Monthly Archives: June 2015

Time Sensitive – Grab Your Private E-mail Account

Computer Security, Technical Tips

In a recent article about privacy in communications, I mentioned ProtonMail. Today, I got an email in my inbox from them, which I thought it should be passed along:

“Hi Everyone,

Thank you for using ProtonMail!

To celebrate our 1 year anniversary, we are upgrading all accounts created by June 17th, 2015 to 1GB of free storage! Many of you have also asked for a way to share ProtonMail with friends and family. To do that, we have created a special link that allows instant account creation:
https://protonmail.ch/privacyforall

You can send this link to friends and family and they will be able to get a ProtonMail account instantly. As our server capacity is still limited, we will only keep this link active until June 17th, 2015 (or until we hit capacity limit). Also after June 17th, all new accounts will default to 500MB of free storage.

Over the past year, ProtonMail has proven to be reliable with less than 12 hours of total downtime (mostly scheduled maintenance), no incidents of permanent data loss, and no reports of user data compromise. Over that same period, the ProtonMail user community has grown from 10,000 to 500,000 people.

As you know, we respect your privacy and do not track detailed user activity. Therefore, to continue to improve ProtonMail, we need to rely on direct feedback from you and would love to hear your suggestions or criticisms in the following survey:
https://blog.protonmail.ch/feedback

Many of the improvements mentioned in the survey will be coming soon. In the past few months alone, we have added new features like folders/labels, encrypted attachments, the protonmail.com domain, and more: https://blog.protonmail.ch/protonmails-new-features-guide

We look forward to continuing this exciting journey with you!

Best regards,
The ProtonMail Team

We believe privacy is a fundamental human right which is why we are supported by donations instead of advertisements. If you would like to support us, please visit: https://protonmail.ch/donate“

I don’t receive any compensation from passing along the above, but thought for those similarly minded souls who like privacy, this represents a good opportunity.

Windows 10 Upgrade App, or “What’s That Doohickey by the Clock?”

Technical Tips

Taskbar: The bar, normally at the bottom of your screen, in Windows.

System tray: The notification area normally at the right side of the taskbar, near where the clock usually is. it has little icons that provide notifications and status of certain programs.

Some of you running computers with Windows 7 or Windows 8/8.1 may have recently noticed a new, previously unseen icon in the system tray, that looks like this:

gwx

This is the result of a recent Windows Update which is set to do several things as the release of Windows 10 nears (the release is currently set for the end of July). The idea being to get users to upgrade to Windows 10.

As explained in my last article, you’ll need to decide whether or not Windows 10 is an upgrade you want. If yes, don’t need to do anything at this point. If not, you can uninstall the Windows Update that installed this “Get Windows 10” app. If you are familiar with how to do that, you can find the update, KB3035583, and uninstall it. If you want to do it but need help, let me know.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.