TECH

Thunderbolt – (often) undiscovered raw power in your computer

Sven Krumrey

Inconspicuous port that packs a punch

Imagine your PC or laptop had a port with a myriad of connection options and lots of raw power but you didn't even know it existed! That's what many computer owners must feel like these days. Purchasing a computer usually involves a welter of technical terms that are hard to sort out. And honestly, whose interest would spike if, along with disk size, RAM, processor and graphics card, the term Thunderbolt was suddenly thrown around? What is almost considered old hat in the Apple world is still a rarity among Windows users.

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LIFE

All games under a single roof - Steam

Sven Krumrey

Steam Store, commercial centerpiece of the program

There's hardly another software that is as controversial as Steam, even 15 years after its debut. Some gamers refuse to buy games that require activation through steam while others rejoice at the opportunity to manage all their software in a single place and never tire of praising the various additional features. Whichever side you're on, Valve has definitely pioneered online software distribution. But what exactly is Steam, why does it matter and what are its strengths and weaknesses?

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LIFE

The end of Google+

Sven Krumrey

The end of a big hope

2011 was a year of hope for Google. Their biggest prestige project, Google+, was to be made public in the middle of that year. It was supposed to upend the world of social networks, dethrone Facebook and, naturally, collect a plethora of user data. Whatever site users visited, they were inundated with ads for the new platform. But what could have been a record-breaking launch, was soon marred by glitches and growing disenchantment, which is why the once bleeding-edge network will now shut down permanently.

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TECH

10 years of WhatsApp – past, present and future

Sven Krumrey

The greatest messenger of our time

Every month, several thousand apps are published. Most target a niche market, many are clones of existing popular programs, seldom does a new app make a splash these days. When WhatsApp launched, ten years ago, it got barely noticed and messengers were still considered PC-only. For text messages, there was SMS, for everything else, there were phone calls. Read on to learn why Facebook's rejection really got the app off the ground and why 2019 will be a decisive year for WhatsApp!

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LIFE

How a large corporation lost millions of data sets to hackers

Sven Krumrey

A company that has a lot of explaining to do

Let me start off by apologizing. As mentioned before, we're in the process of relocating to new headquarters and, consequently, a few things have fallen by the wayside, including the server who sends out nice notifications for new blog articles once a week. So in case you didn't receive any notifications for the past two weeks, please see the links at the bottom to access the previous two articles. The most recent entry also gave rise to this week's article that deals with the question of where the leaked email addresses and passwords have come from. As a case in point, I'll cover the momentous and well-documented Equifax hack that has achieved legendary status by now. Seldom has there been another case where highly sensitive information met with utter management failure!

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