August 2015

One common trend in software development in the past couple of years seems to be to streamline products and remove options in the process.

We see this in most tech products this day, be it browsers or operating systems. Windows 10 is a good example as it is more restrictive than previous versions of Windows when it comes to user choice and options.

If you cannot connect to the Internet or another device on a network when you start Windows or change the system's network state, then it may have DHCP issues.

Without going into too many details, DHCP enables devices such as routers or servers to assign IP addresses to computer systems connecting to the network.

If that fails, for whatever reason, connection errors may occur.

A friend of mine ran into a issue recently after making changes to the Windows Registry. The computer would not boot anymore and since there was no System Restore or backup available to restore the system to a previous state, another solution had to be found.

While re-installing the same operating system would have worked, it is often not an efficient solution.

Before you consider doing that, you may want to try other options first. You may use various tools for instance to edit the Windows Registry without loading Windows first.

AdwCleaner is a handy program for the Windows operating system that you can use to detect and remove adware or traces of adware on computer systems. While that's its main purpose, it ships with a selection of tools that help you reset changes made to the system by adware.

AdwCleaner 5.000 improves the program in several ways without sacrificing its core functionality along the way.

I have the habit of hovering over links in web browsers I'm using to look at the linked url before I click. While I don't do that for all links I'm interested in, I do this 100% of the time for critical links, e.g. those pointing to financial resources and services that I have an account at.

Most browsers use some sort of preloading or precaching to speed up the connection and sometimes even the loading process in the browser.

Networking monitoring can be an eye opener in regards to network connections of programs that run on a computer system.

I started to monitor network connections closely recently and decided to take a closer look at some popular programs installed on a Windows test machine to check if they'd phone home automatically.

If you are running the Firefox Developer Edition on desktop or Firefox Aurora on Android, you may have noticed a couple of changes after today's update.

Mozilla added several features to those pre-beta versions of Firefox that were previously only available in Nighly builds of the web browser.

Electrolysis, Firefox's upcoming multi-process system is advertised on first run right away. Users receive a prompt about it and may enable it in Firefox Dev if they want to.

While things look as if they are on track for Microsoft in regards to the rapid distribution of its new operating system Windows 10 -- the company wants to push it on a billion devices in the next few years -- things are heating up in regards to privacy.

Firefox 40 was released on Tuesday and the release of an update shortly afterwards is usually a good indicator that something went terribly wrong and needs fixing immediately.

The organization published release notes for Firefox 40.0.1 shortly after release of Firefox 40 to the stable channel. It pulled the release notes shortly thereafter again, and published release notes for Firefox 40.0.2 instead.

Windows 10 users can modify the operating system's privacy settings manually, for instance by disabling express setup during installation or upgrade, or by exploring the Privacy section of the new Settings application.

While it gives them full control over each setting, it requires prior knowledge of these settings and time to make the changes.

Privacy tools help users in this regard but may limit the control these users have over what is happening in the background depending on how the tool works.