What's New

It is easy to connect external devices such as mobile phones, USB Flash drives or external DVD drives to a PC.

The devices get picked up automatically usually and are available for use afterwards.

All devices allow read and write operations by default which may not always be in the best interest of the owner of the system or a network administrator.

Considering that malicious software could spread through the use of these devices, it may be a good idea to limit access rights to read operations only or disable connections of specific device types altogether.

Public Key Pinning (PKP) is an extension to the HTTP protocol that is in draft status currently over at the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF).

It allows web services to reduce the number of authorities that can authenticate the domain by instructing clients to only use a specific subset of authorities instead of accepting any root certificate that ships with the browser.

Google has released Chrome Stable 37 yesterday and with it came a new feature to improve font rendering on Windows. The text rendering was switched from Graphics Device Interface (GDI) to DirectWrite in Chrome 37 and while the majority of users did not report any issues, some users noticed that contents looked zoomed in and kinda blurry in the browser.

Most users who experience the issue on Windows seem to have set the DPI scaling to 125% instead of the default 100% value.

The file synchronization service Dropbox is loved by many even though it is not the cheapest when you compare the price to Gigabyte ratio that you get when you sign up for a Pro account.

This has become apparent especially recently when providers such as Google or Microsoft slashed prices or increased the available storage for accounts dramatically.

The Google Drive 1 Terabyte plan for instance is available for $9.99 per month, exactly the price that Dropbox Pro users paid for 100 Gigabyte of storage.

Zenmate was rated one of the best Chrome VPN recently by us. While it is used by many to access geo-restricted contents, it is adding other VPN-specific features to it as well that include encrypting traffic and hiding the computer's IP address.

The company behind the extension has released an Android application called ZenMate Security & Privacy VPN which brings a similar feature set to Android devices.

When Google started to push out 64-bit versions of Chrome to its Dev and Canary channels in June for the Windows operating system, it was not clear at first if the company had the intention to offer it permanently to users of the browser.

Dubbed an experiment back then, it complemented the 64-bit versions of Chrome available for Mac and Linux systems.

When the 64-bit version hit the beta channel of the browser, it was clear that a version for the stable channel was on its way as well.

While things have improved significantly in recent time in regards to sharing large files or folders with others, it is still far from what many would call easy to setup.

Lets say you want to share a folder full of high resolution photos of your last summer vacation. Email won't work because the photos are too large. You could upload them to a photo hosting site like Flickr and share them this way, but this would require an account on your part and maybe also for anyone wanting to view the photos if you don't want to make them available publicly.

When Mozilla announced that it would add so-called Directory Tiles to Firefox, it was heavily criticized for it even though most users of the browser won't come into contact with the feature often if at all.

While you can criticize the choice of name, as sponsored tiles would make more sense here, it is not a feature that plasters ads all over the Firefox browser in an effort to make money.

When you open the Windows Task Manager using the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-Esc, a mighty list of processes running on the system is presented to you (note: in Windows 8, this is only the case if you expand the manager first).

While that is helpful in determining what is running on the system or to kill a process that is no longer required, it is often difficult to tell if a process is safe or not.

Firewalls are an important layer of defense for computer systems. While that is the case, most can be rather scary when it comes to understand what is going on and what to do.

That's why the majority of firewalls these days come with configurations that require little user attention. The same is true for network monitors, only that they are not that commonly used on home PCs.