January 2018

Integrity Downloader is a free portable program for Microsoft Windows devices that is a basic download manager on first glance. The built-in security features are what may make the program interesting to some users.

Download managers offer plenty of extra functionality when it comes to file downloads. They promise faster download speeds by downloading multiple parts of files simultaneously, and offer better file management options.

Microsoft released another batch of updates for various versions of the company's Windows 10 operating system.

This is the third batch of patches that address the AMD boot loop bug directly caused by earlier updates, or add more protections to the operating system.

The first batch of patches resolved the unbootable state issue for specific AMD devices on machines running Windows 7 and Windows 8.1.

While Mozilla focuses much of its development resources on releasing Firefox 58 next week, work on the next Firefox version Firefox 59 continues as well.

Firefox users who run Nightly, the cutting edge version of Firefox that is updated very frequently, are already on version 59.

While some features are not enabled yet, Tab Warming needs to be mentioned in this regard; others are readily available already.

Firefox 59 will be released on March 13, 2018, if there are not any last minute changes to the release schedule.

A new breed of malicious browser extensions uses techniques to make the removal of these extensions more difficult to users and administrators.

Malwarebytes revealed in a blog post how these extensions block user access to the add-on management page of the browser and therefore removal from within the browser.

Wine HQ announced the release of Wine 3.0 today. The new version of Wine comes with support for Direct3D 10 and 11, improved DirectWrite and Direct2D support, and more features.

Wine enables users on Linux, Mac OS X and other non-Windows systems to run Windows programs without requiring a copy of Microsoft Windows.

It is, for instance, useful to get Windows software to run on Linux machines that would not be available otherwise. Think of computer games, Adobe Photoshop or other programs that are not available for Linux.

The next feature update for Windows 10, Windows 10 version 1803, will feature new privacy settings and improvements that give users and administrators more control over data on the device.

Windows 10 users and admins may change privacy-related settings in several ways on machines running Windows 10. They may change some privacy options under Settings > Privacy, make modifications using policies, or change Registry keys related to privacy.

The recently discovered Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities can only be patched fully with BIOS updates. Depending on your system, you may have installed the operating system, web browser and other software updates already to reduce the attack vector of potential attacks targeting the vulnerabilities.

JSPaint is a free web-based remake of Microsoft Paint, a basic but popular image editor for the Windows operating system.

Microsoft announced some time ago that it would deprecate Microsoft Paint in favor of the new Paint 3D UWP application that it introduced in the Windows 10 Creators Update.

Mozilla has been on the forefront of WebAssembly development, a relatively new technology that offers better performance on the Web than JavaScript in many cases.

Microsoft released the updates  KB4057142, KB4057144 and KB4073290 on January 17th, 2017 for the company's Windows 10 operating system.

One of the updates, KB4073290, addresses the unbootable state issue for select AMD devices after installing the January 3 update KB4056892.  The company released updates for affected Windows 7, Windows 8.1 and Windows Server systems yesterday already.