When you connect your laptop to a wireless network, you usually have to log in with a password. This is true in cafés and libraries, for example – but also when we are in our own or someone else's home. This login only has to be done once and the next time you connect, the computer will remember the password. The problem is that this happens automatically without you being able to see the password in plain text. If you have forgotten your password and want to connect your mobile phone, tablet or any other computer to the same network, this automation can be a disadvantage.

Kim Komando will show you the five tricks that tech pros use all the time. The personal computer has been around for over 40 years. In that time, we've adapted to all kinds of platforms and devices. We've learned Microsoft Office, mastered the iPhone, and conquered Zoom. If you're thinking, "Well, not quite," tap or click for my favorite Zoom tricks you'll wish you knew sooner.

A week ago today, hackers unleashed the first known attack using the vulnerability known as BlueKeep, a long-feared development that in practice turned out to be relatively benign. But don't worry, plenty of other things still went wrong. Like, say, the revelation that you can hack Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri with lasers. Take the two former Twitter employees who allegedly used their insider access to spy on behalf of Saudi Arabia--a stark reminder of how ill prepared even the biggest companies are to protect consumer data from the people who work there. Or the spate of zombie text messages from February that hit people's phones Thursday with no explanation, the result of a third-party server that had failed on February 14 and was reactivated November 7. All the messages stranded in that queue finally got sent.

A week ago today, hackers unleashed the first known attack using the vulnerability known as BlueKeep, a long-feared development that in practice turned out to be relatively benign. But don't worry, plenty of other things still went wrong. Like, say, the revelation that you can hack Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri with lasers. Take the two former Twitter employees who allegedly used their insider access to spy on behalf of Saudi Arabia--a stark reminder of how ill prepared even the biggest companies are to protect consumer data from the people who work there. Or the spate of zombie text messages from February that hit people's phones Thursday with no explanation, the result of a third-party server that had failed on February 14 and was reactivated November 7. All the messages stranded in that queue finally got sent.

Since smart speakers like the Amazon Echo first began to appear in homes across the world, the security community has come to see them as a prime target. But that threat has remained largely hypothetical: No Echo malware has appeared in the wild, and even proof-of-concept attacks on the devices have remained impractical at best. Now, one group of Chinese hackers has spent months developing a new technique for hijacking Amazon's voice assistant gadget. But it may be the closest thing yet to a practical demonstration of how the devices might be silently hijacked for surveillance. At the DefCon security conference Sunday, researchers Wu Huiyu and Qian Wenxiang plan to present a technique that chains together a series of bugs in Amazon's second-generation Echo to take over the devices, and stream audio from its microphone to a remote attacker, while offering no clue to the user that the device has been compromised.

Losing a signal or getting kicked off a Wi-Fi network can often be an inconvenience or a disruption. It can even lead to theft -- though of a relatively harmless variety -- with 32 percent of users telling an industry trade group in 2011 that they had stolen a neighbor's Wi-Fi in order to go online. But instead of a desperate search, what if a Wi-Fi signal could find you instead, even in a room full of people all using the same network? That's the idea behind a new system developed by researchers at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). It finds a particular user by calculating the "time-of-flight," a measurement of how long it takes for a signal to travel from a user's computer or phone to a single Wi-Fi source.