blocking

The bottom line: Low-impact performance, strong security, and useful features are the hallmarks of Norton Internet Security 2012, one of the best security suites available.

Review: Editors' note: Portions of this review are based on CNET's review of Norton Internet Security 2011.

Over the past few years, Symantec has completed a course reversal for its Norton consumer Internet security suites. The massive package of security tools works better than it ever has before, with an impressive set of features, some useful new tools including remote management and download stability analysis, and third-party security efficacy benchmarks that are at the … Read more

Mouse Trap is an addictive puzzle game that tests your logic skills as you help a trapped mouse find his way through a thoroughly obstructed exit. Your job is to move the obstructing blocks either vertically or horizontally (never both) in order to clear a lane for the trapped rodent. As you progress through the game's hundreds of levels, the configurations of blocks get increasingly complex, requiring additional brain power to clear them.

Mouse Trap is a classic puzzle game similar to other hits like Unblock Me and Traffic Jam. But what sets this game apart is that there … Read more

For the past couple of years, Adobe Flash has been attacked by Apple for being a clunky add-on that causes numerous crashes and other problems for Safari and other Web browsers on the Mac. Given the advancements in HTML5, Flash has been slated as unnecessary by Steve Jobs and others who have been promoting the new HTML5 standard's features as an alternative for rendering Web media and other rich content.

Despite these efforts, Adobe has managed to improve Flash and add a number of new features such as hardware acceleration to the handling of images and video, which have … Read more

A reader named Eddy contacted me the other day to ask how to block mail from specific people in Mozilla Thunderbird. Eddy also wants to be notified when mail comes from certain addresses.

While I am familiar with how to create rules in Microsoft Outlook to block senders and receive notifications when mail arrives from a particular person or address, I had never tried to do the same in Thunderbird. It turns out Thunderbird's filters make it easy to automatically block mail from a person or address, but there's no equivalent in Thunderbird to Outlook's ability to … Read more

Google+ only roughly represents real life's full range of interactions, but Google's social network just got a little more subtle with the new ability to ignore people.

Previously, Google+ members could block others, but now you don't have to go nuclear if somebody is bugging you.

And because Google doesn't tell a person you've ignored them, Google+ now lets you be as socially dysfunctional as you were in eighth grade: ignored people still can tell if they're in one of your circles, seemingly indicating that you're following them when in practice you're … Read more

Full disclosure: I just finished a cup of black coffee, and it was damn fine. (And yes, I make Twin Peaks references wherever possible.)

So it is with vigorous jumping up-and-down motions, aided surely by the caffeine, that I write about a team's findings from the University of Washington and Rutgers University that caffeine can help lower one's chances of UV-associated skin cancer by inhibiting a DNA repair pathway, essentially helping cells die after exposure to sunlight.

The team reports on this "protective effect of caffeinated beverage intake" in the August 15 issue of the Proceedings … Read more

We love puzzle games, and all the better if there's something about them that engages our word nerd tendencies. Letter Blocks combines aspects of the puzzle game Tetris with the word-forming challenges of Scrabble. It's not perfect, but it is an awful lot of fun.

The game's interface consists of a grid of letters, which you must string together into words that are at least three letters long. Forming a word causes the letters used to disappear, making more room on the screen for the letters that drop from the top. The rate at which the letters … Read more

What more can one say about Tetris? The megapopular classic '80s action puzzle game from Russian programmer Alexey Pajitnov is now available for the iPhone, featuring everything you loved about the original, and some added bonuses to keep the game interesting. The game is crystal-clear with Retina Display support and the simple interface requires only swipes and taps on the screen to move, rotate, and drop pieces on the board. Sometimes the tap-to-rotate and swipe-to-move method can be a little frustrating (it's easy to make mistakes), but we were mostly able to enjoy the classic game on our iPhone … Read more

Recently we discussed a problem that has cropped up in Safari 5.1 running under Lion, in which the browser will display Web pages with block-A characters instead of the desired text. We initially suggested that people check their fonts and rebuild their font caches. However, this issue shows up only in Safari and Chrome, which both use the WebKit engine, and specifically for those users who have font manager tools installed. It turns out this issue is likely a compatibility problem between how third-party font managers store fonts and a limitation in the WebKit framework that deals with the … Read more