that it is banning the sale of Kaspersky antivirus in the country, and is asking Americans who use the software to switch to a different provider.

The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security said it imposed the “first of its kind” ban, arguing that Kaspersky threatens U.S. national security users’ privacy because the company is based in Russia.

“Russia has shown it has the capacity, and even more than that, the intent to exploit Russian companies like Kaspersky to collect and weaponize the personal information of Americans. And that’s why we are compelled to take the action that we’re taking today,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said in a call with reporters.

News of the ban was first reported by Reuters ahead of the announcement. A Kaspersky spokesperson did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Kaspersky will be banned from selling its software to American consumers and businesses starting July 20, but the company will be able to provide software and security updates to existing customers until September 29. After that, Kaspersky will no longer be permitted to push software updates to U.S. customers, according to Raimondo.

Engadget reported the Russian company has been the topic of cybersecurity questions many times over the years. The Federal Communications Commission put Kaspersky on its list of companies posing unacceptable security risks in 2022. 

In 2017, Kaspersky products were banned from use in US federal agencies, and the business also drew scrutiny from the UK’s cybersecurity leadership.

In my opinion, if you are currently using Kaspersky Lab’s product – you should dump it and find something better –  and safer – as soon as possible.


GitHub’s Newly-Created Repositories Default to ‘Main’ on October 1



GitHub announced that on October 1, 2020, any new repositories you create will use “main” as the default branch, instead of “master”. The change does not impact any of your existing repositories: existing repositories will continue to have the same default branch they have now.

In June of 2020, GitHub decided to replace the term “master” on its service with a neutral word like “main”. That change will be taking place as of October 1, 2020. GitHub explains the reason they selected the word “main” to replace “master” this way:

main is the most popular replacement for master that we’re seeing across GitHub. We like it because it’s short, it keeps your muscle memory intact, and it translates well across most languages. We’re using main for our newly-created repositories and for the repositories we’re moving now, like depandabot-core.

Later this year, GitHub has plans for seamless moves for existing repositories. They point out that renaming the default branch today causes a set of challenges. GitHub states that by the end of the year they will make it seamless for existing repositories to rename their default branch. When you rename the branch, GitHub will retarget your open PRs and draft releases, move your branch protection policies, and more – all automatically.

ZDNet reported that GitHub’s move to replace “master” with “main” is part of a bigger trend in the tech community. Companies and major open source projects like Microsoft, IBM, Twitter, Red Hat, MySQL, the Linux kernel, and OpenBSD have also agreed to make changes to their technical jargon.


GitHub will Replace “Master” with “Main” on its Service



GitHub is working on replacing the term “master” on its service with a neutral term like “main”. The reason for this change is to avoid any unnecessary references to slavery, says GitHub CEO Nat Friedman, ZDNet reported.

For those who are new to this terminology, PC Mag has an easy to understand explanation of what master/slave means. “An electronic interaction in which one device acts as the controller (the master) and initiates the commands, and the other devices (the slaves) respond accordingly.”

Right now, there are many Black Lives Matter protests happening. You’ve probably seen photos and videos from the protests on social media.

Black Lives Matter Foundation was founded in 2013 in response to the acquittal of Trayvon Martin’s murderer. It is a global organization in the US, UK, and Canada whose mission it is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes. Those who support this movement are working for a world where Black lives are no longer systematically targeted for demise.

With that in mind, it is obvious why continuing to use the “master/slave” terminology is hurtful. There are other options for “master” including: primary, conductor, coordinator, and main. The term “slave” could be replaced by secondary, drone, worker, doer, or minion. GitHub is moving in the right direction by replacing “master” with “main’.


Codeacademy Offers Scholarships to Students Affected by COVID-19



Codeacademy is offering 10,000 scholarships to Codecademy Pro for free to high school and college students who are affected by COVID-19. The Pro memberships include Codeacademy programming, data science, and mobile development curriculum, a community of peers, and paths to help students be successful.

Codeacademy teaches millions of learners web development, mobile development, and data science skills. In the wake of COVID-19, we’re offering 10,000 scholarships to Codeacademy Pro for free to high school and college students across the world for the rest of the school year. Those students get access to the same features that every Codeacademy Pro learner does: roadmaps to figure out what to learn, thousands of hours of courses and projects to learn programming and data science, and a community of supportive peers.

CEO of Codeacademy, Zach Simms, said: “This is massively important. COVID-19 is leading to so many changes all at once – disruptions in finance, education, work, and more – and so much of our lives are moving online as a consequence. Online education is the only way for people to stay on top of their learning while kids are learning from home. We hope that what we’ve learned from 45 million users can help millions more during this difficult period. At the same time, we think Codeacademy is also helpful for those that might be out of work as a result of a financial challenge. Learning to retrain for a new job is a sure way to better your opportunity set.”

To get started with a free Codeacademy Pro scholarship, students must visit the Codeacdemy website and click a button called “Join Pro”. Doing so will start their 90-day scholarship. This offer is valid for any student with a valid school email address.


The Mobile App Gap



The history of mobile applications dates back to simple games such as Snake, Pong, Tetris, and Tic-Tac-Toe included with candy bar phones.

As phones became “smarter,” Windows Mobile phones of the mid-2000’s and others included the ability to install third-party software, both paid and free.

Next came the era of the high noise level platform app stores that we know and love/hate today. There are tons of both free and paid apps. Some apps are useful to accomplish very specific, pointed tasks with high efficiency. Others apps are arguably less than useless. The good and the bad, the useful and the useless are packaged together in a cacophony of brightly-colored graphics and flowery sales language, all on equal footing and demanding attention. App discovery is often painful, unpleasant and risks device app bloat.

Mobile device ownership and management requires a learning curve. In phase one, the mobile device novice is at high risk of downloading seemingly every app encountered, while actually making use of very little of that which has been installed.

Phase two of the learning curve is typically marked by out of storage memory errors.

Phase three requires the user to decide which useless apps should be deleted so that the mobile device can continue to be updated and/or functional. When deleting apps, there is a tendency for the user to hang on to installed apps if there’s even the most remote of chances that the user might conceivably use the app.

The key test to determine whether a particular app should simply be deleted is to ask yourself whether or not you would reinstall it after a factory reset.

It should be noted that apps that the user has paid for will tend to have a higher psychological value placed on them, regardless of whether they are actually useful or not.

In this noisy mobile app jungle, where crap is right alongside cream, people are trying to squeeze the most out of their mobile devices, to extract the maximum productivity.

Mobile devices make great content consumption devices. Proof is all around us. At any given moment when people are around, how many of those people are absorbed with their mobile devices?

As mobile devices become ever more powerful, the next step in the evolution of the mobile device usage learning curve is revolving around increasing demand to accomplish real-world productivity tasks. While some productivity tasks can be accomplished, others are difficult or impossible – not because of computing power limitations – after all, today’s mobile devices often have quite powerful processors – no, because of software limitations.

Mobile device operating systems have grown larger and more sophisticated along with the more powerful processors. However, there is a problem plaguing both iOS and Android in the form of an app gap. Apps are wannabe pretenders when it comes to genuine software sophistication. No mobile device apps can compare on equal footing with desktop computer software. Both major platforms – iOS and Android – suffer from this problem.

There is nothing stopping software vendors from developing highly sophisticated mobile software, other than the fact that it’s typically just not worth it. For whatever reason, mobile device owners have a pervasive “it has to be free or very low cost” mentality. We are willing to spend upwards of a thousand dollars or even more for a high end mobile device, but balk at the idea of having to pay more than a few dollars for single apps.

If you have ever tried to push a mobile device to better take advantage of its powerful processing capabilities, you quickly run into a problem. Go beyond a certain level of task sophistication, and the apps typically fall flat very quickly. The ultimate test for mobile apps is to take a mobile device and plug it in to a 1080p or higher monitor. Attach a keyboard and if it’s an Android device, attach a mouse or trackpad. Try to use the mobile device and the installed apps like you would a full computer. For example, try to push the experience to its limits by editing a long, complex video and see how well it goes. The mobile software will play back high resolution videos without any trouble at all, but try to do something really productive and things quickly fall apart. The problem isn’t the processor, but the software.

The mobile app gap situation doesn’t look as if it will improve anytime soon. In the meantime, as mobile device owners and users there are a lot of questions we should be asking ourselves.

How much are you willing to pay for mobile device apps? What has been your experience? Have you ever paid for an app and then realized later that it was a waste of money? What is the most you have ever paid for a mobile app and why?

Why are people willing to pay sometimes hundreds of dollars for sophisticated commercial desktop class software without batting an eye, yet close their wallets when it comes to paid apps for mobile devices? Do people perceive mobile devices to have as big of a potential payoff as a desktop or laptop? If mobile computing devices don’t have the same payoff potential as a desktop or laptop, then why not? What is the difference between the two systems? What can be done to increase the potential payoff value of mobile computing devices?


The Future of Mobile Computing



Mobile devices, specifically large screen smartphones, have made significant inroads into the computing spaces traditionally held by full-sized desktop and laptop computers. This incursion can best be measured by personal usage shifts.

In my own case, I find myself making much less use of my laptop and desktop machines, with my large screen smartphone making up the majority of my usage. At this point, if it were possible I would shift all of my computing usage to my smartphone, but unfortunately I find that the lack of quality software, and not the hardware, is preventing me from making the full shift.

The high end smartphone hardware of today compares quite favorably to traditional desktop and laptop hardware. If I could only run desktop class software applications on my smartphone, I could pretty ditch my traditional machines to an even greater degree than I already have.

The large screen high end smartphone hardware is closer than ever to hitting a peak, where performance improvements are incremental. From my point of view, the only way my phone could be made even more useful would be the addition of genuine desktop class software applications that would allow me to do real work and truly take advantage of the heavy duty hardware that is built in to a very compact package.

The software we’ve had to this point is at best dumbed-down and lacks capability. Apps such as Garage Band and iMovie on iOS and most of their counterparts on Andriod in the Google Play Store are toy apps aimed at seemingly air headed casual users. For example, where is the ability to import from and export to wider varieties of audio and video file types?

I want a real video editor that would allow me to attach my phone to a large screen monitor, keyboard and mouse and do intense video editing. Ditto with a real sound editor that would run on my phone that would be similar to the depth of an application such as Adobe Audition.

Who will develop these more capable smartphone applications? That remains to be seen. At this point the only real differentiators for hardware platforms lies in better software applications.

I personally am willing to pay for desktop class applications that will run on mobile computing platforms. Unfortunately so far they don’t seem to exist.


MacKeeper Provides Human Tech Support For Your Mac At CES



mackeeper logo

Even though Macs are well-known for their security, it’s still important to keep tabs on your Mac’s security. With excellent anti-virus protection and built-in tech support capabilities, MacKeeper is the perfect Mac security and support solution.

Jamie and Nick talked to Jeremiah Fowler from MacKeeper about his product. MacKeeper is an application with a wide range of features to protect and enhance your Mac. You can connect with a real technician to troubleshoot and solve computer issues, manage and protect your Mac’s data against viruses and security breaches, clean up your system, and much more.

MacKeeper’s support staff are certified IT professionals, so you can rest assured that you’ll get expert assistance every time. MacKeeper runs quietly in the background of your system, so you won’t experience annoying lags in speed or performance. And with pricing as low as $7 per month, you won’t have to break the bank to get user-friendly all-in-one tech support for your Mac.

For more information, visit MacKeeper’s website.

Interview by Jamie Davis of Health Tech Weekly and Nick DiMeo of F5 Live.

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