January 2018

Microsoft announced yesterday that the most recent update for Windows 10, the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, reached its final rollout phase.

Microsoft released the Fall Creators Update on October 17, 2017 officially after months of testing on the Windows Insider channel.

The friends over on DonationCoder hold an annual software development event called NANY — New Apps for the New Year — in which programmers pledge to release programs and apps.

The results of the NANY 2018 event have been published on the DonationCoder forum, and you may head over to the forum to download any app or program from there for free.

The author of the archiving software 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, released 7-Zip 18.00 Beta today to the public. The new version of the Windows software is the first release of 2018. The first two digits of the version number reflect the year of release.

7-Zip 18.00 follows another beta version of the program, 7-Zip 17.01 which Pavlov released in August 2017. The most recent stable version is 7-Zip 16.04 released in, you guessed it, 2016.

Devices running Linux are affected by Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities as much as their Windows counterparts.

Development teams work on updated kernels for the various distributions, and users need to update browsers and other software to protect data against potential attacks.

Web browsers are the main target for attacks targeting the recently disclosed Spectre vulnerability. For home systems, one could argue that web browsers are the major attack vector. Why? Because browsers connect to remote sites, and these sites may run JavaScript to exploit the vulnerability.

Mozilla Corp. acquired the Read-It-Later service Pocket in 2017 and promised to turn Pocket into an Open Source service to address criticism and reservation that some users had towards the service.

Mainstream support for Windows 8.1 ended on January 9, 2018. Yesterday’s Patch Day marked the end of mainstream support for the two operating systems and the beginning of extended support.

Microsoft distinguishes between two support phases for its Windows operating system: mainstream support and extended support.

KeePass 2.38 is the latest version of the password manager. It features minor improvements and fixes for the most part.

Whenever someone asks me if I use a password manager, I answer that I use KeePass. I have plenty of reasons for using KeePass and not one of the available online password managers. Most important for me is that I have full control over the database file. It is not hosted somewhere on the Internet, and there are any data transfers between remote servers and my work PC.

Paint.net 4.0.20 was released today. The new version of the image editor for Windows comes with dark theme and high DPI support and requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.7.

Paint.net started out as an image editor for Windows. The author released a Windows Store version recently that works on Windows 10 S and other Windows 10 devices. The Store version is not free, but revenue from sales help finance development.

A security notice was posted on the official Linux Mint blog on January 9, 2017. It informs users of the Linux distribution about the recently discovered security issues in modern processors called Meltdown and Spectre, and how these affect Linux Mint.

The notice contains instructions to protect Linux Mint systems from potential attacks that target the vulnerabilities. It covers web browsers, Nvidia drivers, and the Linux kernel.