November 2014

Detekt is a free tool for computers and devices running Windows operating systems that scans for traces of surveillance spyware on the system.

Designed to provide journalists and human rights activists with a program to detect potential surveillance spyware on computer systems, it can be downloaded and used by anyone running Windows computers.

Mozilla announced yesterday that it ended its 10 year long partnership with Google which made Google Search the default search engine in the Firefox web browser.

Instead of signing up a global agreement with Google or another partner, the organization decided to work with regional partners instead.

Google Search has been the default search engine of the browser for the past years with Google paying Mozilla money for that privilege.

While Mozilla put the money from the deal to good use, it made it dependent on that money at the same time.

Ever since the deal was announced (first back in 2004) I had a major concern: that Mozilla became too dependent on Google and that Google would not renew the deal.

While cloud services like Dropbox, Google Drive or OneDrive are immensely popular, there is also a market for individuals and companies who don't want data to be stored on third-party servers.

The recent development of the tablet market is quite interesting. Once hailed as devices that will make PCs obsolete its market is showing signs of a slow down. Even Apple's tablets are not selling like hot cookies anymore.

Two new tablets were announced this week and both are related to Nokia in one way or the other. First the Nokia N1 tablet which Nokia revealed yesterday and then the Jolla tablet, designed by former Nokia employees.

Privacy is probably the number one reason why you may not want others to access your computer. It does not really matter if you want to protect your browsing history, financial documents, photos that you have taken or a book you are writing on.

Sometimes, others may want to access your computer, for instance to look something up, do something of importance (that eBay auction is running for just a couple more minutes), or simply show you something.

Google Safe Browsing maintains a list of files, sites and pages that the company has flagged as malicious. The product has been in use in the company's own Chrome browser for some time and recently implemented in the Firefox web browser as well.

While private browsing is mostly associated with browsing the naughty parts of the Internet it can be used for a wide variety of other things as well.

Private browsing refers to a mode that web browsers offer that leave little traces behind. This means that no browsing history is recorded and that data is only stored temporarily for the browsing session and deleted afterwards.

Microsoft released fourteen security bulletins last week on this month's patch day. If you read the patch notes or our summary, you may have noticed that two bulletins were mentioned but not released on that day.

It is unclear why the two bulletins were listed by Microsoft but not released on the day. One explanation for this is that the company needed more time to create patches for affected systems.

It is quite easy to fill up hard drives or partitions with data. This is true for Solid State Drives which are blazing fast but don't come close to the storage that platter-based hard drives offer but also for traditional hard drives.

Programs such as CCleaner or the native Windows tool Disk Cleanup help somewhat by offering to remove temporary data or data that is usually not needed from the system to free up disk space.