What's New

Windows 10 Privacy, it seems like a never ending story that just won't get away. France's National Data Protection Commission (CNIL) served Microsoft with a formal notice on July 20, 2016 asking the company to comply with the French Data Protection Act within three months.

In a little bit over a week, Microsoft ends the free upgrade offer for eligible Windows 7 and 8.1 systems.

While some may still get the upgrade for free after July 29, 2016, the majority of Windows devices aren't.

DisCoverJ is a free cross-platform program to add missing cover art automatically to as many music files as you like in one swift batch operation.

There are numerous ways to add cover art to mp3 files. Some music releases ship with cover art included, and some mp3 players may retrieve cover art for the music file that is playing.

Then there is mp3 tag editors and management programs, MediaMonkey, Mp3Tag, and numerous others.

TagSpaces is an open source cross-platform program to manage local files in various, better ways than the underlying operating system supports.

File management is quite limited on Windows, and probably also on other operating systems. While you can use folders to manage files somewhat, that's about all that is supported in this regard by Windows.

TagSpaces is a free program for Windows and other operating system that offers better options to organize files on devices.

Tags play a central role but not the only role when it comes to that.

MuteTab introduced options to mute audio playing in Chrome before Google integrated native audio controls into the browser.

The extension placed an icon on Chrome's main address bar that you could click on to display all noise making tabs in the browser, and to control the flow of audio.

Seagate unveiled today a new portfolio of 10 Terabyte hard drives for the consumer market that push storage capacities to new heights.

The 10 Terabyte drives Seagate Barracuda Pro, Seagate IronWolf and Seagate SkyHawk are designed for desktop, NAS and surveillance system use.

If you are running a recent stable version of Microsoft Windows 10 on a mobile device, you may have received notifications already about programs or apps that drain battery on the device.

For instance, if you run Chrome or Firefox, you may get the message that said browser is draining battery faster than Microsoft Edge.

It is unclear right now whether the notification is limited to web browsers, or if other third-party programs are shamed as well if they are more power hungry than native Windows programs.

Microsoft Edge is a new browser, and while I tend to be lenient when it comes to new browsers and the features that they may be missing, I think it is fair to hold browser's by multi-billion Dollar companies to higher standards than browsers created by smaller companies.

When Microsoft Edge launched with Windows 10 in 2015, it was clear that Microsoft cut the tie to Internet Explorer in a major way.

Mozilla updated the official Firefox roadmap entry on the organization's Wiki website recently, highlighting major plans for the browser in 2016/2017.

The information highlight some of the features that Mozilla has in store for the next four stable versions of the Firefox browser (Firefox 48 to 51).

The organization lists three main areas of improvement: foundation, customization and context graph.

According to a report on Reuters, the sale of Opera Software to a Chinese consortium is not going to happen.

Firefox 48, out August 2, 2016, will block known plugin fingerprinting services thanks to a new blocklist that Mozilla developed to improve user privacy.

Fingerprinting techniques use various methods to identify and distinguish devices. Anything that the browser reveals on its own is used for instance. Methods may parse the user agent header which reveals the operating system, browser version and other information.

Apart from information that is revealed on connect automatically, scripts may be used to get additional information.

Dropbox's Android client is limited when it comes to the automatic synchronization of files between Dropbox and the Android device.

It did support automatic photo syncing up until now, but a recent change required that you either connect a computer to Dropbox as well, or upgrade to Dropbox Pro to retain the functionality.

SpyDetect Free is a free software program for Microsoft Windows devices that scans for spying and monitoring activity when run.

You have a couple of options when it comes to identifying monitoring and spying activity on your Windows device.

You may run manual checks for suspicious processes or network activity, rely on security software, or use third-party software that speed up the process.

If you are running your Windows computer on a high resolution display, for instance one of those brand new 4K displays, you may have noticed that some text does not scale well.

While most programs and apps should work well on high resolution displays, others display text so small that you can barely read anything without binoculars.

Basically, these issues may occur on any device that is connected to displays with a resolution greater than Full HD (1080p).

Flixtape by Netflix is a new service by Netflix that enables you to create video mixtapes using Netflix's video archive that you can play or share afterwards.

While you may add movies or television shows to your list on Netflix, it is more of an internal thing that you cannot share with others easily.