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Favicons may be used to track users

Security researchers of the University of Illinois at Chicago have discovered a new method to track Internet users that is persistent across sessions, even if users clear cookies and the browsing cache.

The research paper Tales of F A V I C O N S and Caches: Persistent Tracking in Modern Browsers highlights that favicons may be used in conjunction with fingerprinting techniques to track users.

Microsoft Edge 88 Stable is a security update that drops FTP and Flash support

Microsoft released a new stable version of its Chromium-based Edge web browser on January 21, 2021. Microsoft Edge 88 is a security and feature update that introduces several new features and changes to the browser.

The company released the first stable version of the new Microsoft Edge in January 2020.

Google improves the password management feature in Chrome 88

Google released a new stable version of the company's Chrome web browser to the public this week. Chrome 88 fixed security issues and removed Adobe Flash among other things.

Google improved the browser's password management capabilities in the release. Chrome users who save passwords in the browser may access two new password management related options in the release.

DuckDuckGo Search Engine's rise continues as it hits 100 million search queries for the first time

Privacy-first search engine DuckDuckGo's year was productive in 2020. The search engine managed to increase daily search queries significantly in 2020 and 2021 is already looking to become another record year as the search engine broke the 100 million search queries mark on a single day for the first time on January 11, 2021.

Google is testing larger cache sizes in Chrome to reduce cache partioning impact

Google introduced support for partitioning the cache of the company's Chrome web browser when it launched Chrome 86 earlier this year. The feature changes how web browsers cache content. Previously, web browsers like Chrome used a single cache to store content. One benefit of this approach is that all sites may make use of a cached resource, say a web font or image to speed up the loading of a page or application.

Use of a single cache opened up the door for attacks as sites could check for the existence of cached entries for use in tracking and other attacks.

Looking for YouTube's Autoplay option? Google moved it!

Google released updates for the company's YouTube application for Android and Apple's iOS operating system recently. One of the changes of the update moved the autoplay toggle; it is now displayed in the media player.

YouTube users who use the web version, e.g. on a desktop operating system such as Windows, will get the same change. Google is rolling it out currently to all users who access YouTube on the web.

Most users should see a prompt the next time they play a video on the site stating "looking for autoplay? Choose whether videos automatically play next".

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