Google not only has Gmail, Chrome, YouTube and a plethora of applications to help you, but they also own and are working on many other technologies. You may be surprised just how much Google has inserted itself into the future of things to come. And some of the wild things are already here. Read this article from CNET to learn all about it.
http://www.cnet.com/pictures/things-google-owns/

But beyond that...did you know that Google is owned by Alphabet?

To learn all about Google and Alphabet, read here:
​http://news.thewindowsclub.com/alphabet-holding-company-google-79693/_

How much do you know about your recent Windows updates? According to PCWorld magazine, the latest "Patch Tuesday" updates killed off Windows 8 and IE 8, 9 and 10.

Read the article here: 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/3021789/windows/microsoft-patch-tuesday-kills-off-windows-8-and-internet-explorer-8-9-and-10.html

Do you ever check to see what each update actually does? Microsoft's SecurityTech Center provides the details of each update. Check out their security bulletin summary for January 2016 at:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms16-Jan
 
The info might be a bit techy, but you can find out how critical a certain update might be. At any rate, making sure you keep your computer updated is very important. Questions? Send an email to [email protected]. You may have to copy and paste the email address into your email program if you have not configured your computer to use your default email program.

NOTE: Do you know about Patch Tuesday?
​http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/Patch-Tuesday_

by Bob Bloom
Just read an interesting report.  “In just visiting the homepage of {the top 100 most} popular sites, we found 32 websites placed 100 or more cookies, 7 websites placed 200 or more cookies, and 6 websites placed 300 or more cookies.”
http://techscience.org/a/2015121502/

A visit to the top 100 homepages (and no other pages) would give you a total of 6,280 cookies – 83% of them from 3rd party hosts.  If one added just two links at random on each of those 100 home pages, you’d get 12,857 cookies deposited on your computer.  Here’s a list of the top 100 sites:
https://www.quantcast.com/top-sites
 
Here’s a chart of the ‘deep crawl’, i.e. the home page + 2 random (but still on the same domain) links: