Tag Archives: New Technology

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

New Windows 10 Disk Cleanup Feature Coming Soon

If you’re a veteran Windows user, you’ve almost certainly made frequent use of the “Disk Cleanup” feature, which has been a standard part of the OS for what feels like forever. Recently though, Microsoft has given the utility a bit of a facelift and an upgrade.

Lurking under the hood of Windows 10, in the Storage setting, you’ll find an up to date version of the Disk Cleanup utility.

Where the old version of the tool would give you a generalized overview of how much space you have and how much you’re currently using, its latest incarnation breaks it down categorically, showing you the amount of space each category is occupying and allowing you to drill down into the details, find files you don’t want or need and get rid of them quickly and efficiently.

In addition to that, the latest Windows Insiders build (19603) has a new feature called “User Cleanup Recommendations” that creates a personalized list of files and applications that are rarely, if ever accessed. Next to the icon representing each program are a few details, including how much space they’re taking up and the last time you accessed them. That is so you can make smart decisions about what to keep and what to get rid of.

The newly redesigned Disk Cleanup layout also gives you a graphic depiction of how much space your machine’s temporary files are taking up. It includes a catchall “other” category which you can drill down into and take a closer look at if it starts crowding out the other, better defined categories.

Overall then, keeping your hard drive free of unwanted and unneeded files has never been easier. If you find yourself beginning to run low, you’ll find the process of freeing up space to be quick and painless.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Computers Might Be Able To Smell In The Near Future

Word has recently leaked out about an interesting project that’s ongoing at Intel’s research labs. The company has apparently built an algorithm that mirrors the brain’s activity to detect and identify smells. The company developed a computer chip for the project. Called a “neuromorphic” chip, it was designed to allow a computer to process information the same way that a biological brain does.

The project is being pursued in partnership with researchers at Cornell University. It began when the Intel research team began investigating what happens inside the brain of mammals when they smell something.

As you might expect, there’s actually a lot that goes on inside a mammalian brain when a scent is detected. In fact, there are more than 450 different kinds of olfactory receptors in our noses that send signals to the brain. From there, electrical impulses within a group of neurons generate the sense of particular odors.

Then, of course, there’s the fact that our brains act as biological databases. They’re capable of storing not only memories of previous scents, but can cross-reference known scents and accept new information that allows us to track and differentiate hundreds of thousands of different scents.

Intel’s current goals are significantly more modest than developing a chip that can differentiate that many different smells. They’re starting with a goal of ten. They’ve recorded the responses of a total of 72 different chemical sensors sitting in a wind tunnel as a small number of different scents (including acetone, ammonia and methane) were circulated.

The data gleaned from the sensors was then fed into the Neuromorphic chip, which was able to draw neural representations of each smell.

Ultimately, the point behind the research is to better understand how the brain’s neural circuitry solves complex problems and use that understanding to design the next generation of machine intelligence. The future just got another step closer.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Message Recall Feature May Be Added To Office 365

For a while now, Microsoft Outlook users have enjoyed a highly popular addition to their email service. In a nutshell, it allows them to recall messages that have been sent using Outlook, which is an Exchange Online hosted cloud email service for business.

They can un-send the emails, provided that the recipient is using Outlook and the messages haven’t been opened yet.

It’s a good, well-implemented feature. Recently, Microsoft announced that it will be expanding its availability, adding it for all Office 365 environments during the fourth quarter of 2020.

The company had this to say on a recent blog post on the subject:

“The Outlook for Windows Message Recall feature is extremely popular with users, yet it doesn’t always work so well. Part of the problem is that the recall is client-based and the recall can only happen if the recipient also uses Outlook.

With millions of users with mailboxes in Office 365, we’re now able to improve upon that feature by performing the recall directly in the cloud in Office 365 mailboxes, so it doesn’t matter which email client the recipient uses, the recall takes place in their Office 365 mailbox, and when their client syncs their mail, the message is gone.”

As part of the Office 365 implementation of this feature, users will also have an aggregate message recall status report available to them that they’ll be able to use to tell at a glance which messages were successfully recalled and which ones were not.

If you want more, you should know that Microsoft has recently announced it will be adding protections against Reply-All email storms. They have not-so-affectionately been referred to as ‘Reply-allpocalypses’ that are set off when people send emails with a large email distribution list. They can easily lead to accidental denial of service that can bring even the most robust email servers to their knees.

Both are welcome additions indeed. Kudos to Microsoft for the coming improvements.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Hackers Are Already Targeting Disney Plus Accounts

In case you weren’t already aware, Disney recently launched a new video streaming service called Disney+ which has been driving Netflix and other established streaming services crazy with fear and apprehension since it was first announced.

If the early indications are any clue, Netflix has little to worry about, but Disney has their hands full.

Mere hours after the service was launched, complaints started flooding in, and not just on Disney’s website.  Angry customers were taking to Reddit, Twitter, and other social media outlets to complain that their accounts had been hacked the same day they began using them.

As this was happening, hold times at Disney’s support center surged past two hours, which only increased customer frustration.  Worst of all, researchers quickly discovered tens of thousands of Disney+ user account details for sale on the Dark Web, with prices starting as low as $3 per account.

If you were one of the lucky customers who didn’t get your account hacked, your experience with the service still may not have been stellar.  Many users who could get on it had complaints that they were either completely unable to stream the offered content, or that the streaming speeds were so low that the videos were essentially unwatchable.  These reports, however, were largely drowned out and lost in the shuffle given how many users had their accounts hacked on day one.

One thing that’s conspicuously absent from the Disney+ service is a two-factor authentication option.  While this isn’t a magic bullet that would have solved all of the company’s launch day issues, it would have made it significantly more difficult for hackers to disrupt the launch of the service to the extent that they did.

Disney will no doubt survive and recover from the debacle, but as of now, they have a well-deserved black eye over the affair.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

New Office 365 Feature May Prevent Questionable Emails

Microsoft continues their war against spam and phishing emails with the rollout of a new feature in Office 365 called ‘Unverified Sender’.

It is designed to help Outlook users identify emails that may contain poisoned files or requests for personal or sensitive information that could be used to steal a user’s identity.

The company had this to say about the new feature:

“Unverified Sender is a new Office 365 feature that helps end-users identify suspicious messages in their inbox…we’ve added an indicator that demonstrates Office 365 spoof intelligence was unable to verify the sender.”

When you toggle the new feature on, any email in your inbox that the AI is unable to identify or verify will be marked. It will have the sender’s initials or photo replaced with a question mark in the People Card. That will make it easy for any Office 365 user to spot potential phishing or sender spoofing attempts.

In tandem with the Unverified Sender feature, Microsoft is also increasing the size of its DKIM keys from 1024-bit to 2048-bit for all Office 365 customers during the month of October. They are doing this in order to enhance security in all environments.

About this, the company published the following:

“If you already have your default or custom domain DKIM enabled in Office 365, it will automatically be upgraded from 1024-bit to 2048-bit at your next DKIM configuration rotation date…This new 2048-bit key takes effect on the RotateOnDate and will send emails with the 1024-bit key in the interim.  After four days, you can test again with the 2048-bit key (that is, once the rotation takes effect to the second selector).”

Finally, Microsoft is rolling out a feature they announced in late July of this year (2019), which is their improved Malicious Email Analysis.  Collectively, these new features should provide a much safer environment for all Office 365 users.  Kudos to Microsoft for that!

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