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December 2019

How to block the automatic installation of suggested Windows 10 apps

When you sign-in to a new Windows 10 profile or device for the first time, chance is that you notice several third-party applications and games listed prominently in the Start Menu.

Candy Crush Saga is probably the most famous example of such an offer but there are other games and applications such as Netflix, Twitter, the Windows 10 edition of Minecraft or Farmville 2 that may be displayed in the Start Menu.

Booking.com promises to end manipulative sales practices in the EU

If you have ever been to one of the big hotel and flight booking portals on the Internet, you may have noticed sentences like "Only 1 room like this left on our site", "other persons showed interest in this hotel in the last 24 hours", "the room is popular", or "time limited offer".

Hotel and flight booking portals like Booking.com use these to  convey a sense of urgency to people interested in finding a hotel or flight in order for them to make rash decisions.

Custom UserAgent String is a Firefox extension that lets you set a user-agent on a per-site basis

So, Mozilla removed the site specific user-agent override setting from Firefox 71. There is a workaround for this, which as mentioned in the previous article is to use a global user-agent. The main issue with the workaround is that the set user-agent is then used on every site that you visit in the Firefox web browser.

Microsoft reorganizes teams to speed up Windows 10 development

Microsoft adjusted the development cycle of the company's Windows 10 operating system to the development cycle of Microsoft Azure; the change explains the longer development period of Windows 10 2004, the next feature update version of the operating system.

Azure updates are released in the second and fourth quarter of each year, and the decision was made to adapt Windows updates, which were historically released in the first and third quarter, to the development cycle.