March 2016

The results of this year's Pwn2Own security contest are in and things are not looking good for Windows and Apple OS X, the browsers Safari, Edge and Chrome, and Adobe Flash as they have all been pwned by participating security teams.

Firefox was not part of the 2016 contest because it has not "made serious security improvements in the last year" according to Brian Gorenc, manager of Vulnerability Research at HPE, which sponsored the 2016 event together with TrendMicro.

Diffractor is a free program for devices running Microsoft Windows operating systems that assists you in the organization of photos and videos.

You can use it to add tags, locations or other attributes quickly to media files for instance, or rate media using the program's slideshow functionality.

Diffractor will scan default Windows locations such as the Pictures, Videos or Download folder by default but you can add custom locations to the program in the settings.

Veeam Endpoint Backup Free 1.5 is a new version of the backup program for the Windows operating system.

The program has come far since the release of the first beta version, and version 1.5 of it introduces a batch of new features that make it even more interesting than before.

But first, it is required that you create an account on the site before you are allowed to download the free backup program to your system.

Heads up Ixquick users, the company behind the popular search engine announced today that it will merge the search engine with the company's other big search engine, StartPage.

What it means, basically, is that Ixquick will serve the same search results that StartPage provides.

According to the announcement on the official website, this is done in light of changing market conditions, and to combine the two products into one that is more powerful.

Tripmode is a commercial program for Windows and Mac devices that can be used to block all traffic on the device in a comfortable easy manner.

While you could say that most software and hardware firewalls allow you to do the same,  none make the process that easy.

Basically, all you need to do is flip a switch to enable the traffic blocking mode. All traffic is blocked from that moment on, and it is up to you to allow certain applications or system services to connect to Internet servers.

SABnzbd 1.0 is the latest version of the popular binary newsreader. The version change may come as a surprise to existing users as the last was 0.7.11 and everyone expected 0.8 to be the next version.

The developers of the application decided to switch to 1.0.0 instead "in order to start using a common release numbering method".

The new version of the program ships with several improvements and feature additions, but also a few changes that users need to be aware of.

Microsoft shipped build 14291 of Windows 10 to the Fast Ring insider channel a few hours ago, and with it an update for the system's default browser Microsoft Edge that introduces initial support for extensions.

The version of Microsoft Edge that is available on stable builds of Windows 10, does not support extensions currently but Microsoft plans to change that this year by integrating an extensions engine to Edge that is very similar to that of Google Chrome.

A recent security analysis of OEM laptops running Windows 10 by Duo Security Inc concluded that all analyzed devices had privacy and network protocol related issues.

The seven laptops, produced by Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer, shared many of the privacy and security issues, while some laptops had additional issues caused by installed OEM software.

The team looked at the network traffic that each device produced, and noticed -- among other findings -- the following:

HTTPS Checker is a free program for Windows that provides you with the means to scan all pages of a website for HTTPS related issues.

Rolling out HTTPS on an established site has become a lot easier in recent time. While that is the case, it still very important to make sure that the implementation does not cause any issues such as duplicate content, mixed content warnings or certificate validation issues as it can backfire if that is the case.

LastPass Authenticator is a new mobile application by the makers of LastPass for Google Android, Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS devices to generate 2-factor authentication codes for the software and other programs.

2-Factor authentication is one option to improve the protection of accounts. It has been supported by LastPass for a while but relied mostly on third-party authentication applications and services such as Google Authenticator, YubiKey or Authy to power the functionality.