Compu Hub

Get ready to see more red warning signs online as Google adds ammunition to its technological artillery for targeting devious schemes lurking on websites. The latest weapon is aimed at websites riddled with "unwanted software" — a term that Google uses to describe secretly installed programs that can change a browser's settings without a user's permission. Those revisions can unleash a siege of aggravatin g ads or redirect a browser's users to search engines or other sites that they didn't intend to visit. Google had already deployed the warning system to alert users of its Chrome browser that they were about to enter a site distributing unwanted software. The Mountain View, Calif., company just recently began to feed the security information into a broader "safe browsing" application that also works in Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox browsers. All told, the safe browsing application protects about 1.1 billion browser users,...

ASRock has gone mad -- it has built a Mini-ITX motherboard based on the X99 platform (and secretly we love it). Recently, ASRock announced that it would be displaying Extreme6 Z97 and X99 motherboards at CeBIT with USB 3.1, but it turns out that there is another board that we will be seeing – the X99E-ITX/ac. What's interesting here is that a couple of months ago, when all the X99 motherboards were launching, I asked ASRock reps whether they were interested in making a Mini-ITX motherboard with the X99 chipset and LGA2011-3 socket. At the time, we were told that ASRock had been toying with the idea but wasn't sure whether it would be worth it, due to the limited market it had been addressing. We wanted to see a "stupid powerful" system built with Mini-ITX, and thus we're glad to see the X99E-ITX/ac; it's delightfully ludicrous. Why? Because nobody has ever put an Extreme-series chipset on a Mini-ITX board, and what ASRock doing so is nothing short...

Last month, YouTube experimented with Choose Your View, which allows the user to have multiple camera angles of the same video. Now the popular video website is trying out another feature to keep viewers interested: 360-degree videos. Just like any YouTube experiment, there are a few videos available now that showcase the idea, such as a Formula 1 car racing down a track and the viewer sitting in a flying red couch. Obviously , the quality isn't as good as you would expect even at higher resolutions because it is limited to the camera's shooting capabilities. That's not to mention that these videos will take up four to five times the bandwidth of a regular YouTube video. Additionally, the feature isn't widely available yet. You can only use the 360-degree feature on the Google Chrome browser or the YouTube for Android app, but it's bound to be widely available in the future. As cool as the feature looks, the process to actually shoot and upload the videos...

The voice calling feature that WhatsApp had been teasing and testing for some time now is finally going mainstream. The WhatsApp voice calling feature is enabled in the latest build of the WhatsApp Messenger that is now available for download for Android devices on Google Play (version 2.11.561). But WhatsApp isn't activating voice calling feature right away. Desirous users will still need an invit e, in the form of a WhatsApp call from any other WhatsApp user who has the feature activated on his/her app. The steps involved fairly simple: 1. Go to Google Play and download/update the free WhatsApp Messenger app. 2. Ask any other WhatsApp user you know with the voice calling feature activated to call you via WhatsApp. Following the call you should find the WhatsApp voice calling feature activated on your phone. You will now see a new 'Calls' tab to the left of the Chats and Contacts tab on the WhatsApp home screen. While there have been unofficial APKs floating...

Researchers with Trend Micro have analyzed malware that first connects to home routers and scans for connected devices, and then sends the information it gathers to a command-and-control (C&C) server before deleting itself without a trace. The malware was detected by Trend Micro as TROJ_VICEPASS.A, or VICEPASS, and it has been observed infecting users that navigate to malicious websites hosting a purported Adobe Flash update, Trend Micro. Once downloaded and executed, the malware uses a predefined list of usernames and passwords to attempt to connect to the home router. Some of the usernames include admin, D-Link, guest, root and user, and some of the passwords include 12345678, admin, password and qwerty. “This malware appears to be used primarily for intelligence gathering,” in a Tuesday email correspondence. “Specifically, it enumerates as many connected devices as possible, attempts to connect to them and returns a list of results to the command-and-control server....

“ Having your first name as your password is not a good idea —just getting it out of the way. Words that are in your email address aren't a lot better. Having security questions that tons of people know the answer to is another no-no.” When we hear the word “hacking,” most of us picture this hacker in his underground workstation with dozens of computers “h acking” away with their superawe some hackingtools that can rip the space-time continuum and *poof*! Your World of Warcraft account has been hacked. Now, riddle me this. Why would someone like that be interested in something as trivial as your Facebook account? More often than not, in cases where email or social media accounts get hacked, it's mostly because of something stupid you did. Not unticking the “Remember Me” option before logging in, for instance. But I'll assume you have the sense to not do that. The internet can be a scary place. Would it freak you out if I told you that a lot of computers in the US are ...

The new TA970 Plus motherboard from Biostar is targeted at budget enthusiasts. The board offers a number of features such as ACC (Advanced Clock Calibration) to help achieve better results from overclocking. The TA970 Plus is predominantly black with yellow highlights. The heatsink over the MOFSETs is made to look like a piano keyboard to go with the audio and Hi-Fi theme. Although the audio chipset used  on the board is a cheaper ALC892 that has become a baseline for quality motherboard audio in recent years, Biostar used a number of Hi-Fi capacitors and a segmented section of the motherboard to improve the SNR. There are two USB 3.0 and six USB 2.0 ports on the back I/O panel, with an additional USB 3.0 header and two USB 2.0 headers on the board. Further, the I/O panel has a 1 Gbps LAN connection, two legacy PS/2 connections and basic audio connections. For storage, the board has five SATA 3 connectors and an mSATA connector. There are two PCI-E x16 2.0,...