March 2015

Yahoo announced the launch of the a new on-demand password feature today in the United States. If you have a US IP you get the new on-demand passwords options under account security in the Yahoo! account settings.

To enable it click on the get started link. This takes you to an information prompt highlighting how the feature works.

I prefer subtitles over dubbing when it comes to video productions. The core reason for this is that the original version is usually the best and that dubbing on top of that may break scenes or the entire movie.

I don't want Japanese Samurai to speak German for example. Subtitles are on the other hand not always provided with movies. If you take retail releases for example, you may get a couple of subtitles depending on the region you live in but that is only the case if it is released officially in the country you are living in.

Up until now I ran the excellent F.Lux application on my Windows PC to help me sleep better and adjust to the monitor brightness better.

The program adjusts the screen of the computer to be more natural to the eye. Instead of being bright all day and night long, it changes the screen throughout the day to take the natural day night cycle into account.

Depending on where you live, you may be required to unlock your device when authorities ask you to do so. While you could deny that request, you could end up with a hefty fine and jail time as a consequence.

There may also be situations where you are not asked nicely to hand over the unlock code of your phone, but are pressured to do so.

Privacy Lock is an Android application that allows you to add actions to unlock codes that are executed when they are used.

While it is usually not necessary to look up information about connected storage devices regularly on a computer, doing so can sometimes reveal important information that help you troubleshoot issues.

SSD-Z is a lightweight portable program for Windows that reveals a bunch of information about each connected disk device.

While the name hints at it being optimized for Solid State Drives in particular, it displays information about platter-based hard drives, removable devices and even optical drives as well.

System optimization tools and apps are fairly popular on desktop PCs but also on mobile devices. They promise to free up space, memory or remove privacy-related information from the device they run on.

Avira Android Optimizer is a new application for Android by Avira that can be best described as a system optimizer as it includes various options to clean and optimize the system.

More than one third of encrypted Websites are open to attack via the FREAK security hole.

The browser extension uBlock so far has only been available for desktop devices. The extension was released for Chromium-based browsers first and then later on for Firefox as well.

Today, a version for Firefox on Android has been released that users of the browser can install to get the same blocking functionality as on the desktop.

Google has rolled out a new feature in Chrome Beta on Android, currently on version 42, that changes the link sharing functionality in the browser significantly.

You may know that you can share links in Chrome relatively easily. If you open the browser and tap on the three dots next to the url, you get the main menu of the browser which includes a share entry.

When you tap on it, Chrome asks you to pick a service that you want to share the url with. Available are installed applications, for instance Gmail, Twitter, Facebook or Pushbullet.

A new version of the popular web browser Pale Moon has been released. Pale Moon 25.3 is a feature and performance upgrade for the browser that fixes several security issues in addition to that.

The developers have removed several features in Pale Moon that are an integral part of Firefox but not used in Pale Moon. Probably the biggest feature that is removed in Pale Moon 25.3 is the Crash Reporter which is used by Mozilla to receive reports about browser crashes when enabled.