January 2018

Research by online magazine Quartz suggests that Android's Location History feature tracks more data than initially thought.

Location History "helps you get better results and recommendations on Google products" according to Google. It may be used to locate a missing phone, get traffic predictions, or recommendations based on places you have visited in the past.

Microsoft released the Windows Update KB4078130 yesterday. It disables the mitigation against Spectre, Variant 2 on all supported versions of the company's Windows operating system when installed.

Acronis Ransomware Protection is a new security program for Windows designed to protect the system against ransomware attacks.

Users of Acronis True Image 2018 may notice that it looks similar to the built-in anti-ransomware protection of Acronis' backup solution. Acronis Ransomware Protection is a standalone version of the True Image 2018 component that is available for free.

Users of Malwarebytes, a popular security solution for Windows, reported on Saturday that the software's RAM usage and CPU utilization was going through the roof.

One user published a screenshot that showed the Malwarebytes Service process using more than 19 Gigabytes of RAM, and others soon chimed in and revealed that Malwarebytes used a lot of RAM and CPU on their devices as well.

"Can we improve privacy without breaking the Web", that was the question that Mozilla tried to find answers for in a recent study. The organization ran an opt-in study to learn how privacy protections "affect users on websites".

Stellar Squad is a free online strategy game in which you command a squad of futuristic soldiers and fight off wave after wave of robot attacks.

The game plays similarly to Tower Defense games but with the difference that the positions of your soldiers are set.

Stellar Squad

Thunderbird 52.6.0 is a security update for the popular desktop email client. The release is available via the email client's automatic update feature and also on the official project website.

Thunderbird users can run a manual check for updates with a click on Help > About Thunderbird. If the menu bar is missing, tap on the Alt-key to display it.

Thunderbird will pick up the new update and download and install it automatically.

WhatsApp is a popular messaging service that is available for all major mobile platforms, the Web and even for desktop operating systems.

The service supports two main chat types: one-on-one and group. The main difference between the two types is that groups may have more than two chat participants.

Resonic Player is a free for personal use audio player for Microsoft Windows devices. Designed for audio and music playback, Resonic Player plays all popular audio formats as well as midi and music module formats.

Music players are a dime a dozen on Windows and pretty much any operating system out there. A handful of crowd favorites, such as Foobar 2000, AIMP or the more dead than alive Winamp are available and hundreds of audio players that are not nearly as popular.

Cryptojacking is a relatively new threat on the Internet. It refers to websites abusing computing resources of visitors to mine cryptocurrency.

Internet users notice that something is wrong when the computer they use slows down to a crawl suddenly and when fans speed up in an attempt to cool down components of the device that get hammered.