The hard drive in my Windows machine that died and that I thought was the drive holding the OS actually wasn’t. It turns out, the surviving drive is the one with the OS, but the drive that failed had the boot record on it which is why I was unable to boot.
I was able to determine this by downloading the Windows 10 USB installer, booting up with that and inspecting the surviving drive. I managed to restore the boot information and boot successfully into Windows 10.
This is a relief. All that was on the other drive was game installs, most of which I can reinstall by downloading them from Steam or similar cloud libraries.
Destiny 2: Forsaken’s raid will not have a hard mode
That’s kind of disappointing.
Facebook Is Giving Advertisers Access to Your Shadow Contact Information
The researchers also found that if User A, whom we’ll call Anna, shares her contacts with Facebook, including a previously unknown phone number for User B, whom we’ll call Ben, advertisers will be able to target Ben with an ad using that phone number, which I call “shadow contact information,” about a month later. Ben can’t access his shadow contact information, because that would violate Anna’s privacy, according to Facebook, so he can’t see it or delete it, and he can’t keep advertisers from using it either.
So a person can have nothing to do with Facebook, but Facebook will still build a profile on them. If that person wants to control that information, they have no choice but to create a Facebook account.
At this point I guess we really shouldn’t be surprised by the things Facebook does.
Security flaw allows attackers to steal data from almost any computer
According to Segerdahl, Microsoft can’t do anything to remedy the issue. Furthermore, Intel is limited as they provide a reference platform for manufacturers to extend and build new models on.
And
Apple, however, has said it is looking into measures to protect Mac computers. It’s worth noting that Macs with a T2 chip, like the iMac Pro and 2018 MacBook Pro models, are not affected by the flaw.
Apple’s investment in chips is paying off in more ways than one.
Premier Doug Ford to use notwithstanding clause to cut size of Toronto city council
This seems like a good use of this power 🙄
Changing Our Approach to Anti-tracking - Future Releases
From the Mozilla blog:
Tracking slows down the web. In a study by Ghostery, 55.4% of the total time required to load an average website was spent loading third party trackers. For users on slower networks the effect can be even worse.
and
In the physical world, users wouldn’t expect hundreds of vendors to follow them from store to store, spying on the products they look at or purchase. Users have the same expectations of privacy on the web, and yet in reality, they are tracked wherever they go. Most web browsers fail to help users get the level of privacy they expect and deserve.
I use Safari as my main browser, but I switched to Firefox as my secondary about a year ago because of their focus on performance. Ad-Tech tracking is horrible for performance, so it makes sense that Mozilla would tackle this as part of that effort. Not only will these changes increase performance, but they have the added benefit of blocking all the advertisers from tracking your every move across the web.