How to disable Windows 10's Wi-Fi Sense password sharing

Windows 10’s new Wi-Fi Sense feature is a powerful tool that takes the headache out of managing Wi-Fi connections on the run. With Wi-Fi Sense enabled, Windows 10 will automatically sign you into open Wi-Fi networks, as well as private networks that your Outlook.com, Skype, and Facebook contacts have logged into—so you won’t have to manually sign into the network when you visit your buddy’s house.



As convenient as Wi-Fi Sense is, however, not everyone’s thrilled with it. Windows 10 enables Wi-Fi Sense by default, but you can disable it. Here’s how.

How to disable Wi-Fi Sense in Windows 10

First, open the Start menu and head to Settings > Network & Internet > Wi-Fi > Manage Wi-Fi settings. In here, you basically want to disable every option you see, as well as tell Windows 10 to forget any Wi-Fi networks you’ve signed into in the past.

The Wi-Fi Sense settings screen in Windows 10

That’s easy, and all well and good. But what if you don’t want your friends sharing the information about your network’s password with their friends? That takes some additional tinkering, and it’s not obvious. There isn’t a mere option toggle in Windows 10 itself.

Instead, you need to dive into your actual router’s settings and give your network a new name with “_optout” at the end. For example, a network called “WiFiSenseUgh_optout” wouldn’t be stored by Wi-Fi Sense, while one that’s just called “WiFiSenseUgh” would be usable with Microsoft’s sharing feature.

Yeah, it’s a pain, but if you don’t add “_optout” to your network and want to stay out of Microsoft’s Wi-Fi Sense database, you’ll need to manually enter your password on your friends’ devices when they pop by your house and make sure to uncheck Windows 10’s “Share network with my contacts” box when you do so.

Learn How to Clear Cache in Chrome

Every browser does the same thing; that is connecting to a website’s server and downloading those files to display them to the end users. For that functioning, any browser will maintain a folder where all the cache will be saved, its also known as the temporary Internet files.

That folder named cache will store images, audio, video, CSS, web pages and other locally saved content that helps in displaying web pages more quickly and swiftly.

Now, before moving ahead and learning about the clearing cache in Google Chrome, you need to understand the basics, pros and cons of clearing that cache.

Advantages and disadvantages of Removing files from Cache folder:

• Cache folder over the time will collect an enormous amount of files, and it may eat a lot of you disk space which in turn can slow down your PC or Laptop.
• It may happen that while browsing websites you may be displayed with older content, and fresh content is getting ignored completely, all this because of cache.
• You may be storing files that are incomplete and corrupt, it means website displayed on your browser are not up to the mark.
• Now if you clear all the cache than all the browser memory will be cleared and if you removed everything from your system, you may lose some of your username/passwords for your frequently visited sites.
• After clearing the cache, any website will be loading at a slower rate due to no cache files and they have to be downloaded again, which is done automatically.

Here are simple and quick steps for clearing cache in Chrome

All the steps are specifically for the latest version of Google Chrome, but they may be similar to another version as well.

1. Click on Chrome menu icon, located the extreme top right corner of your browser, after the address bar.







2. Next you will see options and many menu items, one of them is More Tools > Clear browsing data. These two steps can be shorted out by using Ctrl+Shift+Delete on your keyboard.





3. Another screen will appear as a popup, shown below. It will give you options to select other browsing data and cache files that can be deleted.

4. To clear only the browser cache, tick mark option that reads “Empty the cache” and leave all other unchecked. From the drop down menu, we would suggest using ‘beginning of time.’ Then, click on clear browsing data once you have done everything else.



Shortest way: In your browser URL bar cop-paste (without quotes):
“chrome://chrome/settings/clearBrowserData”
OR
“chrome://chrome/history/”
plus click on Clear all browsing data key.

Conclusion:
With all the pros and cons of clearing cache, it will all depend on how your computer is behaving. If it is fast enough, then you will never want to remove that cache, and for any reason it goes slow then always make sure you clear the cache before trying any more tricks for computer speed.

In the end, if you face an issue regarding browser cache, you can open a private/incognito mode. If your concern is not resolved, then you have to look forward to something other than clearing the cache.

Apple App store, iTunes back up after outage

Apple's App store, iTunes, Apple Music and Apple TV suffered a four-hour long outage Tuesday morning.

The problems began shortly before 10:00 a.m. ET, and the issues appeared to have been resolved by 1:30 p.m.

Although not all users were impacted, a system status report showed that all of Apple's store services were affected. There were no issues with programs that rely on iCloud solely.

The downtime coincided with the announcement of MTV's Video Music Award nominees, which were set to be broadcast exclusively on Apple's Beats 1 radio station.

Apple (AAPL, Tech30) will also release its quarterly results in the afternoon.
The company did not respond to request for comment.

In March, several Apple services, including iCloud backup, the App Store, and iTunes and iBooks, went down for a day without explanation.

Dell tries stealing creative pros away from the Mac

Dell's Precision M3800 workstation laptop is designed to attract customers using Apple's MacBook Pro. Dell

Adam Wrigley, a product designer at Frog Design, is the kind of creative professional you might expect to see using a Mac. But when choosing between Apple and Dell for his most recent laptop, he settled on the Dell.

"I wanted to get as much hardware as I could," he said of his choice. "With the Mac, I couldn't afford a bunch of features."

That's music to Dell's ears. For decades, a core group of creative professionals sustained Apple's personal-computer business by buying Macs for editing photos, producing videos and designing ads. It's a lucrative, loyal base of customers with a taste for high-end hardware -- and a potentially critical market for Dell to target as it tries to rebuild its PC business.

"I don't think it's a big focus for them," Chief Executive Michael Dell said of Apple's efforts in the market for high-end machines for design professionals. Dell, in contrast, has 40 percent to 45 percent of the market for workstations, Dell said. Combined with its high-resolution external monitors, it's "a special focus market that we're clearly doing well in."

Sensing a potential vulnerability, Dell representatives are showing up at film festivals to court the creative folks, and Dell engineers are designing machines like the M3800 laptop to try fulfilling their need for horsepower and style.

"Rich content is a high-growth market, and it's one where Apple is very strong," said Andy Rhodes, leader of Dell's Precision workstation business. "They have high market share. But customers are telling us Apple is not investing in the future of that market."

It's no wonder Dell has Apple envy. In 1997, Michael Dell said Apple should "shut...down and give the money back to shareholders." Two years later, Dell had clawed its way to the top of the PC market, beginning a long reign there. But fortunes have reversed now: Dell is struggling to rebuild in a faltering PC market while Apple's Mac revenue grew 9 percent in the last quarter and unit shipments grew 11 percent.

Apple is still strong with the creative professionals, but Dell is smart to pounce. More than two years ago, customers started telling Dell that Apple wasn't serving them well, in particular because of Apple's botched transition from its respected Final Cut Pro 7 video-editing software to its radically different Final Cut Pro X. Dell spun up what it calls "customer-inspired roadmap creation" to make products that would get creative pros to switch off their Macs, said Rhodes.

Dell is trying to bring style and polish to its products for the market, but Dell's core values -- performance at the right price -- remain at the center of the sales pitch. That's compelling for companies like video production firm Dawnrunner Productions, whose video-rendering times dropped 25 percent to 30 percent after switching from Macs to Dells, according to Chief Executive James Fox.

"It was a very scary move," Fox said. "When we pulled the trigger, we all said, 'Wow, that was really easy.'"

'Slow exodus'

Apple, which didn't comment for this story, is a very different company now than even two or four years ago. The lion's share of Apple's business is now selling iPhones, a much more mainstream business than courting graphic designers and musicians. In the first quarter of 2015, Apple generated $5.6 billion in revenue by selling 4.6 million Macs.

By comparison, it sold 61.2 million iPhones for $40.3 billion and 12.6 million iPads for $5.4 billion.
Nowadays, creative pros are slipping over to the Windows side of the PC industry, said Jon Peddie, who's tracked the workstation market for years at his firm Jon Peddie Research.
"It's a very slow exodus, no stampede," Peddie said, but Dell is the top beneficiary. "Dell is making the most aggressive moves in screen resolution, power-performance and price. Dell is probably Apple's biggest threat in the professional space now, with (Hewlett-Packard) No. 2."

Michael Dell believes his company's outsized presence in the workstation focus is contributing to its comeback. "There are three companies that are gaining share. We're certainly one of them."
But if Frog Design and Dawnrunner show Apple's vulnerability, Jessica Ruggieri of ad and film agency Sleek Machine shows the company's enduring strength.

What would it take to get her to switch to a Dell? "Maybe if they were bought out by Apple," she quipped.

"I will be anti-PC forever," she said of her disdain for Windows machines. She imprinted on the Mac lineage when she first learned how to use computers. "I'm very comfortable with it. Not only is it a beautiful workspace, it's beautifully designed, aesthetic and streamlined. Compatibility with Mac hardware and software [makes a Mac] one clean system."
 
Apple's momentum also ensures any industry transitions won't be fast. Take the case of advertising and marketing firm Deep Focus, which plans to continue using Macs. "The main reason is continuity -- partners are on Mac, vendors are on Mac, and most of our team is on Mac at home," said Ken Kraemer, the company's chief creative officer.

Apple's increasingly consumer-oriented business cuts both ways, Kraemer added. On the plus side, it makes it easier for creative pros to tap into new technological abilities. On the minus side, it means Apple's attention is elsewhere.

"In the very long term, this apparent focus will probably undo the dominance Apple has in creative fields," Kraemer said. Windows PCS are cheaper and faster, particular for 3D graphics work that's becoming more important, he said, but for now "Mac hardware is great for 90 percent of the creative tasks we do."

Dell tries getting stylish

Dell's success was based on operational efficiency, a direct-to-customer sales model that plumped up profit margins and a reliance on Microsoft and Intel to shoulder most of the research and development burden. Apple, by comparison, always had its own operating system, and it increasingly designs or tightly controls its hardware, too. Where Dell accepted the "Intel Inside" stickers and marketing money from Intel, Apple kept its machines pristine and left customers recognizing only its own brand.

Dell's recipe didn't work, though, as evidenced by a sliding share price that forced the company to go private in 2013. Apple was partly responsible for Dell's decline by diverting people's spending toward smartphones and tablets. But the company had plenty of other troubles, including the rise of Asian PC manufacturers like Lenovo and Asus and Microsoft's market-chilling missteps with Windows 8.

For its comeback, Dell is hardly trying to transform itself into Apple. It's still reliant on Intel and Microsoft, it sells heavy-duty server computers that Apple lost interest in, and it's small potatoes in the tablet and smartphone market. But it's not afraid of aping Apple's success where it makes sense.

The Dell M3800 is 18mm (0.71 inches) thick and includes a high-speed Thunderbolt port to make it easier for Mac users to move to the Windows machine. Dell

"We've made good-looking machines again," Rhodes said. "The creative types care about look, feel, lightness."

Dell's newest M3800 also added a Thunderbolt 2 port to appeal to Mac customers using the high-speed port for storage and monitors.

One convert is Drew Wolber of film, photo and graphic design agency Sparksight, which switched from Macs to Dell machines.

"Macs do a great job of having form and function, but Dell seemed more about function than form," he said. But no more. "The M3800 looks cool, which was a huge thing. This is a pretty sexy-looking laptop, and the 4K screen is even cooler."

Not everyone is so convinced. "The Dell is twice as thick and heavy as the Mac laptop," Wrigley said. "Even though I couldn't get the processing power, the sleekness almost swayed me to get the Mac laptop."

And Dell's trackpad just can't match the Mac's, something Rhodes says Dell is working on.
Dell also has improved its desktop workstations, models with more horsepower that sit in the office for jobs like rendering video to apply special effects or coloring styles. Dawnrunner's Precision T7500 workstations couldn't match the clean interior of Apple's Mac Pro models, but with the newer T7600, Dell fixed the problem, he said.

"I went through film school and started my business all on Mac," Fox said. "I never in my wildest dreams expected to move to an all-PC shop."

Final Cut fiasco

One big trigger in particular was Apple's release of Final Cut Pro X in 2011, a major departure from the Final Cut Pro 7 that had revolutionized film and video industry by dramatically lowering prices for what had been rarefied technology. FCP X's shortcomings opened the door for Adobe Systems' rival Premiere Pro, which runs on both Windows and Mac.

"In high-end post-production [video editing] we never used to see Windows," said Bill Roberts, senior director of product management for Adobe's video tool business. "We see more and more of that now, in particular in higher-performance rooms."

Fully half of Premiere Pro's double-digit growth comes from customers switching from Final Cut Pro, Roberts said. "When FCP X came out, it was a boon to us," Roberts said. Adobe woos customers to the point where it put engineering staff on site for editing of the 2014 movie "Gone Girl."

Though Apple shored up FCP X's initial shortcomings and touts that it was used for editing major motion pictures such as the Will Smith vehicle "Focus," some customers were displeased by the new version's differences, by the fact that FCP X couldn't import files from FCP 7, by plug-ins that stopped working and by having all the changes come by surprise.

The demise of Apple's Aperture software for editing and cataloging photos, while less abrupt than the FCP X shift, also didn't help. Even those who are sticking with their Macs, like Xanthe Wells, chief creative officer of ad agency Pitch, were distressed.

"They tried to oversimplify some of their Pro products and wound up removing features that are needed for creative professionals," she said. "With the tremendous growth the company has seen over the last 10 years -- especially following the introduction of iPhone and iPad -- there is no question they've stopped focusing as much on the Pro user."

For Wolber's film-school days, buying a Mac and Final Cut was a prerequisite. An entire generation emerged knowing Final Cut Pro inside out.

"The logic and intuitiveness was ingrained in us," he said. "When Final Cut Pro X came out, it was such a departure from everything we knew. It was a glorified iMovie."

It's no wonder Dell is taking the offensive trying to win over the Mac faithful.

"In the battles we're in, we win 9 times out of 10," Rhodes said. "We're trying to get into more battles."

Three IT Consulting Services That Every Company Needs

We all know how annoying it can be when a personal computer malfunctions. But imagine if you owned a business whose practices relied on computer support, and its computer network malfunctioned, an event that could also cost thousands of dollars in lost work within a matter of hours, not to mention the anxiety of what lay behind the malfunction, such as a hacker's attempt to access proprietary data.

Do situations like the one above really happen? Unfortunately, they occur daily, but not because they can't be prevented. Businesses can take steps to protect their computer networks from various malfunctions, a process that begins with hiring an IT consultant to analyze their computer needs.

Different IT services offer different services, but four IT services that no business should go without are: spam filtration, firewall management, data back up, and IT system configuration.

Three IT Consulting Services that Every Business Needs
Some IT consulting services target companies according to their unique needs, while others specializing in helping all companies that need to keep their computer processes and networks functional and safe from attack. Below, we list four services that fall into the latter category.

1. Spam Filtration
At its best, spam is an annoyance. At its worst, it can arrive in such volume that it keeps you from accessing and responding to business emails in a timely manner. For example, if your email service's spam filter were to fail-as happens on occasion-the failure could result in thousands of spam mailings reaching your inbox until the problem is fixed, which typically takes hours. The optimal way to prevent this debacle is to back up your spam filtration remotely through an IT service.

Hardware spam you can use

If you are looking to purchase a hardware based spam filter, and you are not sure how to judge capabilities against price, then you have come to the right place. There are a lot of hardware spam filters out there, and they are based on many factors. One of these is the system that you are using, depending on whether you run Windows, Linux or Apple's Macintosh OS, there are hardware spam filters which are either bespoke to these systems.

Some of the hardware spam filters you can use also include features like virus filtering, and anyone in the know should know that spam and viruses come together, especially when a lot of hackers use worms and Trojans to harvest email lists and re distribute them to other sources or spam operators.

So the best advice is that when you do look at hardware spam filters, you should look at the strength of the features and top of the list should be how customisable the spam options are and how strong the virus filtration and protection system is. Also, it should also be a question of price.

Systems like the Barracuda are one of the used systems out there and its specs make it a very good hardware spam filter. Other spam filters like SpamTitan are also good in the sense that it allows alot of customisation and options when it comes to your filtering needs, meaning that you can set things like prompting, storage of junk mail and spam, listing of origin I.P's and a whole host of other security options.

Another brand name that comes to mind is the PineApp mail-Secure system, which is a dedicated mail based spam filtering hardware, managed but their own security networks and all the hassle is taken out. All you need to do is to tell the company what you need and it will set the options down for you. The good thing about hardware spam filters is the fact that they add another level of capacity and since the emails are being handled by the dedicated server, this means that your own email servers are not being stressed by their operations.

They do everything in real time, which means that your 'allow' list will be immediately forwarded to you while dubious sources and generic mails will be scanned before being given the go ahead to go to your inbox.

For many, it is a question of control, because while you do want to filter out the useless and junk emails, you also need to do that there is nothing that was missed out. Also, it depends on what you do, and from business owner to casual home user of the internet, there are different sorts of hardware spam filters that are bespoke for your own needs.

Don't make the mistake of buying the first one you see, or being impressed by features that you don't need. Make the right decision and one that matches you needs, and you will soon see more than 90% of your spam problems disappear.

2. Firewall Management
Companies often conduct firewall management onsite, an arrangement that, unless a company has an IT security team, often fails to account for the latest firewall penetration strategies. Trusting your firewall management to an IT service, on the other hand, ensures that the latest hacking strategies, as well as internal sabotage attempts, are countered by advanced firewall strategies. As with Spam filtration, conducting firewall management remotely brings added security that could preserve your business's functions.

3. Data Back Up
According to a recent study, most companies report collected data as their most valuable asset, making data back up a primary focus of IT services that target sustaining and improving business. In the past, companies performed data back up onsite. But today, remote data back up is increasingly favored due to its ability to save data from anything could destroy or remove a company's onsite data, such as flooding, fire, or theft. With your data backed up remotely, you can rest assured that, no matter what happens at your office, your data is retrievable.

The good and the ugly about drones

Both the good and bad sides of drones were on display over the weekend in the U.S., with a drone delivering medical supplies to a remote area in Wise, Virginia, even as some other drones were obstructing the fighting of a wildfire in far away California to apparently shoot videos.

The delivery drone from Australian startup Flirtey made the first authorized delivery in the country on Friday, transporting 24 medical packages to patients in Wise County. The Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership at the Virginia Tech Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, which is an approved drone test location of the Federal Aviation Administration, oversaw the research flight.

Earlier, a fixed-wing aircraft, operated remotely by pilots from NASA Langley Research Center, was to deliver medical supplies to Lonesome Pine Airport in Wise, which would then be transferred in small packages by the Flirtey drone.

In startling contrast, InciWeb, an interagency all-risk incident information management system, reported Sunday that a drone had obstructed fire fighting work after a fire over the weekend in San Bernardino County.

A drone, also referred to as an Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), halted tanker operations for about 25 minutes on Friday afternoon, according to an update on InciWeb. It added that incident commanders have no choice but to suspend air operations and ground aircraft until a hobby drone that flies into a fire area is removed, to avoid damage to aircraft, and injuries to crew and ground fighters from collisions.

As hobby drones have become more popular, firefighters have seen an increase in drones interfering with firefighting operations, InciWeb said. Drone operators, flying in the area, could face criminal charges as a temporary flight restriction of the FAA kicks in for most wildfires.

The “North Fire” destroyed 20 vehicles and damaged 10 more on Interstate 15, after the fire jumped over the highway.

There were five drones in the area, presumably taking close-up videos of the fire, CNN reported.

The San Bernardino County Fire Department tweeted at one point that firefighting aircraft had been grounded due to drone activity in the area.

The FAA has previously issued guidelines for people flying UAS as hobbyists and for recreational purposes, including the requirement that the drone should not be flown recklessly and endanger people or other aircraft. The rules on model aircraft also require that the UAS, weighing 55 pounds (25 kilograms) at the maximum, should be flown below 400 feet (about 122 meters), within visual sight of the operator, and 5 miles (8 kilometers) away from airports.

The FAA launched a “Know Before You Fly” campaign to advise users on the safe and responsible use of drones, in tandem with the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), the Academy of Model Aeronautics (AMA), and the Small UAV Coalition.

The agency is also approaching the issue of commercial use of drones with some trepidation because of safety and other issues involved. It has proposed rules, which would possibly allow programs like those of Amazon.com for the commercial delivery of packages by drones to take off. But the drones would operate under restrictions such as a maximum weight of 55 pounds, and rules that limit flights to daylight and visual line-of-sight operations. For now, the agency has provided exemptions, including for research, under strict conditions to some companies.