Welcome to the first Tech Talk column of the new year dedicated to some of your recent e-mail questions.
Q: I love Facebook, but I can’t keep up with the changes. Can you briefly explain what the latest privacy settings changes mean?
A: The simplest way to understand the new wave of Facebook changes is to imagine that you live in a house that has had only one or two windows but is being redesigned to have windows in every room, with a shade on each one. What this means is that you now have to manually set your privacy settings to keep them truly private to share content only with friends you have approved.
The good news is that you now have control over who will see each post and photo. The downside is that you must change the new default settings concerning posting and sharing. The default is now “everyone,” which means that anyone and everyone on the Internet may at some point have access to your post or photos unless you set your options to include only Facebook friends.
Google recently has gained access to the real-time content of both Facebook and Twitter, so the privacy issue is important if you do not want your content shared with strangers.
Q: I read online about something called an enhanced CD. What is that?
A: An enhanced CD is one that has audio or music that will play normally in any CD player or computer but also has content such as pictures, videos or documents accessible only on a computer. Normally, to create such a CD, you first burn your audio tracks, then close the session but do not finalize the CD itself. You then burn the content you desire in a separate session and finalize the CD when you are done. Most CD-burning programs support this type of CD.
One problem with this type of CD is that on computers with the CD autorun function enabled, it can cause problems if the user only wants to access the additional content and not the audio. Also, DVDs now have so much more capacity for data that most producers choose them over the enhanced CD format.
Normally they will create a menu for the DVD that will autorun when it is inserted. Of course the main problem with this approach is that the DVD won’t play the audio in a CD player as does the enhanced CD. It’s a sort of dance around various options when trying to choose the best way to do this.
To avoid all this, some producers now provide download options for their content, letting the user bypass all of this.
Q: What security software do you recommend?
A: If you mean firewall and anti-virus software, my current favorites are the Norton 360 and Internet Security programs, both of which I have used.
I avoided Norton for years because it had become bloated, caused the computer to slow down and did not seem to really keep the system safe. This is no longer the case. The company redesigned its approach from scratch and in the process created a great solution to security problems. I use Norton 360, and it is by far the most simple and transparent security program I’ve ever used.
Updates and maintenance are handled in the background, and I have noticed no slowdown of my system at all. Be aware that several other programs also get high marks now, including Kaspersky Internet Security. I stick with Norton for now because its serves all my needs with little or no hassle.