Many people don't know they are eligible for complimentary Microsoft software and services. You can help spread the word to ensure that people in your community are making the best of what's available to them.
Not-for-profit donations
Microsoft and many other suppliers offer technology donations through TechSoup. Microsoft has donated more than $19,000,000 worth of technology to NZ nonprofits through this programme.
Software startups
Microsoft's BizSpark programme provides complimentary software, cloud services and access to a community of partners around the world who are involved in supporting software-fuelled innovation and the next generation of technology entrepreneurs.
Anti-virus software
For home users and small businesses, Microsoft Security Essentials is a complimentary download from Microsoft that is simple to install, easy to use, and is automatically updated to protect Windows PCs with the latest anti-malware technology.
Māori language packs
Complimentary Māori language packs are available for Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office are available to translate commonly-used features, giving people the choice to use the technology in a language that is familiar.
With compliments
Microsoft offers a number of services free of charge to help people live and work a little smarter. Here’s a quick overview of technology to make life a little simpler and more fun. More than a million Kiwis use at least one of these services, and you'll probably find something that's useful for you and your community.
Protect your online safety
For Cyber-Safety Awareness Week this year, we featured top tips to help you keep safer and more secure online.
It’s Privacy Awareness Week in New Zealand from Sunday 29 April.
Privacy on the Internet is something that a lot of people are interested in, but there are few simple explanations of the issues.
In this article I’d like to explain a bit about how your activity on the Internet is tracked, and what you can do about it.
Web Tracking
When you look at a website, it’s quite usual for your web browser to automatically communicate with several other websites at the same time. For example, the site you want to look at might also connect to social networking sites, show advertising from other sites, and use third-party analytics to profile you.
Here’s a simplified diagram to show how a tracking and advertising company might build a profile based on your activity tracked across multiple websites.
Like the example in the diagram, most of this is quite benign. Maybe you want to see the highest bidder’s most relevant camera advertisements.
But if you’re like me, you may prefer that it just doesn’t happen.
Tracking Protection
Tracking protection puts you in control of websites that try to track you.
And it’s really simple. Privacy advocates and other experts have put together ready-made lists of sites so you can minimise unwanted web tracking without losing any part of the website that you actually want to see.
EasyList is a popular choice. If you're using Internet Explorer 9, just click the link and choose "Add List".
Tracking Protection stops the unwanted tracking sites from having any contact with you, so they simply can’t see what you’re doing on the Internet.
If you use multiple computers, tracking Protection needs to be enabled on each one.
Microsoft has proposed it as a web standard, and we hope other web browsers will also adopt this technology to enhance your privacy on the Internet. You can see the tracking protection options offered by the main web browsers here.
Article by Waldo Kuipers, Corporate Affairs Manager, Microsoft New Zealand Limited