January 2015

The encrypted file hosting service Mega seems to do quite well judging from the site's Alexa traffic rank.

The spiritual successor of Megaupload was launched two years ago, a year after the shut down of Megaupload by the United States Department of Justice in cooperation with law enforcement agencies in other countries.

WhatsApp is a popular messaging client for mobile devices including Google Android, iOS and Windows Phone.

The developers of the client have enabled WhatsApp Web yesterday which enables you to use the client on the Internet site.

This works by means of synchronization which means that you can only use the web interface if you have authorized it for the session using your phone.

Whenever you click on a link on a web page to open another one in the same browser, referrer information are sent to the linked site.

You can verify this for yourself by visiting our IP lookup script which reveals your current IP address and other information including the referer (it is a misspelling that is used in this way in the HTTP specification).

The referrer field was designed to provide the linked web property with information about where a user originated from.

Microsoft revealed information about the company's upcoming operating system Windows 10 today during a live event.

While some questions are still left unanswered, the company managed to provide information about several topics of interest including free updates to Windows 10, whether Cortana will make an appearance, what the new browser code name Spartan does, information about DirectX 12, and whether Windows 10 for mobile phones will be unveiled during the event.

What have the words password, baseball, dragon, football, monkey, mustang, access, shadow and master in common?

They all made the word passwords of 2014 list. The list, compiled by Splashdata, is based on 3.3 million passwords that leaked during 2014.

One could say that 3.3 million passwords are not really representative when it comes to online password use but since that is all the data that is available, it can be used to analyze trends.

Firefox users who experience issues when using the browser that they cannot resolve can use the browser's refresh feature (formerly known as Firefox Reset) instead as an automatic option to fix those issues.

Firefox users had two options up until now to refresh the browser: either hold down the Shift-key before start to open the Safe Mode prompt with an option to refresh the browser, or open about:support in the browser (if it still opens) and invoke it from there.

If you want to find out more about the security of a connection to a particular website or a request that a site made while it was loading, then it is quite difficult to do so right now in most browsers.

While you can look up protocol information if https is used with a click on the lock icon in the browser address bar, and go from there to retrieve additional information, it is taking quite some time to do so.

Mozilla added a new security panel to the Developer Tools of Firefox 37 that reveal those information and additional information in compact form.

Chrome's system of displaying tabs in a single row without horizontal scrolling works well up to a point.

Eventually though you will notice that tabs cannot be identified anymore as they don't show any information whatsoever.

That's when tab switching can become problematic as it may happen that you will click around until you find the right tab you were looking for.

Cloud Convert is a free online service that you can use to convert more than 200 different file types.

It may sometimes be necessary to convert one file type into another. Maybe you need to convert files so that you can load them on your mobile phone, or make sure they are compatible with a program that you have access to on your local system.

While you can run file conversion programs on your local system, you may sometimes be limited in what you can do locally.

Mozilla Firefox is without doubt the browser that you can customize the most. Even its default options to display, hide or move user interface elements outshine the functionality that other popular browsers such as Chrome or Internet Explorer provide.

It takes two clicks (one on the Hamburger menu and one on Customize) to launch customization mode to edit the interface.