November 2015

The most recent version of Opera Max for Android adds support for music streaming app to the data compression proxy.

Opera Max is a standalone application that routes traffic through Opera services to compress the data to reduce the amount of data transferred to the user device.

Since it is a standalone application, it works with various web browsers and system applications on Android.

This guide looks at NoScript's Script Surrogates functionality, explains how you can add or remove surrogates from the popular Firefox add-on, and explains what the feature is being used for.

Most Internet users who heard about NoScript associate it with the blocking of scripts on sites that the user visits in the browser. That's correct, but NoScript is more powerful than that as it offers several other security features and settings worth taking a look at.

Did you know for instance that you can force https connections on sites using the software?

Some Dell laptops ship with a self-signed root certificate eDellRoot and private key that attackers can exploit. The issue, first reported on Reddit, has resemblances to the Lenovo incident earlier this year when the company shipped some of its laptops with a pre-installed third-party root certificate that could be exploited in a similar fashion.

You can learn a lot about a site when you monitor its network connections when you connect your browser to it.

You may see connections to third-party sites, ads, web analytics scripts and a lot more just from that.

A common practice is to use popular JavaScript libraries or frameworks like jQuery or Ember. Sites may load locally hosted versions of those, or versions hosted by public content deliver networks (CDN) such as those by Google, Microsoft or Cloudflare.

One of the first things that I do when I get a new Android phone is to enable encryption on the device. Actually, that is something that I do on every computer I own provided such an option exists.

The main reason for this is security. While I don't have anything spectacular stored on the device, I want to protect the data on the device from unauthorized access.

Tab Groups is a brand new add-on for the Firefox web browser that aims to provide Firefox Panorama / Tab Groups users with a replacement for the native implementation that Mozilla plans to remove in a future version of Firefox (likely Firefox 45).

If you compare the search results, or more precisely search options, that you get when using Google Search on mobile devices using Firefox and Chrome, you will notice that Firefox's options are limited.

One feature that I use quite often when it comes to search is the time filter of Google Search. It enables me to restrict results to a certain time period, and while it does not always work correctly, as some sites seem to have found ways to abuse it and make their articles look fresh even if they are not, it is often useful when searching for recent information about a topic.

Google Chrome extensions can extend the functionality of the web browser or make life easier while browsing the Web. While that is the case, they may also be abused by companies to track users across the Internet, display advertisement or download malicious code to the user system.

This article provides you with the means to verify Chrome extensions before you install them. It is important to do so before the extension gets installed in the browser as it may already be too late after installation.