The new in the world of technology

We all know that antivirus software is designed to keep your device protected - but have you ever wondered exactly how it does so? In this article, we’re going to look at the way antivirus apps actually work, and the main pillars of protection that these pieces of software are built around. Our definitive list of today's best Windows 10 antivirus programs Looking for even more protection? Grab the best VPN See why we rate Bitdefender so highly in our testing Watchful eye in real time When it comes to defending your PC and policing the files on your system, antivirus apps have a few different methods of doing so. The first is a manual scan of all the files on your system, looking for anything suspect. These scans can be quite lengthy to start with, although over time, the use of clever routines to skip over any files that haven’t been changed since the last scan considerably shortens those initial long waits. Also, most apps offer some kind of ‘quick scan’ mode, which as the nam...

Windows 10 (Image credit: Shutterstock / rvlsoft) Many people don’t know that Windows 10 has its own built-in VPN client. But before you rush to cancel your current VPN subscription, it’s worth taking a closer look at what the Windows option is capable of. That's because there are quite a few restrictions on what you can do with the dedicated Windows 10 virtual private network. We explain everything you need to know to decide if it’s worth using. See also: high on quality and value - the best cheap VPNs You'll still need a separate VPN network The most important thing to know about the built-in Windows 10 option is that it’s not really a VPN service at all. At least not the kind we've become accustomed to from third party providers. Windows doesn’t give you access to a secure server network, which is what you pay for when using a VPN service. Instead, the built-in tool is just a desktop client for connecting to a third-party VPN network. Basically, even if you use the Mi...

With coronavirus keeping many of us homebound, there's a dramatic increase in the demand for laptops, especially affordable ones for students and those of us working from home. This has caused massive stock shortages for popular models of various Chromebooks, but we think there are still a few solid picks available that you can get in the $200-300 range. All of the models we've selected are fast enough to handle at least a few Chrome tabs and applications running at once, and most of them have large 14/15-inch screens. We have a dedicated guide for the best Chromebooks overall, but this list is solely focused on budget options with large screens that are actually in stock right now. Samsung Chromebook 4+: $300 This is the latest model in Samsung's ultra-popular budget Chromebook series. It offers a dual-core Intel Celeron N4000 processor, 4GB RAM, 64GB of internal storage, and a large 15.6-inch screen. That low-power processor won't blaze through Chrome tabs and video ...

Right now the coronavirus is sweeping the entire world, and it's truly a big deal. One of the things that's keeping it at the center of everyone's attention is the lack of specific treatments to help folks – particularly the elderly – get through it.  In order for these treatments to be developed, scientists from across the world have a lot of work to do – but you actually might be able to help. The folks at Folding@Home have published a  blog post  asking for people to run the F@H client in order to help scientists develop a treatment for coronavirus. We encourage you to read the blog post, as it goes into far more detail than simple tech journalists like us feel comfortable doing, but we can help you get set up and make sure you're offering the most computing horsepower.  We've been running F@H on our  PCs  for about a week now, and we encourage you to do the same. If you get it set up right, you can even help out when you're working on your computer. Tak...

The key to virtual private networks - or  VPN  - is the creation of the encrypted tunnel from the client to the VPN server. Through this tunnel, all the internet data is transmitted back and forth. The privacy of the VPN connection is based on the encryption used, to keep the data going through it secure from both hackers and others - like your ISP - that want to take a peek. There are plenty of options for the encrypted data  VPN protocol , each with its advantages and disadvantages. Some popular ones are PPTP, SSTP, and OpenVPN (which has both TCP and UDP variants). The goals of any of these encryption protocols is to provide a high level of encryption, with a low overhead of computing resources. While OpenVPN remains quite popular with its 256-bit encryption, it does go back to 2001, and much has changed with computing since Windows XP debuted. WireGuard is a more recent entry into the world of VPN encryption protocols and is just beginning to gain more traction in the...

Updated 4/8/20: We've updated this story with a new statement from Canon now that the image.canon service is back online. Just a few months after it launched, Canon's image.canon  cloud storage  platform recently had to temporarily shut down after an issue caused the loss of some users' photo and video files. Well, now it's back online, with Canon confident that it's resolved the issues. The service went down on 30 July, with a new statement on the image.canon site saying that "after the investigation, we identified that some of the photo and video image files saved in the 10GB long-term storage prior to June 16, 2020 9am (JST) were lost". It "temporarily suspended" the service over the weekend, but "after having resolved the issue that resulted in the loss of the photo and video image files, we resumed the image.canon service as of August 4, 2020". That's not quite the end of the story, though. There are still some problems with im...

B loatware on Android phones has been around for so long — especially  on  Samsung   and Huawei phones — that it's hardly even news anymore. Even so , it was a  huge  surprise when we found out that OnePlus has involved itself in this dubious practice. The OxygenOS bloatware in question comes from probably the shadiest company of them all — Facebook. Starting with the OnePlus 8 series and continuing with the Nord, users have had to put up with a bunch of Facebook-owned apps and a few background services on their brand-new handsets, some of which cannot be uninstalled. This came to our attention when Max Weinbach of XDA  tweeted  a couple of screenshots of the Instagram app updating via the Facebook App Manager service instead of through Play Store as you'd expect. A number of people on  Reddit  pointed out that this has been the case for some time. We checked several OnePlus phones, and sure enough, the company's three most recent models come...