July 2017

Bitdefender Home Scanner is a free program by security company Bitdefender that scans devices on local networks for security issues.

The need for security has expanded with Internet of Things being a trend, and household devices such as your fridge or thermostat connecting to a local network or the Internet.

It is no longer sufficient to just make sure that your laptop, smartphone or desktop computer is protected. Any device with connectivity, be it a smart TV, game console or household item, can let attackers in if vulnerabilities are found.

If you use the Vivaldi browser on multiple devices, or even a stable and development version on the same computer, you may have run into a roadblock when it comes to making sure the user data is synced between all Vivaldi versions.

Vivaldi does not support Sync yet, but it is a feature that the company works on actively. It is likely that Sync will ship this year.

For now however, the only option that Vivaldi users have is to sync data manually between profiles. While this requires some manual work on part of the user, it is not super difficult.

Mozilla continues its work on Photon, a visual refresh of the Firefox web browser that will be released later this year (most expect it to launch in Firefox 57 out November 2017).

Photon introduces a number of changes to Firefox's interface, for instance the new Page Action menu that is shown as three dots in the address bar, or the new UI density option to switch between normal, compact and touch display modes.

Microsoft has just released non-security updates for Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016; a day later than anticipated because of 4th of July in the US.

Only non-security Office updates get released by Microsoft on the first Tuesday of the month. That's the reason why you don't see patches for Office 2007 or Office 2010 as both are on extended support which means that Microsoft supports them with security updates only.

Security updates for Office are traditionally released on the second Tuesday of a month; Microsoft's Patch Tuesday.

Avira announced today that it has integrated adblocking functionality into the company's browser extensions for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.

The decision to integrate an adblocker into company products came as a result of a study that Avira ran back in February 2017.

Data usage is a handy feature of the Windows 10 operating system that reveals the data transfer totals from the last 30 days.

Besides displaying the total amount of data that was transferred in the last 30 days, it may also highlight data for different connection types -- e.g. Ethernet and Wireless -- and list the top applications.

Microsoft published information on Bing on the company's Bing Ads account yesterday that show Bing's market share in some parts of the world.

According to the Bing Network market share graphic, Bing has a global market share of 9% of the search market.

If you break down the market share, you will notice that Bing is doing quite well in North America, and other English speaking countries.

Bing's market share according to Microsoft is 33% in the US, 26% in the UK, 17% in Canada, 19% in Hong Kong, 17% in Norway, and 19% in France.

Previously I wrote a very simple beginners article on how to host your own nginx webserver and host a webpage. But, not everyone is familiar with ways to get the files you want onto your server (assuming it's not hosted on your everyday machine) so that you can use those images, files, etc.

There are a multitude of ways ranging from using the command line to transfers files over SCP (secure copy of files via ssh), using an FTP client like FileZilla if your server has an FTP server running, etc.

TumblThree is an open source program for Windows that you may use to download blogs from the popular blogging platform Tumblr.

The application is designed primarily as a backup tool even though it can be used by anyone to download entire blogs, or content posted on blogs from Tumblr.

TumblThree supports videos, images, audio files, text content, and pretty much any other content that is posted on Tumblr.

Outlook Tools 3.0 is the latest version of the popular Outlook management and troubleshooting tool for Microsoft Windows devices.

It is the first release of the program since 2010. We reviewed Outlook Tools 2.3 back in 2010 when it was released and concluded back then that it was a handy program to have for Outlook users.

Outlook Tools 3.0 is the first update of the program in over six years. It improves the compatibility of the program with newer versions of Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Windows.