October 2015

Yahoo announced today the roll-out of new mobile versions of the company's Mail application that introduce new features such as multi-mailbox management and password-less sign-ins among other things.

The company launched on-demand passwords earlier this year which allowed Yahoo users to sign-in to their accounts using their username and a mobile phone number they have linked to the account previously.

Instead of entering passwords during sign-in to the account, users received a one-time password as a text message sent to their mobile phone.

Reports are coming in that Windows 10 upgrades seem to be enforced on some systems without users explicitly giving permissions beforehand to download and install the upgrade to Microsoft's newest operating system.

Google announced two days ago that the decision was made to replace the mixed content security icon in the company's Chrome web browser with the icon that is used for HTTP connections.

One of the main issues that website administrators run into in regards to enabling HTTPS on their sites is to ensure that all content is delivered via HTTPS.

Microsoft revealed in 2014 that it plans to end support for older versions of its Internet Explorer web browser starting January 12, 2016.

The company will only support the most recent version of Internet Explorer for supported versions of the Windows operating system, Windows Server and Windows embedded systems from January 2016 on.

Older versions will no longer receive technical support or security updates once the new policy goes live in January 2016

Internet Explorer supported versions as of January 12, 2016

Google announced today that it will remove the Notification Center that is part of Google Chrome from the browser in the upcoming release of the web browser.

One of the first things I did whenever I installed Chrome on a system was to disable notifications since I did not find them particularly useful. Quite the contrary, I found them irritating most of the time and never had any use for them on the desktop.

The same is true actually for mobile devices as well as I prefer not to receive constant streams of updates as I find the feature invasive and distracting.

I like to type URLs directly whenever possible, and do so especially on sites like Reddit that use a common scheme for all URLs on the site.

It happens that I mistype an address and hit enter which often results in a not found error page on those sites and sometimes may result in the wrong page being opened.

Chrome and Firefox remember every address that you enter and load manually in the web browser. That's often helpful as it means less typing when you want to open the site again in the future.

While there are certain categories of Windows Updates that I would call mandatory to install, security patches come to mind first and foremost, there are other updates that are not required to operate the system or beneficial to it.

Microsoft revealed recently that Windows Store is on a serious upswing thanks to the company's Windows 10 operating system which accounts for more than 50% of all store downloads.

Windows Store will be the universal location for Windows devices to download apps. First introduced on the desktop with the release of Windows 8, it failed to impress the then largely desktop-focused Windows audience.

Voice & Audio Activity is a feature of Google History that Google users can access to list and listen to voice recordings that they have sent to Google.

While I'm not actively trying to convince others that privacy is important and should not be neglected, it is often difficult to convince others when the topic is discussed.

One of the better ways in my opinion is to point users at services on the Internet that display usage data they have collected about users.

The Microsoft Patch overview for October 2015 provides you with detailed information about security and non-security patches and advisories that Microsoft released in the past 30 days for Microsoft Windows and other company products.

The executive summary offers a quick overview of the updates released this month. What follows are information about operating systems and other Microsoft products that patches got released for.