July 2017

AMP is a controversial technology by Google with the aim to speed up the loading time of websites on mobile devices. It is criticized both by users and publishers, for instance for making it difficult to access the original content, for caching sites on Google properties so that the Google URL is shown and not the publishers, or for making it difficult to share the original link.

Google pushes AMP content heavily in search which is probably the main reason why many publishers make use of AMP right now.

The warning "Disable developer mode extensions" is displayed in Chrome when you install non Chrome Web Store extensions in the browser.

This warning is displayed on each start of the browser, and it stays on the screen until you hit one of the available buttons (disable or cancel).

Google stated that it displays the warning because of malware that force-installed extensions to Chrome.

Microsoft announced a while ago that it plans to release two feature updates for its Windows 10 operating system per year.

This year -- 2017 -- saw the release of the Windows 10 Creators Update back in March, and will see the release of the Fall Creators Update in September/October (anyone wondering if Microsoft will keep the names of the updates linked to each other in the coming years?).

OneDrive users who have picked a non-NTFS location as the file storage for Microsoft's cloud synchronization and storage service OneDrive, receive notifications currently that using OneDrive on any non-NTFS location does not work anymore.

Users who have used OneDrive on Fat32 or REFS storage locations receive the following message when they start their PC or OneDrive:

"Drive" must be formatted with the NTFS system to work with OneDrive

URLs List is a free browser extension for Mozilla Firefox that you may use to import plain text lists of URLs in the browser, and to export them.

Firefox's session restore feature takes care of the loading of sites that were open in a previous browser session. There is however no option to load a large list of URLs with little effort in the browser.

Say, you have extracted a list of URLs from Google's Search Console and want to check them, or you want to load a list of URLs that you got from elsewhere, for instance from a forum or a file that was posted online.

Linux Mint 18.2, a new version of the popular Linux distribution, has been released to the public on July 2, 2017 in Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce and KDE flavors.

The new Linux Mint 18.2 is a long term support release which means that it will be supported until 2021 (as opposed to regular releases which are not supported that long).

The new version introduces new features and changes to existing features. These differ somewhat depending on the Linux Mint edition -- Cinnamon, MATE, Xfce or KDE.

NordVPN, a popular virtual private network provider, has launched CyberSec, a new security feature as part of the NordVPN 6.4.5.0 client update.

CyberSec is a new security component of the official NordVPN client designed to block malware, intrusive advertisement, and other threats.

Photobucket disabled the third-party hosting of images functionality of the site recently which had been a part of it for years.

Internet users who used Photobucket for that, that is store their images so that they can embed them on other sites, were asked to pay $399 per year, or $39.99 per month, to reactivate the functionality.

Users of the popular BitTorrent software uTorrent who have updated the client to the latest release version may have spotted the new Game Store entry on start already.

Game Store is an integrated store for digital computer games that users of the software may buy directly from within the client.

VeraCrypt 1.20 featuring 64-bit optimization, support for Secure Desktop for password entry on Windows, and more, was released on June 29, 2017.

The encryption software was one of the programs that came to life after the developers of the open source encryption software TrueCrypt stopped development under mysterious circumstances.

VeraCrypt is based on TrueCrypt source code, and compatible with encrypted containers and drives as a consequence.