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I am old enough to remember the days before USB, and let me tell you -- when it came out, everything changed. It became so much easier to add hardware to a PC -- no need to open the case. USB largely made the term "plug and play" a reality. The problem? The damn thing wasn't reversible! As we all know, you had a 50/50 shot of plugging the Type-A connector in correctly, yet for some reason, it felt like you were almost always wrong the first time. Maddening!

USB-C solved that dilemma, as the connector is reversible. Long gone is the frustration of having to turn the connector around. Adoption of USB-C has been frustratingly slow, with companies like Microsoft still refusing to add it to the Surface Laptop 2. Sigh. With that said, there are many nice USB-C products on the market, and today, StarTech launches a trio. All three products are USB-C hubs, but they are quite different from each other.

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Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen died on Monday at age 65. His cause of death was Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma, the same disease that nearly killed him back in 1983. Allen, who was every bit as important to the history of the personal computer as Bill Gates, had found an extra 35 years of life back then thanks to a bone marrow transplant. And from the outside looking-in, I’d say he made great use of those 35 extra years.

Of all the early PC guys, Allen was probably the most reclusive. Following his departure from Microsoft in 1983 I met him only four times. But prior to his illness Allen had been a major factor at Microsoft and at MITS, maker of the original Altair 8800 microcomputer for which Microsoft provided the BASIC interpreter and where Allen was later head of software.

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There has never been a better time to be a Linux enthusiast. There are so many great distributions from which to choose, including elementary OS 5 Juno, Linux Mint 19, and Bodhi 5.0.0. What do those aforementioned operating systems have in common? They are based on Ubuntu. To take things a step further, Canonical's operating system is based on Debian, but I digress.

But yeah, Ubuntu is wildly popular -- with both end users and other Linux distro maintainers. When a new version of the operating system is released, the world goes wild. Well, it's time to get excited, yall! Today -- after a short Beta period -- Ubuntu Linux 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish is finally available for download!

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Recently, we reported the Sentry K300 keypad flash drive from DataLocker Inc. What made that flash drive newsworthy? Well, besides its 256-bit AES hardware encryption, it has an industry first -- an OLED screen.

While entering a passcode into keypad on a flash drive is cool, Lexar has a new drive that makes it look like old hat. The JumpDrive Fingerprint F35, as it is called, uses biometrics for decryption. Much like the fingerprint reader found on a smartphone, you can use your finger to unlock the flash drive. How cool is that?

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In today’s cybersecurity landscape, the value of good cybersecurity tools is undeniable. What is more valuable are the people behind the tools -- however, the amount of open cybersecurity positions worldwide is growing year over year. Currently, there are more than 300,000 open cybersecurity roles in the U.S. alone, but by 2021, Cybersecurity Ventures expects that number will reach 3.5 million.

This gap is felt by cybersecurity leaders; in fact, a recent study found that more than 70 percent of the cybersecurity decision makers agree that their organizations do not have the staff or necessary resources to monitor all cybersecurity threats that their organizations face. With the number of cybersecurity openings growing yearly and the sophistication and frequency of cyberattacks increasing, in order to build the cybersecurity leaders of tomorrow, business leaders must turn their attention to things that they can control: investing in the right solutions and their staff.

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Brian Gladstein, a security marketing strategist at Carbon Black, discussed the question posed in this headline at RSA Conference 2018. In his presentation entitled "Endpoint Security and the Cloud: How to Apply Predictive Analytics and Big Data," Gladstein observes that digital crime is structured like an economy consisting of several tiers. At the top is the "Digirati," a term used by Gladstein for the class of high-ranking controllers responsible for executing digital attacks. The Digirati consists of the ones who hide on the network and gather information, usage patterns, and intel. They then share this information and build upon what knowledge they’ve already gathered from other actors in the online criminal community.

Below the Digirati are the subject matter experts. Malware writers, identity collectors, and individuals who hoard zero-day vulnerabilities and other exploits sit on this level of the digital crime economy. These individuals oftentimes sell access to their goods and services to the next tier, which consists of botnet owners, cashiers, spammers, and other brokers and vendors.

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There’s a lot of fantastic media content on Reddit, although finding it isn’t always easy. The new Reddit Browser for Kodi scrapes subreddits for video, live streams, audio, images and discussions.

The add-on has been in development for almost a year, and while it’s still very much a work in progress, it’s easy enough to use.

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IT operations is an area that often involves analyzing and reacting to a series of events and that makes it a strong candidate for automation.

Operations platform specialist OpsRamp has recognized this with the launch of OpsQ, an intelligent event management, alert correlation, and remediation solution for hybrid enterprises.

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We all have lots of different devices that need charging on a regular basis, often at the same time, placing ever increasing demand on our plug sockets, and resulting in companies attempting to deliver different solutions to the growing problem.

Cheap power strips and USB hubs offer a solution of sorts, but if you're after something more advanced, there's the Chargehub Powerstation 360 Surge Protector Power Strip. Quite a mouthful, huh? It’s made by Limitless Innovations, an Illinois-based company.

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Businesses are increasingly moving more of their operations to the cloud and this leads to a greater focus on securing these workloads.

Cloud infrastructure security company Threat Stack has released a new report created by Vanson Bourne which shows 54 percent of businesses are worried that they will soon outgrow their security solutions.

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In many organizations, time and productivity is lost by staff by working on repetitive tasks that would be better suited for outsourcing, rather than focusing on the knowledge-based work that they are employed to do.

This is a problem that shouldn't be underestimated, Harvard Business Review reckons that knowledge workers spend up to 41 percent of their time on tasks that could be competently carried out by others.

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The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ is a great, low-cost single board computer that you can put to all sorts of uses, but there are some hardware add-ons available for it which make it more useful.

Two months ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation launched a HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) that makes it possible to power the Pi over Ethernet (PoE), and today there’s another even more exciting announcement -- the arrival of a TV HAT.

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The Windows 10 October 2018 Update was a real mess for Microsoft, not to mention for those users who installed it and lost their data. That feature update is back with Windows Insiders for further testing, and it likely won’t be long until it’s re-released.

In the meantime, Microsoft is busy working on the next feature update, due out next Spring (the Spring 2019 Update, perhaps?), and today the software giant releases a new build to Insiders on the Fast and Skip Ahead rings.

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If you can afford it, 4K monitors are great. If you are on a budget, however, 1080p is still totally passable. They work perfectly with all operating sytems -- Windows, macOS, and Linux-based -- without any scaling issues. In other words, it is generally a headache-free experience.

Today, AOC launches a new affordable "V2 Series" line of 1080p monitors, and they look incredible. How affordable are they? Pricing starts at a mere $99.99! There are three sizes from which to choose -- 22-inch, 24-inch, and 27-inch. The bezels are insanely slim -- great for those that want to use two side-by-side. Despite being inexpensive, these monitors are not no-frills. Believe it or not, they have AMD FreeSync technology and a respectable 75Hz refresh.

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Six days ago, Facebook notified me that my personal information had been pilfered in a recently revealed hack affecting tens of millions subscribers. Lovely. Why don't you kick me in the head, too, Mark Zuckerberg? Perhaps you would prefer a baseball bat, so you can beat me to death instead? I responded by removing most of the same information from my FB and started a content purge ahead of possible account deletion.

Since then, I have been on a social media account rampage, which turned my sights to Nextdoor, where I joined on Aug. 29, 2017 (my Facebook is 12 years old, for comparison). When checking privacy settings, I discovered that the social network lists your actual address (presumably by default) for locals to see. The only other option is the street where you reside—what I switched to. Do I really want cranky neighbors coming up to my door and rap-rap-rapping? Or provide would-be burglars a place to break into, after observing my habits and schedule online and off? Eh, no! I appreciate that someone had to invite me to Nextdoor, which verified my residence to be part of the local network. But sharing my street or actual address is too public for me. Late yesterday afternoon, I deactivated my account. But reasons are bigger, with the privacy thing being but one.

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