April 2015

When you search for software downloads currently on Google, for instance for Firefox, VLC or Google Chrome, then ads may be displayed to you before the organic search results.

The problem with this is that advertisers were free to buy spots regardless of their relation with the software.

This led to situations where users were redirected to third-party sites that had nothing to do with the original project.

VeraCrypt is a TrueCrypt fork that came to life after the original TrueCrypt project was abandoned by its developers.

It is not the only fork of TrueCrypt -- Ciphershed is another -- but one that receives regular updates.

The company behind the password manager Dashlane introduced a new service earlier today that scans your email inbox for sensitive information to inform you about them

Sometimes, passwords or other sensitive information may be sent over email. This may be a regular occurrence at work for example depending on policies there but happens as well when you request a new password to be sent to an account's primary email address.

Hush is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that adds password protected bookmarks to the browser's private browsing mode.

Private browsing is Firefox's name for a special mode of the browser in which most data that is usually written to the local system is not.

This includes cookies or the browsing history for example which are not available after the private browsing session is exited.

Spell checkers are useful tools that highlight spelling mistakes automatically while you write or manually if you prefer it that way.

Most compare what you write to dictionary words and highlight all words that are not in that dictionary.

Browsers, word processors, email and messaging clients, and other tools ship with built-in spell checkers that are only active when these programs are used.

Most web browsers ship with keyboard shortcuts that you can use to cycle through tabs or access specific tabs that are open in the browser right away.

On Windows, the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Tab is used by the majority of browsers to cycle through tabs from left to right. If you add Shift to the shortcut, tabs are cycled in reverse instead.

Opera, the new version, supported that feature as well up until now.

The most recent Developer version of the browser, version 30, ships with a modification that Opera Software calls a "real tab cycler".

Yahoo! Search Alerts is was a Google Alerts alternative for Yahoo users. The service provided you with tools to monitor search keywords in Yahoo's engine and receive notifications when new websites or pages were added to Yahoo Search.

Unlike Google Alerts, Yahoo! Search Alerts supported only email notifications and not RSS notification options.

Google introduced autoplay recently on YouTube to the effect that new videos are started automatically on the video hosting and streaming website once the previous video ends.

It is unclear why Google introduced the feature but it could have something to do with displaying more ads to users visiting the site considering that advertisements are displayed at the beginning of videos usually on YouTube.

Whenever you visit a web page on the Internet one of two things can happen in regards to the color scheme used by it: the site may use its own color scheme to paint foreground and background colors as well as link and visited link colors, or Firefox's default color scheme may be used.

While that is usually not a problem, you may sometimes encounter websites that use color schemes that don't work for you.

Root certificates are one core building block of today's Internet. They are used to verify connections and a list of trusted certificates ships with operating systems such as Windows which makes them more trustworthy than certificates added to the operating system by third-parties.