What's New

Mozilla implemented Google's Safe Browsing technology for downloads in Firefox some time ago. The feature checks downloads that you make in the browser using Google to determine if a file is malicious.

The browser maintains a local copy of the blocklist and checks the file against that list to verify it. If it is flagged by Google, a blocked message is displayed in the download manager and the download is not saved to the local system.

EpicScale is a Bitcoin mining application for Windows. It can be installed as a separate application but comes bundled with programs as third-party offers as well.

The program has come to some fame recently as it was bundled with the popular BitTorrent application uTorrent on Windows.

Freak Attack is the name of a new SSL/TLS vulnerability that came to light on March 3, 2015. The vulnerability can be exploited by hackers to weaken the encryption used between clients and servers when HTTPs connections are used.

Affected are servers, according to a site that is tracking the issue 9.5% of Alexa's top 1 million domain names but also web browsers such as Chrome, Safari and Internet Explorer.

Update: This is uTorrent's official statement on the matter.

This morning users on the uTorrent forum started to report that EpicScale, a Bitcoin miner, was installed on their systems without their permission after upgrading to uTorrent 3.4.2 Build 38913.

Program launchers come in two shapes: those that integrate what is already available on the system, think Launchy for example, and those that bring with them programs that you can use directly.

SyMenu falls in the second group of program launchers as it offers to launch local programs but also integrates lists of programs that you can download and use from then on.

If you are on Facebook or on Google+ and have at least one friend or contact on the site, chance is that you receive birthday notifications.

Birthday notifications are enabled on both systems by default and depending on how many friends and contacts you have, you may get quite a view notifications throughout the year.

That's not always something that you want, especially if you get many notifications throughout the year and don't act on or have another way of keeping track of birthdays.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 36.0.1 to which fixes nine issues in the browser. The new version is already distributed via the browser's automatic updating system and also available on the official website from where it can be downloaded to upgrade Firefox manually instead.

To make sure Firefox picks up the update right away, tap on the Alt-key and select Help > About Firefox from the menu.

If you have a Google account then you also have access to the company's Contacts tool that is available as a standalone service but also integrated in web applications such as Gmail.

Google is about to release an update to Google Contacts with the aim to consolidate various contacts databases.

Mozilla announced a new feature coming to Firefox 37 that adds a list of revoked intermediary certificates to a local blocklist in order to speed up revocation checking and improve how revoked certificates are handled by the browser.

Revocation refers to the process of invalidating certificates before their expiration date (which can be years in the future).

The Vivaldi browser, just like many other Chromium/Blink browsers, shares much of its core with Google Chrome and other browsers Chromium based browsers.

One positive effect of that is that it supports the majority of extensions published for Google Chrome in the Chrome web store.