
Search results for '+real +estate' - Page: 5
| RadioNZ - 19 Mar (RadioNZ) A battle over rebranding a string of high-profile real estate agencies is being played out in court. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | PC World - 17 Mar (PC World)So, your data was leaked by hackers. Well, you’re not the only one. We live in an era in which data breaches are a daily occurrence. And that’s both bad and good news. It’s bad for obvious reasons—no one wants to have their personal information exposed.
But here’s why it could be good news—it means the digital landscape is saturated with terabytes of data, leaving each individual data point nearly worthless. The rise of data brokers—companies that legally aggregate hundreds or thousands of data points to create a profile on you—is a result of this phenomenon. This means that, while data breaches are indeed bad news, taking down a majority of your exposed data is simple if you know where to look, or which provider to use that can legally remove aggregated profiling information from large databases.
Once your data finds its way into one of these datadumps (that is, files containing breached information), there are some things you can do yourself to safeguard your data and some services that can be done for you to remove that data from the largest profiling databases out there.
Let’s dive in!
How to take back control after a data leak
Here’s a quick overview of the steps you should take to protect your data after it’s breached. It’s best to follow them in the order presented.
Change passwords: Immediately change the password for the affected account and any others using the same credentials.
Freeze your credit: If the breach involves more sensitive data like your SSN, full name, or address, freeze your credit with one of the main credit bureaus.
Set up MFA: Enable multi-factor authentication for your important accounts and, ideally, all online accounts.
Remove your personal information from data brokers: Having your data breached is one issue, but it being shared is another. Sign up for a data removal service to prevent your information from spreading online.
Monitor your accounts for signs of identity theft: The consequences of a data breach aren’t always immediate; identity theft can occur months later. To prevent this, regularly monitor your banking, credit, and Social Security accounts.
Now, let’s get into more detail.
Change your passwords
Statistics indicate that two-thirds of Americans use the same password across multiple accounts.Nearly half prefer easy-to-remember passwords over hard-to-crack passwords. The consequence?
If you’re among either of those groups, once your password gets leaked, it exposes your other accounts as well.
That’s especially true if you reuse your passwords, but people who use similarly structured passwords aren’t safe either.
For your own safety, update your passwords:
On the platform where the breach happened
On all other accounts that use the same or similar passwords.
Come up with unique combinations, preferably 14 characters long.
And yeah, we get you—Remembering unique, 14-character-long passwords for each account becomes a titanic act, probably not within reach of us mere mortals. Only, you don’t have to do it yourself. There are tons of password managers you can use to boost your security and organize your passwords.
See our top password managers for 2025.
Freeze your credit
People whose personal information was used by fraudsters to open new accounts suffered over $3K in losses on average.
When you combine it with the instances where fraudsters took out loans or breached credit card information, that number grows even further.
And it’s easier than you might think.
Take credit cards, for example. Some banks ask for only the following information to submit a request for a new credit card:
Full name
Birth date
Social Security number
Address
Annual income
Current employer
The Real Estate Wealth Network data breach from 2023 exposed five out of six data points listed above—in just a single incident. Fraudsters could take out lines of credit in your name, without you even knowing.
To prevent anyone from taking out lines of credit in your name, freeze your credit reports at all three bureaus.
You can do it for free online:
Experian credit freeze
TransUnion credit freeze
Equifax credit freeze
Enable multi-factor authentication
Passwords aren’t enough. Especially if you don’t have an appetite for unique, 14-character-long ones.
The good news is that you can improve your accounts’ security by a wide margin with multi-factor authentication (MFA) methods.
The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) states that the “use of MFA on your accounts makes you 99% less likely to be hacked.”
The idea behind MFA is simple and you’ve likely come across it before.
Here’s how it works: After entering your password, you’re asked to confirm your identity by a different measure—typing in a code received via email, for example. It’s the second factor in the authentication process.
It usually stops here, making it two-factor authentication (2FA), but it could go further, adding a third and even fourth layer—making it a truly multi-factor.
Learn more about MFA and how to use it.
Remove your personal information from data brokers
Here’s the thing about data breaches—a data breach is a singular incident, a one-time thing. Hackers get access to databases and expose them.
Our attention revolves mostly around that incident. We change our passwords, freeze our credit, and, after a while, forget about the whole affair.
But the leaked data is still circulating the web.
From one dark web forum to another, it passes through many, often shady, hands, potentially landing among the records of data brokers.
Data brokers are companies that buy and sell personal information to make a profit. It’s similar to stock brokers. Only, instead of buying and selling corporate shares, data brokers buy and sell your:
Names
Birth date
Phone numbers
Email addresses
Current and past addresses
Owned properties
Current and past employers
Pulic records
Relatives
…and more
With each data breach, your profile builds up.
As a result, you may be targeted by identity thieves long after the initial data breach took place.
Here’s the good news, though—you can sign up for a data removal service, like Incogni, and have your personal information removed from hundreds of data brokers.
There are a few good removal services available for US citizens, like Kanary and Optery, but what really sets Incogni apart is that they target both private and public data brokers, while most others only focus on the public ones.
The private databases, which are traded behind closed doors, are the ones that really impact your privacy. And Incogni is one of the few services that actually tackles those. But the good news doesn’t stop there.
Incogni makes protecting your personal info a walk in a park. Getting started is super easy—it only takes a few clicks to set up your account and send out the first batch of 220+ removal requests.
And after that you can sit back and focus on what really matters. Incogni will keep reaching out to all the data brokers in their network on a regular basis to make sure your personal info doesn’t end up back in their databases.
Remove your personal information with Incogni
Monitor your accounts for signs of identity theft
“Identity theft is no joke, Jim!”—teaches us Dwight from The Office.
And with nearly a third of Americans already affected by some form of it, it indeed is not a joke.
10% of identity theft victims realize something is wrong only when their money is gone. That’s far too late.
Instead, monitor your key accounts—like banking, credit, and Social Security—regularly.
Keep a close eye on your:
Bank statements for any anomalies.
Credit reports for unsolicited activity.
Social Security account for unrecognized actions.
Mail for suspicious letters, even if not addressed to you.
Email for any unintended updates to your accounts, especially new accounts. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 Mar (PC World)Eighty bucks is pretty cheap for a monitor, but not unheard of if you’re limiting yourself to a budget 24-inch 1080p panel. But with extra features thrown in, it becomes a great value. I’m talking a speedy 180Hz refresh rate that makes for a pretty good gaming display and an IPS panel for superior color accuracy. You can get such a deal on Amazon today: this Aopen by Acer monitor is on sale for $79.99. (That’s 38% off!)
First, that brand name. “Aopen” isn’t a household name for PC gear, but it is in fact a subsidiary of Acer that’s mostly focused on B2B sales, and the “Fire Legend” label is Aopen’s attempt to break into affordable gaming monitors. So yes, this is an Acer design—at least nominally—and it should offer better support than most of the white-label gear on Amazon. Aopen has a three-year parts and labor warranty for all of its monitors, according to this US support page. This monitor earns a 4.3 star rating out of 5 from over 700 Amazon buyers, for whatever that’s worth.
For just $80, I can’t overstate how great a deal this is. It’s a very basic design, sure, with only single DisplayPort 1.2 and HDMI 1.4 connections according to the specs. Zooming in on the rear shots, it looks like this thing has a VGA port (wow, been a while, huh?) and a headphone port. You don’t get any USB extras or fancy lighting, and at 24 inches and 1080p, it’s about as small as desktop monitors get in 2025.
But a 180Hz IPS panel—not VA like most budget gaming displays—is nothing to sneeze at. I also appreciate that it has a VESA mount for using a monitor arm. (Again, not a given at this price point.) This is also a fantastic deal if you want to add one (or two, or more) displays to a multi-monitor setup for more screen real estate.
In addition to Amazon, a poster at SlickDeals spotted the same discount for this Aopen 24KG3Y model at Walmart and Newegg. Keep your options open if this one sells out on Amazon.
Wow! Get a 180Hz IPS gaming monitor for just $80Buy now at Amazon Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 Mar (PC World)I’m a smart home expert. Writing about smart home technology, smart devices, and voice assistants is my job. Yet, I don’t remember the last time I actually spoke with Alexa.
Just to be clear, I don’t mean to pick on Alexa per se. I rarely speak to Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri, either. The reason? It’s way easier to haul out my phone and use an app than it is to get a supposedly “smart” voice assistant to do what I want.
As it stands, there’s a Google Nest Hub Max sitting in our kitchen that acts as a glorified photo frame, and it occasionally interrupts with a random answer to a question nobody asked. A few HomePod minis are scattered around our home, but they’re really just for playing music (which I mainly control on my iPhone). And a lone Alexa speaker in our daughter’s room is merely an alarm clock.
Now Amazon is promising a grand rebirth for Alexa. Slated to roll out as a public preview later this month, Alexa+ will harness the power of generative AI to hold flowing conversations, understand our intentions, take actions on our behalf, and—hopefully—be so helpful that we’ll keep our phones in our pockets.
Alexa+ will be free during its preview period, and it will remain free for Amazon Prime members; non-Prime folks will need to cough up $19.99 a month for Alexa+ access, equivalent to the entry-level subscription tiers for ChatGPT, Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude (the latter of which is among Alexa+’s under-the-hood LLM models).
But cost was never the issue with Alexa (the “classic” Alexa will remain free for everyone, by the way). Instead, it was that Alexa became more annoying than useful.
Here’s what the new AI Alexa needs to do to get us back on speaking terms.
Make it easy to control my smart home devices
Getting the old Alexa to reliably control anything in my smart home is a royal pain. Unless I know the exact name of the device, the name of the room it’s in, and the precise command for making it do what I want it to do, Alexa will frequently come back with “Sorry, I don’t understand” or the equivalent. (Again, Google Assistant and Siri are guilty of this, too.)
As a result, I don’t ask Alexa or any of my other smart speakers to adjust my lights, turn fans on, or switch the TV to the correct input. Instead, I use my phone.
What I want from the new Alexa is simple: to get what I mean when I say, “turn the lights up in here” or “turn on the TV,” and not just because I’ve hard-coded those phrases in an Alexa routine. I want Alexa+ to intuit my intentions—and if it can’t, to ask clear follow-up questions that don’t require me to fall back into “Alexa-speak.”
Amazon is promising this exact type of smart home performance with Alexa+, and if it delivers, I might start using Alexa to control my smart gadgets again.
Make playing tunes a breeze
We use our HomePod mini speakers for music on a daily basis, teeing up tracks by Steely Dan, Miles Davis, and (more often than not) Taylor Swift. But my family struggles to get Siri to play the right tunes (“No, play the album called Lover, not the song”), so I generally queue playlists using my phone. It’s just easier than arguing with a voice assistant.
The same goes for Alexa, which is partly why there’s only one Echo speaker left in our house (the others are in a cardboard box somewhere.) But what if Alexa+ could make it easier to ask for music rather than searching for it on an app? What if we could just say, “Alexa, play that song from The Hills” and it would know we meant “Unwritten” by Natasha Bendingfield? (That’s an actual question that came up the other night—and naturally, Siri played “The Hills” by the Weeknd instead.)
If Alexa+ could really make it easier to play the music we want, and where we want (don’t get me started about trying to get Alexa or Siri to move tunes from one room to another), then our exiled Echo speakers might come out of hiding to replace our HomePods.
Be truly helpful in the kitchen
Yes, Alexa can display recipes on an Echo Show display (Google Assistant can do something similar on a Nest Hub screen), but more often than not, I just print out the recipe for whatever I’m cooking and bring it to the kitchen. It’s just easier. Put another way, Alexa has never played a meaningful role as a cook’s companion, or at least not for me.
Now, I have had success using ChatGPT to help in the kitchen (“What can I substitute for sesame oil?”). but that requires pulling out a phone when I have sticky or raw-meat hands. I would really love the ability to say “Hey Alexa, I need a quick recipe for a vinaigrette dressing, can you whip one up for me? Give me the steps one at a time, and I don’t have red wine vinegar, but I do have mustard, olive oil, and balsamic,” and Alexa would just talk me through it.
Again, Amazon demonstrated this very capability during its Alexa+ presentation last month, even going further to show how Alexa could order groceries with a partnered retailer like Whole Foods. But to just have a conversation with Alexa about general cooking questions (“what’s the safe internal temperature for pork?”) without it saying “I don’t know the answer, but I can show you search results from the web” would be a major win. Heck, I might even leave my printer alone the next time I’m about to cook.
Answer my random questions
We’re a family with lots of questions about, well, everything (it’s the byproduct of having a 13-year-old daughter), but I always groan when someone asks, for example, “Alexa, what’s something cool to do in Baltimore?” Why? Because Alexa won’t know, or it will come up with a random answer, and then someone will inevitably tell Alexa to “shut up,” and it won’t, and then things get ugly.
A more conversational Alexa+ could help keep such random questions from devolving into shouting matches, with the ability to go back and forth, ask follow-ups for clarity, and deliver organized responses that are actually relevant and interesting. The advanced voice modes for the ChatGPT and Google Gemini apps can already do this, and summoning Alexa+ on an Echo speaker for such general questions would be even easier.
Of course, if Alexa+ could go ahead and do something based on our conversation—say, book one of those interesting activities it found in Baltimore—we’d really have something. And that leads me to my next point…
Take action on my behalf
One of the big points Amazon made during its big Alexa+ reveal is that unlike ChatGPT and Gemini, the new Alexa won’t just be stuck in a chatbox. Instead, it will actually be able to do things for you.
An example demonstrated during Amazon’s event was how Alexa+ could help find a nearby carpet cleaner who uses organic materials, book an appointment, and put it in your calendar. Done and done.
Here’s another example from real life: I’m using ChatGPT to help me find affordable real estate in New York City. (Cue the laughter.) But while ChatGPT has been reasonably effective at zeroing in on listings that fit our criteria, it’s useless when it comes to proactively scouting for and notifying me about new properties on the market, and it can’t do squat about booking viewings.
But if I could have a daily chat with Alexa+ about my real estate ambitions, or if it could chime in when it learns of an enticing open house and put it on my calendar, or even fill in a real estate agent’s web form, that would be cool.
Amazon has been touting Alexa+’s skills as an AI agent, and it can supposedly fill in web forms on its own, so the kind of functionality I’m talking about here is theoretically possible. I’m eager to see it in practice.
Stop interrupting me
How many times has Alexa, or Google Assistant, or Siri just started talking out of nowhere? Sometimes I’ll just be sitting in the kitchen and I’ll hear Alexa nattering away in my daughter’s empty bedroom, or Siri will jump in with an “mmm hmm?” because it thought it heard someone say “Siri.”
Part of the reason we tucked away most of our Alexa speakers (and I’m tempted to mute the microphones on our remaining Google Assistant and Siri devices) is that they’re constantly talking out of turn, butting in on conversations, and replying to phantom queries.
What I’m hoping is that the new AI Alexa is smart enough not to jump in every time it thinks it hears the “Alexa” wake word—or if it does accidentally speak up, that it gracefully cedes the floor when we say, “Not talking to you, Alexa.” Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 13 Mar (Stuff.co.nz) He had already lost his licence on four separate occasions, but says his girlfriend did not want to be late for work so he drove her despite being forbidden just four days prior. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 13 Mar (PC World)As a fully remote worker, I love being able to take my work laptop to the coffee shop, the beach, or even my own backyard. The one thing I hate, though, is relying on a single screen when working. It frustrates my productivity because I generally bounce between multiple apps.
That’s why I love portable monitors! It’s the solution to every on-the-go worker who needs more screen real estate. And right now, this 15.6-inch MNN portable monitor is on sale for $60. That’s a hefty 33% discount off its original $90 price and the lowest we’ve ever seen it.
This thing has a beautiful 15.6-inch IPS display with 1080p resolution, able to deliver vibrant colors, great contrast, and excellent color accuracy. It’s widely compatible, too, with two USB-C video ports and a Mini HDMI port. Whether you hook it up to your laptop, smartphone, tablet, or handheld gaming console, it’ll perform beautifully.
Trust me, you’ll appreciate how nice it is to have an extra screen with you everywhere you take your laptop. It’s not even heavy, weighing 1.5 pounds and measuring 0.3 inches thick. You can slip it into your bag right next to your laptop and not notice it at all. It also comes with a smart cover that both protects the screen and serves as a kickstand.
You need a portable monitor, don’t you? It’s one of those things that you may hesitate on for a while — until you finally get one and wonder how you ever lived without it. Jump on this chance to get this MNN portable monitor for the cheapest it’s been on Amazon.
This portable laptop monitor is an absolute bargain for $60Buy now at Amazon Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 12 Mar (Stuff.co.nz) It is the second time inside for the colourful former real estate agent and one-time `Voice of Speedway`. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | RadioNZ - 12 Mar (RadioNZ) The number of Americans checking out homes for sale in New Zealand has surged since US President Donald Trump returned to office. Read...Newslink ©2025 to RadioNZ |  |
|  | | Stuff.co.nz - 12 Mar (Stuff.co.nz) The employee, who worked at a real estate firm for 17 years, funnelled tenants` bond money into a “ghost account” used to pay her personal expenses. Read...Newslink ©2025 to Stuff.co.nz |  |
|  | | PC World - 8 Mar (PC World)If you’re still rocking a 1080p desktop monitor, I think it’s time to upgrade. At 27 inches, a 1440p display gives you almost twice the screen real estate in terms of pixels while still being comfy enough for day-to-day use. Today, you can get Acer’s take with upgraded IPS panel for just $109.99 at Best Buy. That’s a smooth $90 off.
This is definitely a budget screen, so it’s not going to blow anybody away for gaming or video. But with that upgraded resolution and IPS panel, it’s perfect for office work or as a multi-monitor upgrade next to a bigger, fancier monitor. You do get two HDMI ports and a DisplayPort, but no USB extras so it’s not a natural companion for a laptop or tablet. It does include a standard VESA mount for a monitor arm… and you should probably do that because the plastic stand doesn’t impress.
As one Best Buy customer and a SlickDeals poster points out, the listed “100Hz” refresh rate might not be what you actually get in the box. It looks like there are multiple versions of the Acer KA272U monitor, some with 100Hz and others with 75Hz. Frankly, that’s not going to make a huge difference — this kind of budget display isn’t really ideal for gaming anyway — but it’s worth noting.
If you’re looking for a gaming monitor, this Acer Nitro monitor has a much speedier 180Hz IPS panel but compromises with 1080p resolution.
Save 45% on Acer`s 27-inch 1440p IPS monitorBuy now from Best Buy Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
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