You’re likely well-acquainted with classic CAPTCHA tests on websites. You know, the thing where you have to click to confirm you aren’t a robot? Type in the strange-looking letters and numbers? Select all the traffic lights, the buses, the motorcycles, that sort of thing? These tests are mostly nuisances and data collection traps, but hackers are now leaning into CAPTCHAs as a way to trick users into installing malware. At least, that’s what security experts are increasingly warning about. Last month, MalwareBytes Labs spotted one such fake CAPTCHA that had you paste some “verification” text into the Windows Run prompt. Recently, there have also been reports of a malware called “Quakbot” that uses an even more dangerous variant of the CAPTCHA scam. How do CAPTCHA scams work? Hack attacks via CAPTCHAs are dangerous because users click on them out of habit when they appear on websites. Hackers are now exploiting this instant-reaction behavior with fake pop-up messages that look strikingly similar to real CAPTCHA tests. Here, too, users are asked to click on a box to solve a test. However, when you click on that box, you end up redirected to other pages. Further actions ensure that dangerous commands are copied to your clipboard, making it possible for attackers to run those dangerous commands on your computer without authorization. In some cases, these CAPTCHAs even prompt you to press certain key combinations that directly invoke Windows PowerShell or execute certain commands on your device. That’s why you should be extra suspicious of any CAPTCHA request that asks you to do anything unusual. These types of attacks are called ClickFix CAPTCHA attacks because they use social engineering to trick you into clicking fake CAPTCHAs and other elements, which then trigger malicious responses. These attacks are surprisingly effective To keep you off your toes, every subsequent click in a ClickFix CAPTCHA attack is disguised with additional “verification requests” that hide the malicious nature of what you’re doing. In the worst case, it ends with you unknowingly executing a malware script that takes over your PC. CAPTCHA attacks reportedly have a higher success rate than other scam attempts because of their novel psychological tricks that prey on reflexive behavior when our guards are down. The only real protection is to remain vigilant, especially when visiting unfamiliar websites. And, of course, having reliable antivirus software that protects against threats. Read...

Doth mine eyes deceive me? The cheapest and, in many ways, most desirable of Nvidia’s new RTX 50-series graphics cards is actually available to buy at a major retailer? And I don’t have to give up my soul or any other precious bits? Indeed, for the last 90 minutes I’ve had the option to buy an RTX 5070 from Best Buy. At the $550 MSRP. Holy crap. So most mornings I scope out some deals that will appeal to PCWorld readers. It’s part of my job. This morning I saw an Nvidia PNY RTX 5070 graphics card on SlickDeals, which Best Buy is allegedly selling for $549.99. Normally that wouldn’t be anything interesting, but as you’re probably aware, new Nvidia cards have been almost impossible to find for a month and change. Doubly so if you’re looking for one without a ridiculous markup from an add-in board partner, a retailer trying to make a little bank, a reseller-slash-scalper, or some combination of all three. So following the link, I was surprised to see the $550 graphics card still available to buy, yes, at the price Nvidia advertised way back at launch. I was able to add it to my cart. I was able to begin the checkout process, with an extra account verification step and a countdown timer that usually doesn’t apply to Best Buy’s straightforward sales. I was presented with the “place order” button, indicating that it was about to charge my card. 90 minutes later, I was able to do it again. Shipping to my Pennsylvania home in two days. To use technical industry parlance: hot diggity. A couple of qualifiers here. One, I have a Best Buy Plus membership, basically the store’s version of Amazon Prime. It’s possible that Best Buy is reserving a certain amount of stock specifically for these memberships — the company has done so before. It’s also possible that, had I actually checked out at either of these points, Best Buy would decide that it doesn’t actually have the stock after all, apologize in an email, and reverse the charge in a day or two. We’ve seen that happen with the latest graphics cards as well. But even with those sobering afterthoughts, the fact that I was able to get this far into the process for what’s probably one of the most in-demand graphics cards on the market right now is promising. It means that somewhere, in at least some measurable degree, availability is improving. We can but hope. Give it a shot if you’ve been looking for a relatively affordable card. And don’t you dare try to flip it, or Santa will be going to the reindeer stalls to fill up your stocking this year. Read...

If you’re still on a 1080p monitor, it’s high time you upgraded to something bigger, better, and badder. I’m talking about a proper 4K monitor from a reputable brand—and it doesn’t even have to be expensive, not when you can score a deal like this one. Right now, Samsung’s 32-inch 4K monitor is only $220 on Amazon. That’s a solid 35% discount off its typical $340 price, representing a savings of $120 on a large, gorgeous, yet affordable display. At 32 inches, the ViewFinity UJ59 provides ample screen real estate but isn’t so large that you’ll have to crane your neck or strain your eyes to look your way around it. It’s all the space you need for working on documents, playing games, watching movies, or browsing the web. That’s doubly true with its 3840×2160 resolution, giving you a crisp 4K visual experience that elevates everything you do on your computer. And this monitor has built-in upscaling tech that automatically converts whatever you’re watching up to near-4K quality. Just note that this monitor’s refresh rate caps out at 60Hz, so you’ll have to make do with at most 60 FPS when gaming. The ViewFinity UJ59 does come with a Game Mode, though, which selectively boosts and optimizes screen contrast, allowing you to see more detail in dark areas. That means easier spotting of your enemies in multiplayer games and finding of items on the ground in RPGs. AMD FreeSync helps sync up your monitor with your PC hardware, and there are several ports to connect with, including two HDMI and a DisplayPort. This is a fantastic monitor for the price. If you’ve been waiting to upgrade your workstation to 4K, jump on this deal before it expires and get this 32-inch Samsung display for just $220! Save 35% on Samsung`s 32-inch 4K monitorBuy now at Amazon Read...

Rumor has it that Microsoft is developing an Xbox-branded gaming handheld, and it seems Windows 11 is being prepped for that. The launch of the previously unannounced Xbox handheld is expected as early as this year, but there haven’t been any official details yet. In a tweet by user Xeno (spotted by Windows Latest), both Beta and Dev Channel previews of Windows 11 have new language experience packs that seem to reference a new user interface that’s apparently being developed specifically for gaming handhelds. These new references point to something called “Gaming Posture” as well as phrasings like “Boot into the full-screen experience at device startup” and “Choose your full-screen experience.” The data also shows settings for performance monitoring, resolution, controllers and keyboard shortcuts, among other things. “Gaming Posture” could be a placeholder name or an internal designation for the new user experience that Microsoft is developing. Either way, a handheld-specific interface would be a much-needed step forward, as Windows is currently lagging behind top-dog SteamOS and its user-friendly Steam Deck in this regard. More clues from Asus Just yesterday, we got a different sort of clue to the possibility of an Xbox handheld in the form of a video teaser published by Asus. It shows a robot throwing a ROG Ally gaming handheld and a Raikiri Pro controller together to create a new product. It’s notable that the controller is quite reminiscent of your typical Xbox gamepad, which is prompting many to suspect a collaboration between Asus and Microsoft—not a farfetched move since Microsoft wants to produce its hardware with other manufacturers. Until now, it wasn’t known who else would be working on “Project Kennan,” the code name for the Xbox handheld. However, Asus would be a good candidate as the company has already launched a powerful gaming handheld on the market in the ROG Ally. The Xbox account on X reacted to Asus’ teaser in a humorous way and simply posted a meme that could be interpreted as an indirect confirmation. Alternatively, Microsoft is happy about the fanned rumor mill, which brings more publicity to the Xbox handheld that hasn’t even been officially confirmed yet. Read...

Nintendo has released details of the long awaited successor to the best-selling gaming console Read...

If you’ve been keeping an eye on the latest gaming PC hardware news, you’ve probably heard that AMD’s latest X3D chips kick all kinds of ass but are also failing at a fast rate, especially in certain motherboards. AMD’s first official statement blames it on memory compatibility issues. That may or may not be true, but it’ll be cold comfort to some. I’m hesitant to sound the alarm on issues with new hardware. In any large hardware launch, some small percentage of the devices that reach buyers’ hands will always be defective… and when it comes to things like CPUs designed specifically for gaming PCs, we’re going to hear loud and possibly overstated voices on social media like Reddit. But observers have reportedly collected over 100 examples of failing 9800X3D chips and other members of the AM5 family, apparently mostly in ASRock motherboards. It looks like there’s something going on here. In a statement provided to PCGamer, one AMD representative laid the blame on memory timings. “Following a joint investigation, AMD and ASRock identified a memory compatibility issue present in earlier BIOS versions, which has been rectified in the latest BIOS,” it says, echoing earlier statements from ASRock. The language is predictably corporate, imploring all users who encounter problems to contact customer support, where presumably they’ll be given the usual troubleshooting gauntlet before being presented with RMA options. As PCGamer notes, many users who experienced failures have observed electrical or burn damage that would go way beyond memory timing issues, and these are often in CPUs that passed the POST protection system and operated for days or weeks without problems. I’m no electrical engineer, but like many of the commenters on the situation, I’m skeptical. You’d expect a memory timing issue to create a system that would fail POST (Power On Self-Test) and simply refuse to boot, not cause electrical or burn damage. The good news is that anyone who currently has their hands on a 9800X3D, 9900X3D, or 9950X3D processor is well within the warranty period and can plead their case for a replacement with relative confidence. That might not be the case for a slightly older AM5 motherboard purchased for the Ryzen 7000 series, though. Read...

MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra as the company’s premium Chromebook processor on Wednesday, predicting that it will easily offer the highest Minecraft performance of any Chromebook chip while bringing AI to the platform, too. Essentially, MediaTek launched the Kompanio Ultra to help answer the question: Which Chromebook should I buy? Besides Google’s own Chromebook Plus brand, there aren’t too many answers. Instead, the list of Chromebooks is a hodgepodge of various processors, including the Intel Celeron, Pentium, and Core processors; AMD’s A-series and Ryzen chips, and Arm processors like the Qualcomm Snapdragon and the existing MediaTek Kompanio 500 and 800 series. Google launched the Chromebook Plus specification to help clarify matters, but it certainly doesn’t help to differentiate the performance each chip can offer. MediaTek isn’t that well known, either. All of that sparked the need for a MediaTek “Ultra” brand, said Adam King, the vice president and general manager of computing and multimedia business for MediaTek, in a conference call with reporters. Around 2021, MediaTek tried the Kompanio 1000 chip, which fizzled. “We decided, if we were going to try again, we would,” King said. “We wouldn’t hold anything back. We would put the absolute best that we could out there, even knowing that it might not necessarily drive tremendous volume.” What’s in the MediaTek Kompanio Ultra? The Kompanio Ultra is an 8-core Arm CPU, on a 3nm process technology. It’s based upon a single Arm Cortex 3.62GHz X925 ultraperformance core, along with three Arm Cortex X4 performance cores and four Arm Cortex A720 efficiency cores. Those cores are paired with an 11-core Immortalis-G925 GPU that can perform ray tracing and output to three 4K displays at 60Hz while performing 10-bit 4K60 video encoding and decoding using the HEVC/AVC codecs. It uses an undisclosed amount of LPDDR5X memory. The chip supports Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6.0. MediaTek More importantly, the Ultra chip includes an NPU capable of 50 TOPS, leaving it able to perform whatever NPU-centric functions a Chromebook can throw at it. AI capabilities have pretty much ignored the Chromebook entirely, save for Qualcomm’s Snapdragon processors. Executives claimed that the Kompanio Ultra 910, the first chip in MediaTek’s new product class, could easily outperform Intel’s leader, Intel Core Ultra 5 115U and 125U, in the Chromebook space. The Ultra offers 18 percent faster single-thread performance and 40 percent more multi-thread performance, respectively. More importantly, the Ultra 910 can deliver 250 percent the frame rate of the 125U while playing Minecraft, MediaTek executives said, a key metric for elementary-school age kids. If you’re looking for the best Minecraft or Roblox Chromebook for your kids, you might want one with a Kompanio Ultra chip inside it. Users don’t need to trade off performance for battery life, either; MediaTek claims that the chip will deliver 20 hours of battery life on a 60Wh battery. Are Kompanio PCs coming? In fact, if there’s one area that’s been ignored within Chromebooks, it’s AI. King said that it’s likely that Google will address this in its May event, Google I/O. (Could Google announce a Chromebook Ultra then?) MediaTek executives said that the Kompanio Ultra won’t appear in Windows on Arm PCs, however, nor on tablets. So while we still expect MediaTek to eventually challenge Qualcomm in PCs, that will have to wait for another day…although that day doesn’t appear that far off, either. Read...

Microsoft’s new Outlook app — labeled “Outlook (new)” as opposed to “Outlook (classic)” — normally saves your emails online, so you cannot access them without an internet connection. However, it’s now possible to store messages locally on your computer. To do this, open Outlook and click on the gear icon in the title bar at the top to call up the Settings. Select General on the left-hand side and click on Offline in the column to the right. Make sure that the Activate offline emails, calendars and people switch is set to On. In the menu under Folders to be saved, you can then specify which mail folders should be saved locally. The default setting is Default and favorites. Default includes the folders Inbox, Sent, Drafts, Archive, Deleted, and Snooze. get windows 11 pro for cheap Windows 11 Pro This setting covers all important folders. Below this, you will find the option Days of emails to be saved. Here you can specify how far back the local archive should go. The default setting is 30 days. However, you can use the menu to copy messages up to 180 days old to the local SSD/hard drive. The higher you select this value, the more storage space the mail archive requires. Please note: The offline feature only works if you had Outlook open with an existing internet connection and then go offline, for example because the WLAN is no longer available. However, if you try to start Outlook without an internet connection, you will only receive a message about a connection error. Reading tip: 12 useful tips for the new Microsoft Outlook Read...

One of the first things I did as a new Roku user was to start adding apps to the Home screen, from Netflix and Disney+ to Apple TV+ and HBO Max (back when it was still called HBO Max).  But once I had all my apps installed, I hit a roadblock. How exactly do you rearrange all those app tiles? Personally, I like having Netflix up top, along with such oft-used services as Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video, but they were all jumbled in the middle of the app grid. Meanwhile, there were some apps I wanted to nix, such as People TV and Roku’s Getting Started channel.  If you’re new to Roku, it’s easy to get stuck trying to move or delete apps on the Home screen, given there’s no obvious way to rearrange your tiles.  More experienced Roku users, however, will know the trick: the ever-useful “*” button, a.k.a. Options, which reveals contextual and related options when pressed. Once you’re familiar with the Options button, rearranging apps on the Home screen is a snap.  How to move and remove apps from the Roku home screen  We’ll start with moving and rearranging apps on the Roku home screen; removing channels apps next. Rearrange the apps on the Roku home screen  Go to the Home tab on the main Roku screen, press the “>” button on the remote, then navigate to the channel tile you’d like to move.  Next, press the “*” button on the remote. When you do, a menu will pop up with a variety of options, allowing you to check for updates, remove the app (we’ll get to that one in a moment), and so on. Ben Patterson/Foundry The option you’re looking for is “Move app”—or, if the app isn’t already in the top row, “Move app to top.” Select the latter option to jump the app to the top of the screen, or “Move app” to fine-tune its arrangement.  Now, you’ll see the app tiles again, except this time the one you selected will be surrounded by arrows.  Ben Patterson/Foundry Using the arrow keys on the remote, move the app tile around until it’s in the ideal position, then press the OK button. All set!  Delete apps from the Roku home screen  Want to delete an app tile? It’s a cinch, but keep in mind that just because you remove an app (such as, say, Hulu or Max) from the Roku home screen doesn’t mean you’ve unsubscribed from the associated service.  That’s why you should check whether you’re subscribed to the app you want to nix. In some cases, you might have subscribed directly with the service; in others, you might have subscribed through Roku. If you don’t check, you run the risk of a surprise charge on your next credit card bill.  To find out if you subscribed through Roku, visit my.roku.com and select Manage Your Subscriptions. If the channel you want to delete is listed, be sure to unsubscribe if you no longer want it. If the service isn’t listed, you either subbed directly or via a third party, or perhaps the app doesn’t offer a subscription at all. Ben Patterson/Foundry Once you’ve finished checking your subscription (if you had one in the first place), deleting a channel on Roku is similar to moving an app.  Just navigate to the app you want to delete, press the “*” (Options) button, then select “Remove app.” Read...

UN agencies are worried about rising cases of satellite navigation signal interference. Read...