December 2016

Macrorit Disk Partition Free 4.0.0 is out; the latest version of the free disk partitioning software comes with an option to create bootable media to partition and manage hard drives and storage devices on system boot without loading an operating system first.

The free version of the application for Windows works as you would expect it to work. You start it up and it pulls all drives connected to the device on start. You may need to run it with elevated privileges by right-clicking on the dm.exe executable file and selecting run as administrator though.

Ransim is a ransomware simulator for Windows that simulates attacks of ten ransomware families against the computer system.

Ransomware is without doubt a relatively new threat category that has gained some prominence in recent time.

Security companies have added ransomware protection to their tools as a response, or released standalone programs with the aim to block ransomware from encrypting files on a computer system.

OpenVPN 2.4.0 is the latest version of the cross-platform SSL VPN that enables you to create security point-to-point or site-to-site connections.

The new version expands on the capabilities introduced in OpenVPN 2.3, namely full IPv6 support and PolarSSL support.

OpenVPN is a major update of the software that features a large number of new features, improvements and changes.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are trending right now, and chance is good that more and more devices will come to market that may make things easier on the one hand, but may cause privacy issues on the other.

You don't have to look further than at smart home devices that listen to your commands to provide you with information or assistance in controlling various other gadgets or parameters such as the heating.

Tiny Hot Corners for Windows 10 is a free lightweight program for Windows 10 that brings GNOME's hot corner functionality to Windows.

The author of the program Tavis Ormandy, whom you may know from his security research on various Windows programs, missed the hot corner functionality of GNOME whenever he worked on a device running Windows 10.

He did some research on the topic, but noticed rather quickly that none of the existing solutions offered what he was looking for. All used lots of resources or were overblown according to him.

Blackbird is another Windows privacy, performance and security tool in the seemingly unlimited arsenal of these tools that is been designed to improve user privacy on Windows machines.

Privacy tools come in all flavors; from one-click scripts to sophisticated programs that list dozens or even hundreds of settings for you to tweak and adjust.

The most recent version of WordPress ships with new REST API capabilities which plugins, apps, services, or the WordPress core can utilize.

The WordPress development team pushes new features to WordPress all the time. Many of those features improve the functionality of WordPress significantly.

Every now and then though, features get added that are problematic from an admin or user point of view.  The main issue with the bulk of these changes is that they cannot be disabled easily. I have disabled Emojis and XML-RPC here on this site for instance.

HandBrake 1.0.0, a new version of the popular open source cross-platform video converter, was released on December 24, 2016.

I reviewed HandBrake for the first time in the year 2007 here on ComTek4u as a program to convert video DVDs. The program is capable of more than that however. Basically, what it allows you to do is convert any input video file or DVD / Blu-Ray video source that is not copy protected, to the file container formats mp4 or mkv.

If you follow tech news sites you may have read pieces already on how Microsoft's Chief Marketing Officer, Chris Capossela explained on the Windows Weekly 497 videocast that the company is aware of that it went too far with pushing Windows 10 upgrades to customer systems.

Keybinder is an add-on for the Firefox web browser that enables you to change, reset, or disable any keyboard shortcut in the browser.

Certain keyboard shortcuts may get in your way when you use the browser. This is in my case for instance the case for Ctrl-B which opens the Bookmarks window.

Ghacks is powered by WordPress, and one keyboard shortcut of the WordPress editor is Ctrl-B; it bolds the selected text automatically which is usually faster than moving the mouse to the B-icon and clicking on it.