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January 2018

Firefox 59: UI options to block notifications, microphone, camera and location

Mozilla plans to roll out a change in Firefox 59, out 13.3.2018, that gives users better options to block notification, microphone, camera and location requests.

More and more websites and services display prompts to users when they are accessed. Many want permission to send notifications to the browser and others may want access to the microphone, camera, and location requests.

DonationCoder NANY 2017 Software releases

The friends over on DonationCoder hold an annual software development event called NANY — New Apps for the New Year — in which programmers pledge to release programs and apps.

The results of the NANY 2017 event have been published on the DonationCoder forum, and you may head over to the forum to download any app or program from there for free.

Dashlane wants to automate passwords in 2018

Passwords are everywhere. You use them to sign in to operating systems and devices, web services, email accounts, computer games, audio and video chat services, or websites that you have user accounts at.

If you are tech savvy, you know that it is important to use unique secure passwords for accounts. This is best done with the help of a password manager unless you only use a single account on the Internet.

Game Saturday: Logan Kart

Logan Kart is a cart racing game for Windows PCs that plays a lot like Mario Kart. Mario Kart is probably the most popular fun-racing game out there, but it is only available for Nintendo devices.

Logan Kart is a free game for PCs that brings some of the excitement of Mario Kart to PC. While the developers took some of the things that make Mario Kart great, Logon Kart is not a pure Mario Kart clone for PC.

Google promises better protection against deceptive Chrome inline installations

Google announced today on the official Chromium blog that it will improve the Chrome browser’s protection against deceptive inline installations.

When Chrome launched, extensions could be installed from anywhere. Sites sprang up that hosted multiple extensions, and any developer or company could offer extensions on their sites. The Chrome Web Store was released in December 2010, more than two years after the release of the first version of Google Chrome.

Google changed the process in 2012 when it introduced inline installations as a way to better protect users.

NoBot is a portable malware scanner for Windows

NoBot is a portable spyware and malware scanner for the Windows operating system that focuses on detecting bots, spyware, and other types of malware.

I like portable security applications as I run them regularly on Windows machines as second opinion scanners. Fact is, no antivirus solution is perfect, and some may even introduce issues of their own on user systems.

A second opinion scanner may find threats that the resident security solution did not detect. It may, on the other hand, introduce issues of its own.

Opera 50 Stable is out

Opera Software released Opera 50 to the Stable release channel today on January 4th, 2018. The new version of the Opera web browser comes with anti-cryptocurrency mining support, improved VR360 support, and other improvements.

The new version of the web browser is already available via the web browser’s automatic update functionality and as a separate download on the Opera website.

Microsoft releases out-of-band security updates to address Intel bug

Microsoft released out-of-band security updates for Windows yesterdays that address a recently revealed major security bug in Intel, AMD and ARM processors.

The updates are filed under the IDs KB4056888 , KB4056890. KB4056891, KB4056892, and KB405689. All updates share the following description:

Security updates to Internet Explorer, Microsoft Scripting Engine, Microsoft Edge, Windows Graphics, Windows Kernel, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the Windows SMB Server.