Gmail Increases File Attachment Size Limit to 50MB

It's not uncommon to download files that are multiple gigabytes in size, but when it comes to emails, attachments are still very limited. That's no bad thing, because nobody wants their email client sat there downloading huge files. However, sometimes you need to send a large file, and Google is responding to that need by increasing the file size limit for Gmail.

Gmail users can now receive files of up to 50MB in size. However, attaching a file directly in Gmail is still limited to 25MB. That shouldn't be a problem as Google offers to store larger files on Google Drive and send a link in the email instead. This is how most large files should be sent via email. Relying on a file storage and download service means emails stay small and users can choose when it's convenient to download attachments.

Google revealed the size increase yeterday and should have it rolled out to all Gmail accounts before the end of the week. What you may not be aware of is the fact Google actually limits how many emails a user can receive every day "to keep our systems healthy and your accounts safe."

Each account can receive a maximum of 86,400 emails in one day. That limit is further broken down to a limit of 3,600 emails per hour and 60 per minute. If you hit one of the limits then no further email can be received for the next 24 hours and any that get sent "are bounced or deferred back to the sender."

Verizon Bringing Back Unlimited Data

Unlimited data returns to Verizon on Monday for $80 per month.

Verizon Unlimited offers unlimited data, talk, and text on smartphones for $80 per month. Those who need a family plan pay $45 per line for four lines (smartphones or tablets), or $180 per month. Add a smartwatch, GizmoPal$79.99 at Verizon Wireless, or other connected device for $5 each month.

Those who top 22GB of data per month face been throttled when the network is congested. "While we don't expect to do that very often, network management is a crucial tool that benefits all Verizon customers," Verizon says.

The plan also includes mobile hotspot service (10GB of 4G LTE data per month; after that it's slowed to 3G), calling and texting to Canada and Mexico, and TravelPass for $10 per day, which includes 500MB per day (2G speeds after that) for those going abroad.

Verizon also promises high-definition video streaming, "not inferior 480p video," said Ronan Dunne, president of Verizon's wireless division. That's a swipe at T-Mobile, which streams video for its unlimited Binge On service at 480p. T-Mobile offers a $70/month unlimited plan that throttles users after 28GB.

If you don't want unlimited, Verizon will still offer its 5GB plan, as well as S (2GB for $35), M (4GB for $50), and L (8GB + 2GB/line for $70) data buckets.

Verizon stopped offering unlimited plans to new customers in 2011. A year later, it required those upgrading service to say farewell to unlimited, too. Last year, the carrier threatened to cut off unlimited users who eat up more than 100GB per month. More recently, Verizon said those who average 200GB a month will be pushed off unlimited by Feb. 16.

Weekend Project: It’s Time to Clean Your Computer, Inside and Out

It’s a tedious task you’ve been putting off for what could be years. But this is finally the weekend you do it; you’re going to clean your computer inside and out. That means scrubbing down those keys, wiping the fossilized fingerprints off your screen and deleting all the files that secretly downloaded when you were trying to figure out how to make a GIF.

You Will Need

• A microfiber cloth
• Soft cloths for cleaning (don’t use paper towels)
• Isopropyl alcohol
• Q-tips
• An hour or two

Exterior Cleaning

Before doing anything, you need to turn off your device. Unplug it as well. This is the most important step. If you don’t follow it you could do some serious damage to the hardware.

Clean the Exterior
Take a soft cloth (a microfiber cloth is recommended), slightly dampen it with water and start scrubbing. Be careful when going around ports, you don’t want any liquid getting in there.

Screen
Start cleaning the screen by wiping it down with a dry cloth. Go from corner to corner.
Next, take the cloth and dampen it with some water. If you don’t think plain old water will get the job done, you could make a cleaning solution with 50 percent vinegar and 50 percent water. But don’t use cleaning solutions. In fact there are a lot of “Don’ts” when cleaning computers, so it’s best just to follow these instructions. Speaking of which, don’t drench the cloth. If it’s dripping wet, you overdid it.

Run the cloth over the screen. If you want to wipe in a wax on, wax off motion, that’s fine, but don’t get overzealous with your scrubbing; you’re not waxing a Ford Mustang.

Keyboard
If you’re a multitasking heathen who eats while using the computer… well, you’re just like everyone else. It also means you have crumbs between, on, or inside your keys. You need to get those out before you come in with the damp cloth—like sweeping the floor before mopping.

Use a can of compressed air to clear the crumbs from the surface. If you don’t have one, a small fan may work and if you’re really desperate, you could employ a drinking straw and use lung-generated wind power. Just get the crumbs out.

Next, take out a clean cloth, the isopropyl alcohol, and some Q-tips. Take the cloth and dampen it with the alcohol. Run the cloth over the keys and make them shiny. Then take the Q-tip and get in-between the keys. You can dip the Q-tip in alcohol, but stop short of a full soak; you don’t want a puddle of alcohol to spew out when you press down.

Once you’ve run the key maze, the alcohol should dry within a matter of minutes. Voila, you’re halfway done to completely cleaning your computer.

Interior Cleaning

The inside of your machine is probably filled with more crap than the outside was. Boot your computer up and get ready to do the real dirty work.

Delete Files in Windows
Windows 10 comes with an excellent storage manager. In the Settings app, click on System, then Storage. In this view, you can identify the folders taking up the most space, then sift through these to delete the largest files you don’t need anymore.

Chances are, your computer came with a bunch of programs pre-installed that you’ve never used, or that you don’t want. Get rid of these. Within the Settings app, click on Apps & Features, then find those apps you never use and delete them.

Next, launch the Disk Cleanup utility. It allows you to erase temporary files, which may improve the speed of your computer, and system files, which will free up some storage space.

That’s enough to earn you a few gigabytes of disk space. If you’re still hurting for space, there’s more to be done—Windows 10 is full of little hiding places for backups and temporary files. Thankfully, Microsoft has included several different cleanup tools with the OS, and the company offers an online guide to completing a thorough cleaning.

Delete Files in macOS
Macs don’t come with a Disk Cleanup equivalent. To delete unnecessary files, you’re either going to have to pay for software to do it for you, or do it yourself. The latter will take some time, but at least it will be a walk down memory lane.

To to do a manual clean, target your Downloads folder, your Applications folder, and the “All My Files” view. For each one, launch a Finder window and go into List view: Choose View > As List, or click the List View button at the top of the Finder window. From here, you can sort the files based on size, with the largest files at the top of the list. This will help you can catch the biggest space eaters first.

You can also sort by file type. If you know you have a ton of videos lying around from when you tried to make a Star Wars supercut using scenes from the first six movies, you can find and delete them all at once by choosing “Kind” and finding the .mp4 files all clustered together.

Lastly, right click on the column headers in Finder and select “Date Last Opened.” This will let you sort your list to show you the things you haven’t touched in years. This is especially helpful in Applications—those apps you downloaded in 2011 and haven’t used since? Ditch them!

Zap Device Backups
Do you have an iPhone or iPad? Go into iTunes’s preferences and click on Devices. If you see any backups for old devices you don’t use anymore (or devices you’re now backing up to the cloud), get rid of those.

Erase the Past
Clearing your browser history is another way to cleanse your computer of toxins and hogged space. Go into your web browser of choice, open the preferences, and flush that browser history. You may have to reload some images and files the next time you browse, but you’ll free up hundreds of megabytes of space.

Finish the Job
After clearing out all the gunk, empty the trash, which will delete these files and apps. Finally—and this is important—reboot your computer.

Curate Your Feeds
After rebooting, there’s one more item that you’re going to want to clean out, and it doesn’t have anything to deleting items, it has to do with deleting friends. Not real friends; Twitter followers and Facebook friends. The ones you haven’t thought about in years, and the people who bring the least value to your social media experience. Take the time to go through everyone you follow and do not be afraid to make some deep cuts. The same logic applies to Snapchat and Instagram. It’s good practice to trim the fat out of your social feeds regularly, so carpe diem and clean house.

It might be time to stop using antivirus....really

Former Firefox developer Robert O'Callahan, now a free agent and safe from the PR tentacles of his corporate overlord, says that antivirus software is terrible, AV vendors are terrible, and that you should uninstall your antivirus software immediately—unless you use Microsoft's Windows Defender, which is apparently okay.

A couple of months back, Justin Schuh, Google Chrome's security chief, and indeed one of the world's top infosec bods, said that antivirus software is "my single biggest impediment to shipping a secure browser." Further down the thread he explains that meddling AV software delayed Win32 Flash sandboxing "for over a year" and that further sandboxing efforts are still on hold due to AV. The man-in-the-middle nature of antivirus also causes a stream of TLS (transport layer security) errors, says Schuh, which in turn breaks some elements of HTTPS/HSTS.

These are just two recent instances of browser makers being increasingly upset with antivirus software. Back in 2012, Nicholas Nethercote, another Mozillian working on Firefox's MemShrink project said that "McAfee is killing us." In that case, Nethercote was trying to reduce the memory footprint of Firefox, and found that gnarly browser add-ons like McAfee were consuming a huge amount of memory, amongst other things. If you venture off-piste into the browser mailing lists, anti-antivirus sentiment has bubbled away just below the surface for a very long time.

The problem, from the perspective of the browser makers, is that antivirus software is incredibly invasive. Antivirus, in an attempt to catch viruses before they can infect your system, forcibly hooks itself into other pieces of software on your computer, such as your browser, word processor, or even the OS kernel. O'Callahan gives one particularly egregious example: "Back when we first made sure ASLR was working for Firefox on Windows, many AV vendors broke it by injecting their own ASLR-disabled DLLs into our processes." ASLR, or address-space layout randomisation, is one of the better protections against buffer overflow exploits.

Click here to read more from Ars Technica.

If we show you how to back up your PC for free, will you finally do it?

If we show you how to back up your PC for free, will you finally do it? Beyond simple hard drive failure, your PC could fall prey to user error, thieves, and all sorts of nefarious malware. The only way to ensure that none of your personal files or programs are lost in a catastrophe is to back up everything regularly.

While backing up your data can be as simple as dumping critical files on an external hard drive every now and again, you’ll ideally want backups that let you recover not just yesterday’s version of a lost file, but last Tuesday’s as well. Backups should be easy to do, or they won’t get done. And ideally, you should have more than one backup in more than one location.  Click here for the rest of the article, courtesy of PCWorld.com

Increase The Start Menu & Taskbar Transparency In Windows 10

Windows 10 allows you to toggle the transparency of the Start Menu, the Taskbar, and the Action Center. The transparency of these three UI elements is tied to one switch in the Settings app. To manage transparency, go to Personalization>Colors in the Settings app and turn it On/Off. The setting doesn’t allow users to selectively apply transparency to one element while leaving the other a solid color nor does it let you select how transparent the Start Menu should be. You can still make the Start Menu and the taskbar considerably more transparent than it is by default by tweaking a registry key. Here’s how.

Hit Win+R to open the Run dialogue. Type in Regedit to open the Registry Editor. When prompted, allow it to make changes on your system. You will need admin rights to edit registry keys.

To make the Start Menu more transparent, go to;

HKEY_CURRENT _USER\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Themes\Personalize

There should be a key named EnableTransparency and its value will be set to 1. Edit the value to 0 and then open the Start Menu. You will see that it is considerably more transparent than it was before.

The increased transparency lets you read text on a window or document that’s open behind the Start Menu. The difference is most apparent when there is a light window behind the Start Menu or if the wallpaper is a bright color. If your wallpaper is a darker color you won’t be able to see much of a difference. This is of course a trivial matter since you can always change the desktop background. The change doesn’t appear to affect the Action Center.

To make the Taskbar more transparent, go to;

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Advanced

Here, look for the key named UseOLEDTaskbarTransparency and change its value to 1. The difference made by the change can be seen below.

The question as to whether this is more aesthetically pleasing or not will depend on the tiles pinned to your Start Menu and it’s color theme sitting well with the background.