What's New

Microsoft released Windows 10 Virtual Machines on December 23, 2016 on the company's windows Dev Center website where they are listed as public downloads.

The machines are intended for companies and individual developers, but are not limited to that. This makes them interesting for testing purposes among other things as well.

I had some time at hand recently to run a couple of tests regarding the purchase of Windows licenses on eBay, and upgrades of said licenses to Windows 10.

As you may know, Windows 7, 8.1 and 10 licenses are sold on eBay for next to nothing. There is lots of talk about these licenses, how they are not legitimate, that they will not work, or that they will expire after a short period of time.

A leaked build of Windows 10, version 14997,suggests that Microsoft will introduce a new pause updates feature in the Creators Update.

Updating has changed significantly with the release of Windows 10. Not only did Microsoft switch to cumulative updates which bundle updates in a single update package, it also removed options to control the updating process itself.

Microsoft is working on the last bits of the Windows 10 Creators Update which it plans to release in March 2017 to the public.

The name of the update reveals a major focus of what is coming, and that is introducing new options to "create things" on Windows 10.

While that is the focus, it is clear that other changes will come along as well. If you are a gamer, or play games on your Windows 10 PC, then you may be interested in something called Game Mode that may be coming along with the update.

Mozilla plans to integrate better font fingerprinting protection in Firefox 52; the new version of the web browser is scheduled for a March 7, 2017 release. The changes are already live in pre-release versions of the web browser.

Font fingerprinting refers to one of the many fingerprinting options that websites and services have when users connect to them.

Macrorit Disk Partition Free 4.0.0 is out; the latest version of the free disk partitioning software comes with an option to create bootable media to partition and manage hard drives and storage devices on system boot without loading an operating system first.

The free version of the application for Windows works as you would expect it to work. You start it up and it pulls all drives connected to the device on start. You may need to run it with elevated privileges by right-clicking on the dm.exe executable file and selecting run as administrator though.

Ransim is a ransomware simulator for Windows that simulates attacks of ten ransomware families against the computer system.

Ransomware is without doubt a relatively new threat category that has gained some prominence in recent time.

Security companies have added ransomware protection to their tools as a response, or released standalone programs with the aim to block ransomware from encrypting files on a computer system.

OpenVPN 2.4.0 is the latest version of the cross-platform SSL VPN that enables you to create security point-to-point or site-to-site connections.

The new version expands on the capabilities introduced in OpenVPN 2.3, namely full IPv6 support and PolarSSL support.

OpenVPN is a major update of the software that features a large number of new features, improvements and changes.

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are trending right now, and chance is good that more and more devices will come to market that may make things easier on the one hand, but may cause privacy issues on the other.

You don't have to look further than at smart home devices that listen to your commands to provide you with information or assistance in controlling various other gadgets or parameters such as the heating.

Tiny Hot Corners for Windows 10 is a free lightweight program for Windows 10 that brings GNOME's hot corner functionality to Windows.

The author of the program Tavis Ormandy, whom you may know from his security research on various Windows programs, missed the hot corner functionality of GNOME whenever he worked on a device running Windows 10.

He did some research on the topic, but noticed rather quickly that none of the existing solutions offered what he was looking for. All used lots of resources or were overblown according to him.