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A couple of days later, she started anoth-
and look at some of the reviews. You will find er book, read a few chapters and had to
many of the router manufacturers you are famil- put it down as things get busy around the
iar with, like Linksys and Netgear, but you will first of the month. Sure enough, after a
also find some new names such as Eero, Luma couple of days, she gets an email from
and Amped Wireless, as well as Google. So, if Amazon asking, “how’s it going.” Guess
you think you have dead spots in your Wi-Fi set- she wasn’t reading enough and needed
up at home, you may want to give one of these to be prodded. Now, I don’t know what
two possible solutions a try.
you think of that intrusion, but I find it re-
ally disturbing. Guess we’ll have to get
used to it or take the Kindle offline.
No Personal Privacy
2) An important part of being safe online is
keeping your computer’s software up-to-
date. Outdated software often contains
By Matt Batt, President, The Computer Club, Inc., security exposures that can provide hack-
Florida ers access to your computer. Outdated
software can also be buggy and have
December 2017 issue, The Journal of The Computer
Club performance issues which are usually
fixed with a newer version of the soft-
www.scccomputerclub.org ware. Unfortunately, if you have lots of
mbatt453 (at) gmail.com different programs this is an onerous
task.
I want to share (1) something to think about as
we enter this time of “no personal privacy;” (2) Patch My PC Updater will make patch-
a very useful program for keeping your PC ap- ing your PC easy. It is free and keeps
plications up-to-date; and (3) a fun website for over 165 apps up-to-date on your com-
displaying street views of houses. puter. It is an easy way to update or in-
stall any of these programs on to your
1) My wife was reading a book on her Kin-
dle and was getting close to the end. computer.
She wanted to finish the book, so she
cloistered herself in the snug family
room chair and had at it. After about When you open Patch My PC Updater, it
half an hour, she finished the book and will scan your system for outdated pro-
explained that it really was a great book grams. It will show programs that are out-
and she really enjoyed it. A moment or dated in Red, programs that are updated
two later, her cell phone made the noise
for an incoming email and she reached in Green, and programs that are not in-
over and read it. It was from Amazon stalled in Black. With one click you can
and it asked her how she liked the book easily do all your updates. You can
that she just finished. That was so download Patch My PC from https://
spooky! It really made us feel like our patchmypc.net/download.
privacy had been compromised. I’m a
very strong proponent of technology ad-
vances and all the good things that it (Continued on page 8)
can bring, but this just seemed like too
much and too close.
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