December 2015

Google Chrome, just like all other modern web browsers, offers to save account information, usually a set of data consisting of an url, a username and password, locally in a database.

Chrome users may block this from happening, which can be useful if they use a third-party password manager or prefer to use a browser independent solution that runs as a local program only.

Chrome may sync passwords with the cloud if users are signed in to a Google account in the browser, something which Google calls "Smart Lock for Passwords".

A former Winamp employee revealed on the official Winamp forum that a new version of the popular music player will be released in early 2016.

It looked like Winamp would be a thing of the past in 2013 when AOL announced that it would shut down the service. The company changed its mind shortly thereafter, and sold all Winamp assets -- including the popular Shoutcast platform -- to Radionomy.

Microsoft announced some time ago that it made the decision to limit OneDrive storage for many paying and all free customers of the service.

Basically, it made the decision to limit paying customers to 1TB of storage instead of unlimited storage, paid OneDrive plans from 100GB or 200GB to 50GB, and free plans from 15GB to 5GB.

A recent The Intercept article reveals that Microsoft is storing device encryption keys in the cloud under certain circumstances automatically.

Device Encryption is a built-in encryption feature that became first available with Microsoft's Windows 8 operating system. The core difference between Device Encryption and Bitlocker is that Bitlocker is configurable while Device Encryption is not.

Expire history by days is a free add-on for the Firefox web browser that adds a new option to the browser that enables you to have it clear the browser history automatically based on a set number of days that you specify.

Microsoft is doing what it can to reach the goal of 1 billion Windows 10 devices two to three years after the release of the operating system.

Latest figures, which are not yet confirmed by Microsoft, suggest that more than 200 million devices are running Microsoft's new operating system Windows 10 at the end of December 2015.

That's a jump of about 80 million devices from the previously reported figure of 120 million devices two months ago.

All in all, since its release five months ago, Windows 10 has founds its way on more than 200 million devices.

Kaspersky Virus Removal Tool is a free on-demand virus scanner for the Windows operating system designed to remove virus threats from machines running Windows.

Since it is an on-demand scanner, it does not offer any protection against future malware attacks on the system which makes it a suitable program to remove existing malware from PCs or to check systems to make sure they are clean and not infected.

The application itself is portable and requires no installation. You can run it right after you have downloaded the 90 Megabyte file to the local system.

Stock images are used a lot on the Internet, especially on news sites. Most news sites that I visit frequently don't use their own images at all anymore or only occasionally, and it is usually easy enough to spot the use of stock images on those sites.

I do think that original images add to the uniqueness of an article, and prefer to use self-created screenshots or images whenever possible.

But that is not the only situation where you may encounter stock images. If you use image search engines, chance is you will stumble upon stock images as well.

Microsoft Marketing Chief Chris Capossela joined the Windows Weekly team this week for a questions and answers session covering HoloLens, Windows 10, Surface 4 and other Microsoft related questions.

One question touched Microsoft's upgrade push on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 systems, and the fact that the company's methods to get users to upgrade to Windows 10 have become more aggressive.

Whenever you connect with a program to an Internet resource, a web browser to a website for instance, information are revealed to the server hosting the resource.

That's automatic, and often not the only thing happening. If that site loads resources from other servers, they too gain information, and depending on what is running on the site and supported by the browser, additional information may be revealed.