Black Friday is one week away -- I hope you have some disposable income handy. If you need to buy Christmas gifts for friends and family, or you just want to treat yourself, shopping on Black Friday is a great way to save money. The discounts found on the day after Thanksgiving are often quite substantial.

Of course, over time, Black Friday has gone from being a single day to be being, well... whatever a store wants it to be. Hell, some retailers have such sales live right now. Sony is following suit with its PlayStation Store, as tomorrow, an enormous list of PS4 games and DLC will get massive discounts -- a Black Friday sale a week early!

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Ads in your inbox. Sounds like something you'd expect from the likes of Google or Yahoo, but Microsoft appears to be about to get in on the act as well.

And we're not talking about online ads in your Outlook.com account -- we're talking about ads in the Mail app that's included with Windows 10. A new report says that Microsoft is currently testing ads with Windows Insiders, so it could be just a matter of time before they spread wider.

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Cyberattacks are often thought of as being a problem just for large organizations. But a new study by the Ponemon Institute, sponsored by Keeper Security, shows that small businesses increasingly face the same cybersecurity risks as larger ones.

The number of attacks is on the rise -- with 67 percent experiencing a cyberattack and 58 percent experiencing a data breach in the last 12 months.

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While a large majority of companies now permit employees to use their own devices for work, they have concerns over security and privacy.

Organizations are making BYOD available to employees (76 percent), contractors (27 percent), partners (25 percent), customers (22 percent), and suppliers (19 percent).

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Three-hundred-and-nine in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on the Windows Store in the past seven days.

Microsoft re-released the October 2018 Update for Windows 10 this week; check out Wayne's post on the fixes in the new version of the feature update.

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Part 1 of three. Google Store's bureaucratic ineptitude is beyond belief. My recent, unresolved customer crisis is an experience in artificial unintelligence. For a parent company whose core competency is supposed to be indexing, crunching, and disseminating information, it's inconceivable that something so simple as fixing a single order error could escalate into a tragically comic Catch-22. I should have abandoned all efforts long before reaching the point of penning this post and looking back to the Apple Way.

To summarize: I received the wrong Pixel phone nearly a month ago. Google Store struggled to process a return authorization, because the device in hand didn't match the one in the order. I eventually agreed to keep the thang, so long as the retailer could transfer the extended warranty -- so-called "Preferred Care" -- that I had paid for. But the process proved to be complicated, then necessity, after I unexpectedly needed to file a damage claim. You'll have to read on for the sordid punchline, but suffice to say it all ends in a comedy of compounding errors.

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For many consumers, Windows 10 is total overkill. If most (or all) of your tasks are web-based, a Chromebook is probably a much better option. After all, the Linux-based Chrome OS is fast and stable, while also being extremely secure. Why bother with all the malware and lag of Windows if you don’t have to?

Today, a company called Sector 5 launches a new Chromebook model. Called "E3," it has an attractive design, decent specs, plenty of ports, and an affordable asking price. Best of all, it supports both Android apps and traditional Linux desktop programs too.

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There has been an increase in the use of .com extensions in phishing emails that target financial service departments, according to a new analysis.

In October alone, anti-phishing company Cofense Intelligence analyzed 132 unique samples with the .com extension, compared to only 34 samples analyzed in the nine months before. Four different malware families were utilized.

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Business software specialist Zoho is launching the latest version of its Zoho CRM Plus suite, an all-in-one customer experience package that enables sales, marketing, customer support, and operations teams to work as one.

Using Zia, Zoho's intelligent assistant, and Zoho Analytics, the company's business intelligence and reporting engine, the package helps users to understand customer sentiments, provide better experiences across channels, and enable actions to keep customers content throughout their journey -- all from one place.

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Enterprise cloud use is increasing, with with 91 percent naming hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, yet only 18 percent say they have that model today.

This is one of the findings of a new study by Nutanix to create the first of what is planned to be a global Enterprise Cloud Index, measuring enterprise plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.

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With digital transformation enabling supply chains to become ever more integrated, businesses no longer have to worry just about the risks posed by their own systems, they must consider those they are connected to as well.

Vendor monitoring solution RiskRecon is launching a new tool that enables enterprises to automatically produce assessments and action plans based on their unique risk requirements, allowing risk professionals to easily understand and act on their third-party risk.

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As more and more people wake up to the fact that Windows 10 is a giant turd lately, computer users are exploring alternatives, such as Linux-based operating systems. First impressions can be everything, so when searching for a distribution, it is important that beginners aren't scared off by bewildering installers or ugly and confusing interfaces.

Linux "n00bs" often opt for Ubuntu, and while that is a good choice, there are far more pretty and intuitive options these days. One such operating system that I recommend often is deepin. Why? It is drop-dead gorgeous and easy to use. It is guaranteed to delight the user, and its intuitive interface will certainly impress. Today, the newest version of the excellent Linux distro, deepin 15.8, becomes available for download.

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The Raspberry Pi was very much inspired by the BBC Micro -- a popular British computer of the 1980s. The BBC Micro was available in Model A and B forms, and shortly after the Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the original Pi 1 Model B+ in 2014, it followed it up with a cut-down A+ model.

It didn’t offer an A+ version for the Pi 2 or 3 unfortunately, but today, it finally rights that wrong and brings back the popular bare-bones system’s smaller brother.

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Microsoft rolled out a new Windows 10 19H1 build earlier today, and the standout new feature is a Light theme -- the perfect antidote for those who don’t really like the dark themes that seem to be everywhere nowadays.

As well as the theme itself, the build comes with a new, Light default wallpaper. If you don’t want to install a potentially buggy Insider build (like the original Windows 10 October 2018 Update), and you don’t want to wait until next spring when the 19H1 update is set to arrive, the good news is you can get the wallpaper now -- and in resolutions of up to 4K.

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Microsoft has finally fixed many of the myriad problems with the botched Windows 10 October 2018 Update, but one issue it hasn’t yet addressed, is the one to do with file associations.

With this problem, Windows fails to remember which programs you want to use to open certain files with by default. This was a problem Insiders reported to Microsoft back in May, but which -- like the file deletion issue -- got missed. The company previously announced that it is working on a fix, which it hopes to roll out by the end of the month.

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