Imagine a different way of computer life. For 80% of your computer-using time, you carry a usb key as your notebook computer You come to a foreign place and are allowed to use an unfamiliar computer. The computer may work perfectly or it may have been rendered non-bootable by a virus. It may be a powerful one or it may be an inexpensive netbook. It may speak Zulu or Tamil.

Securing a computer goes beyond more than just using strong passwords. You should consider what happens if an unauthorized person gains physical access to your computer. If the only security feature protecting your data from an unauthorized person is a user account password, then you have not taken enough steps to protect your computer and your data.

Disk encryption is not something most personal computer users think of when they consider ways to boost the security profile of their computer. A firewall? Yes, that in the minds of most is what computer security is all about. However, a firewall is a network security tool, and it is useless if your computer is lost or stolen. That is when disk encryption comes into play.

Microsoft's latest operating system, Windows 7, is currently shipping with a potentially serious defect. Ahead of the product's global launch on Thursday, Germany's federal IT security agency (BSI) has issued a warning about a high-risk vulnerability in the SMB2 protocol. This can be exploited over the network to shut down a computer with a Denial of Service (DoS) attack.

If you want to launch a career in adult modeling, you don’t start by knocking on the door of the Playboy Mansion. Since porn is a visual medium, one way to get started is by building a web site. And one good way to do that is with the Web-based Adult Content Server (WACS), an application that brings hot nude teens to open source software.

Ever wish you had your whole desktop on a flash disk? You know what we mean, you take a spreadsheet up to your 'rents, and you realize that they have no program to actually open your spreadsheet with. Or maybe you hop from computer to computer in several offices, and hate the fact that every computer you work on is just different enough to make it difficult to get things done.

Surveys suggest that up to 90% of home computer users do not back up their data. That is a pretty frightening statistic bearing in mind how valuable and precious users' files are. Computer users who do not backup their files are at risk of losing all of their personal and irreplaceable documents. The hard drive in a PC can malfunction at any time, sometimes without any warning at all.

You can’t blame your computer for crashing, being slow or losing your work. If it is behaving in a funny way, then it is problem with you – it’s operator. You are doing something wrong. Or did in the past, and now you are paying the consequences. Barring unforeseen hardware issues and unpredictable software bugs, almost every computer issue can be traced back to you. Why?

"Lawyers have successfully managed to argue that computer programs are not mathematics and thus should not be covered by the exclusion of mathematics from patentable material. This comes from a deep misunderstanding of how computers really work – particularly as implementations of a universal turing machine. Some great papers on this have been written – including this one at groklaw.