August 2014

Zenmate was rated one of the best Chrome VPN recently by us. While it is used by many to access geo-restricted contents, it is adding other VPN-specific features to it as well that include encrypting traffic and hiding the computer's IP address.

The company behind the extension has released an Android application called ZenMate Security & Privacy VPN which brings a similar feature set to Android devices.

When Google started to push out 64-bit versions of Chrome to its Dev and Canary channels in June for the Windows operating system, it was not clear at first if the company had the intention to offer it permanently to users of the browser.

Dubbed an experiment back then, it complemented the 64-bit versions of Chrome available for Mac and Linux systems.

When the 64-bit version hit the beta channel of the browser, it was clear that a version for the stable channel was on its way as well.

While things have improved significantly in recent time in regards to sharing large files or folders with others, it is still far from what many would call easy to setup.

Lets say you want to share a folder full of high resolution photos of your last summer vacation. Email won't work because the photos are too large. You could upload them to a photo hosting site like Flickr and share them this way, but this would require an account on your part and maybe also for anyone wanting to view the photos if you don't want to make them available publicly.

When Mozilla announced that it would add so-called Directory Tiles to Firefox, it was heavily criticized for it even though most users of the browser won't come into contact with the feature often if at all.

While you can criticize the choice of name, as sponsored tiles would make more sense here, it is not a feature that plasters ads all over the Firefox browser in an effort to make money.

When you open the Windows Task Manager using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Esc, a mighty list of processes running on the system is presented to you (note: in Windows 8, this is only the case if you expand the manager first).

While that is helpful in determining what is running on the system or to kill a process that is no longer required, it is often difficult to tell if a process is safe or not.

Firewalls are an important layer of defense for computer systems. While that is the case, most can be rather scary when it comes to understand what is going on and what to do.

That's why the majority of firewalls these days come with configurations that require little user attention. The same is true for network monitors, only that they are not that commonly used on home PCs.

When Microsoft released its Windows 8 operating system with a store component everything looked great on first glance. Since Microsoft would review all apps before they were made available to users, malicious or deceiving apps should not be an issue.

In mid-2013 I ran a story about how apps deceive users in either paying money for something that they are not, ride on the bandwagon of popular software, or simply embed websites of third-party services.

Japanese is a language that I really want to learn. While I have started some courses, I could not really convince myself to complete them because of how they were laid out and other issues such as participants already knowing the basics while I had to spend day after day trying to memorize the two syllabic scripts hiragana and katakana as well as kanji.

Update: The developers have added an option to the extension to disable the tracking. You find it on the options page when you click on "show Advanced Option". Here you can disable Enable non-personal,anonymous usage statistics to do so.

When extension developers want to make money from their popular extensions, they have only a few options to do so. They can ask for donations, offer a paid version, integrate a third-party monetization module in the app, or sell it to the highest bidder.

Skype displays the list of contacts in its interface on desktop computer systems. Here you see each contacts status, can add contacts to the favorites, or view a person's profile for additional information.

There is however no option to display information about all contacts in list form. While you see all handles in Skype, other information become only available for individual contacts you select.