Google Docs help: How to restore your original version after collaborators make a mess
Google Docs help: How to restore your original version after collaborators make a mess
When your colleagues muck up your work with their comments and corrections, what do you do? What DO you do? You read this quick tip, of course!
Written by David Gewirtz / Courtesy of ZDNet
Here’s the scenario. You spend three days writing a truly excellent document. You research it carefully, you base it on the outline you and your team agreed upon, and you do a strong edit pass before sharing it.
Then, you share it with your team. Because everyone you shared it with is an adult, and on the same team, you set the sharing settings to “Anyone with the link can edit.”
Has this ever happened to you?
After a few days, you get a note from your boss, “Looks like all the comments are in, but the document is now a mess. Can you clean it up? Check out some of the comments, but I think we should mostly go with what you originally submitted.”
You open up the document and it’s a horrendous mess of comments and text replacements. Just out of morbid curiosity you look at the sharing settings. You discover that instead of just the four people in the original conference call, your carefully crafted document has been accessed by 27 people.
It gets worse. Someone hacked away at what you wrote with seeming abandon. Someone else didn’t like those changes and chopped away at those. A vicious cycle was created with one participant after the other cutting and adding, until what you end up looking at has no resemblance to what you submitted.
Has this ever happened to you? Yeah, we’ve all been there.
Now clean it up
Somewhere under all that glorious collaboration was a workable document, your original. The only problem is digging it out. Clearly, trying to walk out each contributor’s changes would be a tedious and ultimately fruitless endeavor.
There has to be a better way.
Fortunately, there is. That’s because Google is also a collaborative organization and folks there have experienced just the same comment and edit graffiti you have.
The trick is to go under the File menu in Google Docs and look for “Version history.” Under that, you’ll find a sub-item called “See version history.” When you select that, you’ll see your document with a list of versions in a panel on the right.
You can click any one of the listings in that panel and you’ll see the document as it was. If you want to go back in time and recover one of those listings, click the big blue button at the top of the page that says “Restore this version.”
Boom! Sanity is restored.
Bonus tips
Here are a couple of bonus tips within a tip. If you look under the Google Docs File->Version history menu item again, you’ll see “Name current version.” Use this to… wait for it… name the current version. That way, when you’re sifting back through all the previous edits, you can find the version you want.
Here’s a best practice to boost your productivity. Just before submitting a document to the team for edit, name the current version something you’ll remember. I like to use version numbers, so I often name mine something like DG_01, DG_02, etc. These are the versions just before the chaos.
Then, when I have to get back to them, I can just look for the version with the right name, or – and this is magic in a bottle – I just flip the “Only show named versions,” and it’s like a breath of fresh air.
Only the named versions are shown. Since my collaborators don’t usually name their versions, it’s only a matter of seconds to find and restore a clean document, free of all that edit clutter.
Do you have any Google Docs editing horror stories? What did you do? Share below, so we can feel your pain or learn from your success. Also, do you have a quick tip, or a problem you’d like solved with a quick tip? If so, share with us in the comments below.
Read the original article over at ZDNet.com.
Florida city pays $600,000 to hackers who seized its computer system
Florida city pays $600,000 to hackers who seized its computer system
Courtesy of CBS News
Fort Lauderdale Fla. — A Florida city agreed to pay $600,000 in ransom to hackers who took over its computer system, the latest in thousands of attacks worldwide aimed at extorting money from governments and businesses.
The Riviera Beach City Council voted unanimously this week to pay the hackers’ demands, believing the Palm Beach suburb had no choice if it wanted to retrieve its records, which the hackers encrypted. The council already voted to spend almost $1 million on new computers and hardware after hackers captured the city’s system three weeks ago.
The hackers apparently got into the city’s system when an employee clicked on an email link that allowed them to upload malware. The city had numerous problems, including losing its email system and 911 dispatchers not being able to enter calls into the computer.
According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, ransomware is the fastest growing malware threat, targeting both individuals and organizations. In 2018, the massive “SamSam” virus disrupted the flight information system, baggage displays and email at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport, while another attack crippled computers at the Port of San Diego.
City governments in Atlanta, Newark, N.J., and Sarasota, Fla., also have been hit by ransomware schemes. And hackers have taken the information systems of dozens of U.S. hospitals hostage.
“Ransomware is commonly delivered through phishing emails or via ‘drive-by downloads,'” according to Homeland Security. “Phishing emails often appear as though they have been sent from a legitimate organization or someone known to the victim and entice the user to click on a malicious link or open a malicious attachment.”
The FBI, Homeland Security and U.S. Secret Service are investigating the Florida attack, according to The Palm Beach Post.
Samsung asks users to please virus-scan their TVs
Samsung asks users to please virus-scan their TVs
Samsung Support USA deleted its own virus-scanning recommendation.
Written by Jim Salter / Courtesy of ArsTechnica
Yesterday on Twitter, Samsung’s US support team reminded everyone to regularly—and manually—virus-scan their televisions.
Samsung’s team followed this up with a short video showing someone in a conference room going 16 button-presses deep into the system menu of a Samsung QLED TV to activate the television’s built-in virus-scan, which is apparently “McAfee Security for TV.”
Unsurprisingly, Samsung got immediate pushback on these tweets and almost as immediately deleted them.
This may raise some questions about Samsung’s practices and what we as consumers should be expecting of modern devices. The fact that Samsung’s malware scanner is McAfee (and that McAfee’s only customer for the service is apparently Samsung) raises questions about the real value and intent of the service: is Samsung paying McAfee for what has to be a pretty trivial application, or is McAfee paying Samsung for brand promotion? But even if we skip the brand-related cynicism and take the concept at face value, we are left with a few questions.
Ars reached out to Samsung with the questions below, but the below statement the company provided didn’t answer them. The following statement is attributed to Samsung:
Samsung takes security very seriously and our products and services are designed with security in mind. We recently shared information about one of the preventative security features on our Smart TVs, in order to show consumers proactive steps they can take on their device. We want to clarify that this was simply a way to educate consumers about one of the features included in our products and was only posted because we believed that consumers would find it informative.
Is there a real danger?
Does Samsung believe there’s a real danger of malware infection on its smart TVs? Obviously, any computing device with random-access storage can run malicious code. When it comes to consumer devices with almost no access to attack surfaces, though, the question becomes one of vector. It seems extremely unlikely that Samsung is worried about some neighborhood blackhat wandering into your living room and rooting your TV by pressing buttons on the remote—but the TV does have a Samsung App Store, which hosts third-party apps.
The store is hosted by Samsung, however, and appears to contain fewer than 100 total apps. Thoroughly vetting these applications prior to publishing them doesn’t seem like an unmanageable load for Samsung to bear… and if a malicious app does sneak past, can Samsung not simply revoke the app from the back end?
Shouldn’t it be automatic?
If anti-virus scanning your TV is necessary, shouldn’t it be automatic? If you do a vanilla Windows 10 install from an ISO, Windows Defender is installed, enabled, and has regular and automatic updates and scans scheduled by default—with no consumer interaction required. If the consumer decides to replace Defender with a third-party app such as McAfee, Symantec, or Malwarebytes, those apps will also automatically schedule regular scans and updates. Expecting most consumers to regularly schedule and faithfully execute system administration tasks is out of the question even when it comes to their PCs; even more so for their televisions.
Was whoever was operating the Samsung Support USA twitter confused, as they simply didn’t realize the service already runs automatically? Or were they correct, and it really doesn’t happen unless a determined user beep-beep-beeps 16-plus times with the remote once every couple of weeks? If it’s not automatically scheduled, consumers may ask “why not?” Is there a concern over performance problems, or does Samsung just not see any actual value in a service that might only exist for branding purposes?
How long does malware stay in Samsung’s store?
How long does Samsung expect smart TV malware to stay on its store? There’s a dirty secret about anti-virus scanning: it almost never stops zero-day problems. Heuristics engines aren’t very effective, and the vast majority of “true positives” are signature-based detection of known malware. The real purpose of anti-virus isn’t to block fresh malware, it’s to limit the viability window of new malware. In an ecosystem with presumably only one vector for malware distribution—Samsung’s own App Store—there shouldn’t be any aging malware floating around, being reused by not-particularly-talented script kiddies incapable of writing their own; the only threats possible ought to be fresh threats in the first place.
This leaves us wondering why Samsung not only feels the need to run an internal malware scanner, but needed to contract one from a third party rather than (continuing to) run its own.
A modest counter-proposal
The best way to keep your big, expensive smart TV safe is never to allow it access to your network in the first place. The consumer electronics space is packed chock-full with inexpensive, high-quality streaming devices that typically have better interfaces and more options than most smart televisions anyway. Roku and Amazon 4K-streaming players both start at less than $50; in the unlikely event one of those becomes compromised, “recycle the bad one and buy a new one, probably from a competing brand” seems like a perfectly reasonable response.
Read the original article over at ArsTechnica.com.
Apple spent $10,000 repairing his MacBook Pro. There was nothing wrong with it
Apple spent $10,000 repairing his MacBook Pro. There was nothing wrong with it
This may be the most absurd, convoluted Apple repair story you’ve ever heard.
Written by Chris Matyszczyk / Courtesy of ZDNet
It’s likely, when historians look back on the Kingdom of Apple, that the recent iterations of the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air will go down as among Apple’s greatest nonsenses.
I’ve had my own keyboard issues with my MacBook Air, less than six months old.
However, a tale offered by photographer and developer Greg Benz might truly give you the bends as to how it reached the depths it did. Or, perhaps, the heights.
It seems that his 2018 MacBook Pro had a recurring problem. So much so that his Pro underwent four complete failures.
As he describes it: “The first two motherboard replacements seemed odd, but I was given a completely new laptop from Apple on the third failure. Just like before, the screen was pure black after clicking the power button and there was a slight fan sound. The only other indication that anything was alive was that the machine would still make an audible chime when plugging in power and the capslock key light could be toggled off and on.”
This clearly vexed Benz. I suspect it would drive most people demented. You’d think that someone at Apple might be driven demented by the amount of replacement money that seems to have been spent here:
“So after losing about two weeks of my time, >$10,000 in Apple warranty repairs (two logic boards, new cables, and a complete replacement of a >$7,000 computer), troubleshooting input from several Apple Geniuses, level 1 and 2 tech support from Apple Corporate, diagnostic tests at the Apple Store, and diagnostic tests twice at Apple’s repair facility in Texas; what was the root issue?” says Benz, knowing how to hang a cliff hanger.
He seems, you see, to be made of determined innards. He went to yet another Apple Genius and this one proved to be true to his moniker. Or, perhaps, he just stopped and thought a little longer than his fellow experts.
You see, he diagnosed there was nothing wrong with Benz’s MacBook Pro. The issue, if you want to call it that, was that the screen brightness was turned all the way off.
Explained Benz: “He used the flashlight function on his phone to shine on the laptop screen and could see a little circle where your login avatar would show (and this was incredible difficult to see). It turns out that the screen pixels are updated even when the backlight is off (at least if the clamshell is open). But even he spent a good 20+ minutes trying other things before he thought to do that.”
Don’t turn your screen brightness off. The Pro may go dark for a very long time.
Benz understands his tale is funny. He does, though, beg for mitigating circumstances. It seems that when you boot up your Pro, it turns on in the state you last left it. So, if you turned the screen brightness off, that’s how it’ll wake up.
If you want to get it going, you have to log in. But how to log on when your screen is dark? And how would an Apple Genius know that this might be the issue?
There’s no point reaching for the brightness control on the touchbar. That, says Benz, doesn’t work until you log in either.
But wait, I hear you cry. Why was Benz turning off his screen brightness? Because he hooks his Pro up to an external monitor.
And, oh, had no one at Apple ever thought that something like this might occur?
As Benz painfully and painstakingly laid out, external monitors are disabled during boot and login. An external keyboard seems non-functional as well.
Naturally, Benz points something of a finger at Apple: “The Apple troubleshooting guides are out of date. They do not note that if you have a firmware password on a T2 Mac, you cannot reset PRAM as expected and therefore cannot resolve screen brightness issues this way. You also cannot run diagnostics due to the black screen. And lastly, they should probably ask users to try to log in blind knowing this list of shortcomings above. [Note that I use and recommend firmware passwords for security reasons, including to disable a thieve’s ability to turn off ‘Find my Mac’ by simply holding down a few keys during boot.]”
You’re wondering if there might be a solution, a workaround that’s slightly better than throwing your MacBook Pro against a wall.
Benz offers that you can log in blind: “Type the first letter of your login name, click <enter>, and type your password to successfully login.”
Well, I never. No, I really never, as I’d never think to turn my screen brightness off.
Naturally, I contacted Apple to see how it felt about this tale of merciless Benz pain. I’ll update, should I hear.
Never mind Benz’s blind login, however. Marvel at his blind loyalty to Apple.
His verdict: “I’m disappointed at the level of troubleshooting support here and felt let down/abandoned during some of the customer support interactions. But I stand by my original review that this is an excellent computer and once again feel confident in fully endorsing it for photographers.”
And somewhere, marketing managers at competing laptop companies screamed.
Read the original article courtesy of ZDNet.com.
Feds lose control of thousands of traveler photos in data breach by hackers
Feds lose control of thousands of traveler photos in data breach by hackers
Immigration agency reportedly collected the photos at a Canadian border crossing.
Written by Timothy B. Lee / Courtesy of ArsTechnica
Hackers have stolen thousands of photos of travelers and their license plates from a subcontractor of Customs and Border Protection, the agency announced on Monday. A source told the Washington Post that the data was collected at a particular port of entry on the Canadian border.
CBP declined to identify the subcontractor, but the agency sent the Washington Post a document with the title “CBP Perceptics Public Statement.” Perceptics sells license plate reader technology, and the Register reported last month that the company’s network had been hacked.
CBP says it learned of the breach on May 31, and the organization stated that its own network was not compromised. The agency says that the subcontractor violated agency policies when it copied the photos to its own network, making them more vulnerable to hacking.
“CBP takes its privacy and cybersecurity responsibilities very seriously and demands all contractors to do the same,” the agency said.
The breach could have been worse. A law enforcement source told Buzzfeed that fewer than 100,000 people had their information leaked and that “no other identifying information was included with the photos and no passport or other travel document photos were compromised.” For comparison, the 2015 hack of the Office of Personnel management affected more than 20 million people and leaked a wide range of personal information.
The breach highlights one of the inherent risks created by routine collection of peoples’ photos. Some airlines have begun using facial recognition technology instead of conventional tickets for international flights. (To be clear, last month’s data breach was reportedly from a land border crossing, not an airport.) The change may make it slightly more convenient to board an airplane and may also aid with immigration enforcement. But it also means that airlines are amassing vast databases of peoples’ faces—databases that could fall into the hands of hackers in the future.
Read the original article over at ArsTechnica.com.
A $999 monitor stand is everything wrong with Apple today
A $999 monitor stand is everything wrong with Apple today
It’s an expensive gadget nobody needs.
Written by Devindra Hardawar / Courtesy of Engadget
You can pinpoint the exact moment when Apple lost the WWDC audience on Monday. John Ternus, the company’s VP of hardware engineering, had just revealed that the Pro Display XDR, its new high-end 6K monitor, will cost $4,999. That’s pricey, but reasonable considering all of the features it offers. But then there was one more thing, and not the good kind. One hour, forty two minutes and five seconds into the keynote stream, he revealed that the Pro Display’s stand is a separate $999 purchase. The crowd, which was mostly enthusiastic until then, erupted into cautious murmurs — enough to make Ternus stammer as he continued on. He was completely unprepared for the Apple faithful to question the glorious technology being bestowed upon them.
Here’s the thing: The Pro Display XDR stand seems nice. It has the sort of elegant modernist design you’d expect from Apple; it can smoothly tilt up to 25 degrees, while also holding everything firmly in place; and it can even be nudged into portrait mode. But is it worth $999? Unlikely. From my perspective, as someone who spends way too much time thinking about the relative value of electronics, it seems like a raw deal. And it continues a trend we’re seeing from Apple recently: trying to upsell attractive tech that ultimately doesn’t do much for users.
Consider the MacBook Pro. Four years after Apple replaced its function keys with the touchscreen Touch Bar, it still feels like a half-brained feature. Sure, there’s potential for a dynamic and contextual menu bar, but in my experience, it only leads to hesitation. I’m always double-checking the Touch Bar to make sure I’m hitting the right button; there’s no way to build up muscle memory like you would with normal keys. Instead of making things easier, the Touch Bar is just a constant source of friction.
And even though the MacBook Pro is Apple’s premium notebook line, the only ports you’ll find on it are USB-C and a headphone jack. There aren’t any memory card slots that pro users actually need, and you can forget about HDMI and Ethernet. Apple expects you to rely on dongles entirely. Meanwhile, Windows PC makers like Dell and Lenovo are crafting sleek machines that somehow manage to fit in those ports. While there’s an aesthetic simplicity to sticking with USB-C, is that really worth making life more difficult for a large segment of your customers?
Apple’s emphasis on design over usefulness is exemplified by the iPad Pro, one of the most attractive devices the company has ever made, but also one that’s been held back severely by iOS. The company’s mobile OS was just fine when the iPad was being positioned as more of a consumption device. But its clunky multitasking and lack of a genuine file system makes it difficult to treat the iPad Pro as a genuine notebook replacement. Thankfully, Apple is going to fix those issues with iOS 13 and its iPadOS fork later this year, but until then, the iPad Pro is like a Ferrari with the handling of a go-kart.
And we can’t forget the previous “trash can” Mac Pro. Apple was so obsessed with making something that looked unique and fashionable, it dropped the ball when it came to expansion and thermal performance. You know, the things pro users actually care about. The company eventually apologized for that machine, and promised a more useful follow-up. That’s the modular Mac Pro the company just announced. It’s a return to a more traditional desktop tower design, and while that might seem regressive from a design perspective, it comes with some useful changes, like PCIe expansion slots and “Afterburner” to speed up 4K and 8K video editing.
Now before you rush off to the comments, I’m well aware that professionals have completely different needs than mainstream consumers. They won’t balk at paying $5,000 for a monitor if it can get a bit closer to reference screens that cost upwards of $40,000. And they won’t blink an eye at the new Mac Pro’s $5,999 starting price — something that can easily scale north of $30,000 depending on what you plug in there.
If that investment means they can get renders and high-resolution editing done faster, it’ll be worth it. But no matter how I look at it, I can’t see the professional justification for a $999 monitor stand, especially when you can get decent rotating mounts for $32. And judging from the reaction at WWDC, it’s clear that even some of Apple’s most devoted users are beginning to question its wisdom.
Read the original article over at Engadget.com.
Hackers May Soon Be Able to Tell What You’re Typing—Just By Hearing You Type
Hackers May Soon Be Able to Tell What You’re Typing—Just By Hearing You Type
Research suggests that sound waves from typing on a phone can be intercepted and decoded.
Written by Matthew Kassel / Courtesy of The Wall Street Journal
Thanks to the increasing sophistication of smartphone technology, hackers soon may be able to intercept and analyze the sounds of typing—and figure out exactly what people are writing on their devices.
A growing body of academic research suggests that acoustic signals, or sound waves, produced when we type on our phones could be used by hackers to glean text messages, passwords, PINs and other private information. Such attacks could occur, experts say, if smartphone users were to download an app infected with malware that gains access to such smartphone sensors as microphones, accelerometers and gyroscopes.
One recent study, one of the latest demonstrations of hacking that exploits acoustics, found that the microphones in Android devices can be used to pick up the vibrations that are produced when you use the virtual keyboard on your phone or tablet. The sound waves that are recorded can then be interpreted to discern where on the screen you tapped and which keys you struck.
Based on results using 45 participants, the study’s researchers, from the University of Cambridge in England and Sweden’s Linköping University, were able to recover numerical codes, letters and whole words with some accuracy. For example, in 10 attempts, the researchers, using a machine-learning algorithm that classified each vibration, cracked seven out of 27 passwords on a smartphone and 19 out of 27 passwords on a tablet.
The study is available online in an archive of academic papers maintained by Cornell University, though it hasn’t been published in an academic journal and hasn’t yet undergone formal peer review. But computer-science experts who were asked to read it for this article say that it shows a plausible avenue of attack, though certain current security constraints could make it unlikely, they add. Smartphones typically ask the user for permission when an app wants to access the microphone, for example, which could reveal a possible incursion. But no such permission is usually needed when an app wants to access another type of sensor such as the accelerometer, the built-in instrument that is used to measure acceleration, which hackers could use to steal data in a more discreet fashion.
Ilia Shumailov, a Ph.D. candidate in computer science and technology at the University of Cambridge, is an author of the study, which proposes that companies design smartphones that indicate to users when their microphones and other sensors have been turned on, indicating a possible breach.
A number of previous studies have examined other ways that acoustic hacking of smartphones can take place. In one early paper in the field, from 2012, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania looked at how a smartphone’s accelerometer—which is used, for instance, to measure steps—can be repurposed by hackers to collect screen vibrations that can then be used to infer PINs and passwords. This paper hasn’t been published but was presented at an apps security conference in Orlando, Fla., in 2012.
In controlled settings using 50 PINs and 50 Android swipe-to-unlock patterns (used by Android owners to access their phones rather than a numerical password), the researchers at Penn found that in five attempts their machine-learning technology could figure out a PIN 43% of the time and a pattern 73% of the time.
Adam Aviv, an author of the study and now an assistant professor of computer science at the U.S. Naval Academy, says that researchers are also examining whether accelerometers can be used to capture the vibrations from speech. Though it is difficult to parse exact phrases in this way, he says, hackers could possibly use the sound waves to determine personally identifiable information like age and gender.
Despite existing research, Dr. Aviv—who says Mr. Shumailov’s study is plausible—thinks that concerns over acoustic attacks are somewhat overblown, at least at the moment. Right now, he explains, such attacks are more a subject of academic inquiry than a real-world threat. Acoustic hacking has long been of interest to researchers, he says, and the smartphone has over the past decade or so provided a new platform for experimentation. But it is still difficult to extract the acoustic information from smartphones with much reliability, he says, though that could change as the technology improves.
Murtuza Jadliwala, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Texas at San Antonio, agrees that acoustic attacks are possible. Dr. Jadliwala also read the Shumailov study and says it seems plausible. Still, he thinks acoustic attacks would be hard to pull off now because machine-learning algorithms trained to evaluate sound waves in academic experiments would most likely prove unreliable when placed in a real-world setting where environmental factors could interfere with the acoustic signal.
In any case, there are simple precautions smartphone users can take to subvert a possible attack, according to Philip Brisk, an associate professor in computer science and engineering at the University of California, Riverside. Such steps include only installing apps from trusted sources and only granting microphone access to apps that legitimately need it, Dr. Brisk says.
Mr. Shumailov, for his part, says that despite current obstacles to such attacks, we need to get ready.
“If right now it’s really hard to imagine anybody deploying these attacks,” he says, “in the near future they’re definitely going to be there.”
Read the original article over at WSJ.com.
Google confirms four-hour outage of YouTube, GMail, other major services
Google confirms four-hour outage of YouTube, GMail, other major services
Google blamed “high levels of network congestion” in the East for outages that affected YouTube, GMail, Google Voice, Calendar and Nest users that couldn’t unlock doors or use the AC.
Written by Alex Johnson / Courtesy of NBC News
Google Inc. reported Sunday that YouTube, GMail, Google Calendar and nearly all its of other consumer-facing services experienced major service problems for about four hours after reports of outages flooded in from users around the country.
The company said it experienced “high levels of network congestion in the eastern USA, affecting multiple services in Google Cloud, G Suite and YouTube,” after web monitoring services began reporting high numbers of connection failures at about 3 p.m. on a host of Google services at about 3 p.m., most of them in the eastern half of the country.
At 7:30 p.m., it said the “issue affecting Google Cloud, G Suite, and YouTube is resolved for the vast majority of users, and we expect a full resolution in the near future.”
In addition to YouTube, GMail and Calendar, affected services included Google Drive and its related editing and presentation tools, like Docs and Sheets; Hangouts; Keep; Tasks; and Voice. Google status pages showed that two of the company’s major internal backbone engines, Cloud Service and Compute Engine, also were “reporting issues” during the same time frame.
The reports began surfacing at about the same time that Level 3 Communications, a prominent provider of internet services in 46 states and much of South America, was experiencing similar problems, also primarily in the eastern half of the country.
Level 3’s clients include Google, but it couldn’t immediately determined whether the two incidents were related.
Read the original article over at NBCNews.com.
How to Download a Windows 10 ISO By Impersonating Other Devices
How to Download a Windows 10 ISO By Impersonating Other Devices
Written by Mayank Parmar / Courtesy of Bleeping Computer
Microsoft allows you to download the latest Windows 10 ISOs from their site, but only if you are using a non-Windows browser user agent. This article will explain how to change your user agent in Chrome and Edge so you can download an ISO instead of using the Windows 10 Media Creation Tool.
Microsoft releases ISO files of every Windows 10 update, including the May 2019 Update, but you cannot download the ISO files from a Windows 10 device. If you open Microsoft’s Windows 10 download page, you’re only given the choice to get Windows 10 via the Update Assistant or Media Creation Tool.
You can download the Windows Media Creation Tool and create a bootable USB drive, but there is an easier way to download a Windows 10 ISO file – pretend to be a mobile device.
All you need is a web browser like Chrome or Edge and little knowledge of web developer tools.
Download ISO files with Google Chrome
To download Windows 10 ISO files using Google Chrome, please follow these steps:
- Go to Windows 10 download page in Chrome.
- Open Google Chrome menu.
- Tap on More Tools and then select Developer tools as shown below.
- Now press Ctrl + Shift + M to toggle device bar and select iPhone, iPad or a Pixel phone.
- Refresh the page to access direct download links.
- The above instructions are also valid for Chromium-based Microsoft Edge.
Download ISO files using classic Microsoft Edge
- Open Microsoft Edge.
- Go to Windows 10 download page in Edge.
- Open Microsoft Edge menu, select More Tools and thenselect Developer tools.
- When the developer tools open, go to the Emulation tab and change the user agent string option to any non-Windows device such as “Apple Safari (iPad).”
- Wait a moment for the webpage to reload.
- You can now download ISO files.
By setting your browser to a non-Windows device, you are spoofing Microsoft’s website into thinking that you are not on Windows 10, thus you can download and save the ISO files.
Read the original article over at BleepingComputer.com.
Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes
Apple Is Finally Killing iTunes
Farewell to a clunky but world-shattering icon
Written by Amy X. Wang / Courtesy of The Rolling Stone
It’s the end of a music era. Nearly two decades after launching iTunes and ripping up the retail-store model of album purchases, Apple is ready to retire the iconic product, according to Bloomberg. During the software keynote at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference in San Jose, California next Monday, the tech giant is set to replace iTunes with standalone music, television and podcast apps.
The move, which has been rumored for years now, will align Apple’s media strategy across the board: iPhones and iPads already offer separate Music, TV and Podcast apps in lieu of the centralized iTunes app that lives on Macs and Macbooks. Users can expect the new Music app to offer some of the same functionalities that iTunes currently does — such as purchasing songs and syncing phones — just with a sleeker interface that’s free of the outdated and oft-bemoaned features of the heritage product, and more closely bundled with streaming service Apple Music.
But the scrapping of iTunes’ brand symbolizes a lot, too. By portioning out its music, television and podcast offerings into three separate platforms, Apple will pointedly draw attention to itself as a multifaceted entertainment services provider, no longer as a hardware company that happens to sell entertainment through one of its many apps. That’s crucial for Apple’s future, as the company combats sluggish phone sales with aggressive growth in its services division. At WWDC this year, according to various reports, Apple is planning to buff up other apps including Books, Messages and Mail; it also announced ambitious plans for original video programming featuring the likes of Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell just a few months ago, in another bid to grow its content presence in entertainment industries.
Welcome as the death of iTunes may be to frustrated users, the software will forever deserve credit for the revolution it engineered in the early 2000s. Before iTunes debuted, the music industry was tearing its hair out trying to combat illegal file-sharing on Napster; Jobs’ new product presented the digital era’s first sustainable, user-friendly way to listen to music. Other firms like Sony and Microsoft had toyed with the idea of digital record stores, yet they “were technology companies that knew how to build disc players and hardware, but they weren’t companies that had demonstrated Apple’s sophistication with regard to software,” Warner Music’s vice president Paul Vidich recalled to Rolling Stone in 2013, on the iTunes Store’s 10th anniversary. “It really took a company that was able to bridge those two things and come up with an attractive consumer product.”
Read the original article over at RollingStone.com.
River Net Computers
(908) 996-3279
10 Bridge St. Ste #6, Frenchtown, NJ 08825
info@rivernetcomputers.com
Monday - Friday 10am - 6pm
Saturday 10am - 4pm
River Net Computers
(908) 996-3279
10 Bridge St. Ste #6, Frenchtown, NJ 08825
info@rivernetcomputers.com
Open Monday - Friday 10:00am - 6:00pm
& Saturday 10am - 4pm, closed on Sunday.
