December 2015

GWX Stopper is a free program for the Windows operating system that's been designed to block the upgrade to Windows 10 prompt on machines running previous versions of Windows.

Microsoft makes it quite difficult to stay on older versions of the Windows operating system thanks to the way upgrade offers are distributed and displayed on those systems.

Microsoft announced yesterday that it made the decision to improve the browsing experience of users on its Windows platforms by changing its adware policies in regards to those techniques.

Adware is without doubt a big problem on desktop computers running Windows. While there are different types of adware available, from programs that display advertisement to the user in their interface to programs that modify core system or program settings, or inject themselves into programs or connections.

Mozilla, maker of the popular Firefox web browser, aims to integrate the first stable release of WebExtensions in Firefox 48.

The organization announced back in August 2015 that it would make fundamental changes to the add-on development process in Firefox. At the core of the change is a focus on WebExtensions, a new API Mozilla is working on to make it easier for developers to create cross-platform extensions, and to reduce the time it takes to review extensions before they are published on Mozilla's official add-on repository.

I'm following the UK's fight against porn on the Internet with fascination as it highlights how ideologists use something that everyone can agree on (protect children) to censor the Internet.

If you are not living in the UK you may not have heard about it, or only read about the initiative in passing.

A filtering program is applied to customers of major Internet Service Providers in the UK since the end of 2013 either automatically or on customer request.

The Firefox web browser displays a "search with" or "visit" entry as the first suggestion whenever you type something in Firefox's address bar.

The suggestion depends on what is being typed as well as the Firefox bookmarks and browsing history. If a web address is the first match "visit" is displayed while "search with" is suggested whenever an url is not the first match.

Facebook announced on December 18, 2015 that it made the decision to switch from a Flash-based video player on Facebook to a HTML5-based media player.

The company will use its HTML5 video player "for all Facebook web video surfaces" including videos on news feeds, pages, and in the Facebook embedded video player. Videos embedded directly from other sites, such as YouTube, use the HTML5 video player by default as well on Facebook.

Electrolysis, or multi-process Firefox, is without doubt one of the biggest projects ever for the Firefox development team.

The main idea behind the project is to separate browser code from website content by separating them using multiple processes. Security features such as sandboxing may be implemented at a later point in time as they rely on multi-process Firefox.

Microsoft's new operating system, released on July 29, 2015, has been available for nearly five months at the time of writing.

It is offered as a free upgrade on systems running Windows 7 or Windows 8.1, and available as a standalone retail copy or installed on retail PCs.

Adoption rates are good but not excellent. Microsoft revealed adoption figures sporadically only, last time in October 2015 during Microsoft's Devices Event when it mentioned that Windows 10 was driving 110 million consumer and Enterprise PCs.

Proxmate, the web unblocking service that enables you to access geo-restricted content on the Internet, revealed the service's subscription costs on the newly launched website.

The service, which was provided for free previously as a browser add-on for Firefox and Chrome based web browsers, announced in October that it would discontinue the free offer and turn into a subscription service instead.

Microsoft EMET 5.5 Beta, the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit created by Microsoft, is now available for download for all supported operating systems.

The program, designed to mitigate exploits that slipped by system defenses, has been designed as a security tool that blocks exploits from being carried out successfully on machines running Windows.