March 2018

Reports are coming in that Windows 10 systems running an earlier feature version of the operating system are upgraded to Windows 10 version 1709 forcefully in some circumstances.

The issue seems to be related to KB4023814, "Some versions of Windows 10 display a notification to install the latest version", which Microsoft updated on March 5, 2018 the last time.

Security company McAfee announced the acquisition of TunnelBear, a Toronto-based company best known for its VPN product TunnelBear, today.

NordVPN is a fairly popular VPN service provider that supports many of the features that users come to expect from a service of its kind this day and age.

It claims that it has a strict no logging policy, allows P2P traffic, offers servers in a lot of countries and regions, and does not restrict user bandwidth.

When you set up Windows 10 on a computer or in a virtual machine, a privacy settings screen is displayed during setup which lets you change some privacy-related settings before the first start of the operating system.

The page lists options to turn privacy-related settings off, as all are enabled by default. You may use it to switch from the collection of data from full to basic, disable tailored experiences (Edge uses less battery than your browser), and turn off location-based experiences or speech recognition.

Any.Run, an interactive malware analysis tool based in Russia opened its doors to the public yesterday. A free community version is available at the time which allows anyone to register an account and start analyzing Windows programs, scripts and other files.

While you can use established services like Virustotal to analyze files, most are not interactive. Any.Run supports a full sandboxed environment that you may use to analyze files interactively.

Malwarebytes, maker of the security software of the same name, released Malwarebytes 3.4.4 for the Microsoft Windows operating system yesterday.

The new version is the first stable release for Windows in 2018. Existing Malwarebytes installations should pick up the update automatically as automatic updates are enabled by default.

Google started the rollout of the web browser Google Chrome 65 for desktop and mobile systems earlier today.

The release post on the official Chrome Releases blog does not reveal much about changes, improvements or new features but an hour-long combing through of the official changelog revealed several interesting changes in Chrome 65.

Microsoft released non-security updates for Microsoft Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 yesterday. The company releases non-security updates for Office on the first Tuesday of each month, and security updates along with security updates for Windows and other Microsoft products on the second Tuesday of each month.

Note that the updates listed below are only available for Microsoft Installer (MSI) based editions of Office.

The updates don't apply to click-to-run editions of Microsoft Office such as Microsoft Office 365 Home.

Netflix announced plans to improve the built-in parental control functionality of the streaming service to give parents more control over what minors may watch on the service.

The service's parental controls are straightforward right now. Parents set up a four digit PIN and a maturity level in the Settings.

One of the really confusing things for users who are new to messing with the command line, can be trying to search with specifics. A useful little tool for aiding in this process, is called grep, or “global regular expression print,” which will search for regular statements in anything you pipe it through, and show you matches for what you looked for (if any exist.)

A rather straightforward example of this, before we continue, would be to use grep to search through the list of processes given with the command ps aux, to search for a specific application.