With no moving parts, solid state drives have all but eliminated mechanical problems with data storage. There are still some issues, however, so John and Steve talk about the benefits and pitfalls of SSDs. Listen to this week’s TechTalk to see if replacing your traditional hard drive with an SSD is a good idea in your...

While we at Backslash are honored to be nominated for Fort Madison’s Small Business of the Year, we would like to give a special congratulations to the other nominees and especially the winners announced this morning. Small Business Person of the Year Nominees Aaron Feagain, Air Evac Lifeteam Bill Faeth, Faeth’s Cigar Store Dr. Kristin Maus, Drs. Smith, Smith, & Maus Optometry Bonnie Howard, The Bookmark Diane Spiekermeier,...

Recently I submitted an article to the website known as Lockergnome, a network of blogs about a variety of topics (mostly tech-related). And today, it’s being featured on the main page of the site! I’ve been a fan of Lockergnome for a long time, and even knew Chris Pirillo when we both went to the University of Northern Iowa. We weren’t best friends or anything, but he did hang out at the computer lab a lot (go figure) and...

The latest in Spring malware has arrived! While there are many things to watch out for on the Internet, sometimes the biggest threat is supposedly from your friends. No, your buddy isn’t out to get you, but his computer might be! John and Steve talk about Facebook malware and how to protect your machine....

  A fresh batch of malicious PDFs is making the rounds via email, with the attackers trying to trick users into opening the files by making them look like instructions for an update to their email accounts. The difference this time, however, is that the attack uses a technique recently published by a researcher that takes advantage of the /launch command in Adobe software. The technique enables an attacker to launch commands and...