October 2014

Depending on how you access the Internet, information about the sites you visited in the past may be available in different locations locally and also remotely.

Most web browsers keep track of these sites in a browsing history. It is a file that records what you have visited, when you have visited it and how often you have been to that web page, domain or service.

Apps on the Android platform can request no extra permissions or a bunch of them. While it is sometimes easy to find a reason for a permission, a web browser needs Internet access for instance, it is often not clear right away.

For instance, why does Angry Birds require permission to read the phone status and identity? Turns out it does not really but uses the information for analytics.

Notepad or its richer replacements are quite good when it comes to writing short to medium sized texts but lose much of their appeal when it comes to longer texts.

While you can certainly write a book using nothing but Notepad, it may not be the most comfortable thing to do and while programs such as Notepad++, Microsoft Word or OpenOffice Write may not have that issue, they may bring along problems of their own.

If you compare the battery life of popular devices, or read about it in magazines or on the web, you will notice a huge gap between the top and bottom.

Battery life may not always be a factor or the major factor when buying a new mobile device but if you are on the go most of the time you may want to consider getting a device that lasts throughout the day as well even if you put it to use.

Even if a device performs poorly in regards to how long it runs on battery without charging, you may be able to overcome this limitation.

Amazon announced the Fire TV Stick today. It is on first glance similar to Google's Chromecast and other streaming sticks and solutions.

You connect the stick to your TV's HDMI port and to the Internet to watch all kinds of clips, shows and movies as well as apps and games on the television.

Have you ever asked yourself how cryptographic algorithms work? What algorithms such as AES or Twofish do, or how cryptography was handled in the past?

How Julius Caesar used encryption to protect messages or how the German Enigma machine worked?

While there are plenty of books and online resources available that teach you everything there is to know about that, not many let you experience it first hand.

Whenever you install an update on a PC running Windows, especially if it is a service pack, larger update or even upgrade to a new version of the operating system, you end up with leftovers that remain on the system.

They are there so that you can return the system to the old state. That is useful in the beginning as updates can be the cause of issues on the system.

We have seen quite a few security update releases in the past for instance which produced blue screens, reboots or other undesirable effects.

Media Source Extensions (MSE) is a specification that enables JavaScript to generate media streams for playback. The most prominent website that requires Media Source Extensions for some functionality is YouTube.

If you use the site's HTML5 player without Media Source Extensions, only some video resolutions are made available. In particular, 720p is the highest quality that is available in this case even if the video itself is also available in 1080p or even 4k.

Canvas Fingerprinting is a new way of tracking Internet users that has come to some prominence recently. I explained the concept some time ago and suggest you check out the article for detailed information on what it is, what it does and how to prevent it.

Bitly is a popular url shortening service that is widely used and according to Alexa one of the top 4000 websites in the world. It can be used by anyone to turn any link into a shorter version that looks similar to this one: http://bit.ly/1dNVPAW

If you have tried to open the main Bitly website recently or clicked on a link that was shortened by others using the service you may have received a notification in your browser that access to the website has been blocked.