November 2024

A team of hackers claim that they have cracked "almost the entire Windows / Office software licensing protection". The breakthrough allows them to activate "almost any version of Windows and Office" permanently.

Windows and Office installations require activation. This may happen behind the scene or when users enter product keys.

Workarounds and hacks have been available for a long time. One popular choice requires running a single line of instructions from a PowerShell prompt to activate Windows 8 or later, or Office.

When you visit the uBlock Origin page on the Chrome Web Store in Google Chrome, you see a notification near the top that states that the extension is no longer available.

Google writes: "This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions."

What do Xbox Wireless Controllers, Microsoft Defender and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and Bing AI in common? All of them were advertised by Microsoft on Windows 11 in the past year.

What if I told you that there is an easy way to turn off these ads on Windows 11? It takes just a minute of your time and you are done with it.

Here is how it is done:

Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Waterfox and Wavebox join hands to fight against Microsoft Edge have created the Browser Choice Alliance. The group has called the European Commission to list Microsoft Edge as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Meet the Browser Choice Alliance

Google, Opera, Vivaldi, BrowserWorks (Waterfox) and Wavebox (a premium, ad-free browser), have formed an alliance to highlight the problems associated with how Microsoft promotes its Edge browser on Windows PCs.

Mozilla has released a new stable version of Firefox a moment ago. Firefox 133 is the latest version of the open source browser.

It includes several major improvements, including protection against bounce tracking, and also security fixes.

The two maintained Firefox Extended Support Release versions, Firefox 115 and 128, are also updated today.

The details:

Google has added a new kind of ad that will appear as clickable texts on third-party websites. The feature, if you can call it that, is named Page Annotation.

Google's Page Annotations will inject search links on web pages

Page Annotations are currently only available via the Google app on iOS. The company says that it will "extract interesting information from Google Knowledge Graph entities and highlight them in line". A user clicking on the text ad will be shown more information about people, places or things without leaving the site they are on.

What is the most annoying feature of Windows 11? If we would collect the input we would probably end up with a large list of annoyance.

On that list is likely the inclusion of Windows Backup and here in particular the "start backup" item in File Explorer.

When you open certain paths in File Explorer, for example Pictures or Documents, you may see "start backup" at the front of the path in the address bar.

Are your games crashing or freezing after installing Windows 11 24H2? You are not alone.

Microsoft is blocking the Windows 11 24H2 update on PCs that have some Ubisoft games installed.

I have used Brave Search ever since it was first introduced as one of the search engines that I use regularly. Brave introduced AI-generated answers to the search engine some time ago.

These display AI-generated content before the organic search results. It is more hit-than-miss in my opinion, but far from perfect.

Microsoft released the official Bing Wallpaper application on the Microsoft Store this week. The app was available as a standalone download previously only.

It is a basic app that changes the wallpaper of the Windows desktop to a new image each day and helps users find out more about the images. The store app, in fact, is a Win32 application.

Turns out, the app has a darker side.