What's New

Tripmode is a commercial program for Windows and Mac devices that can be used to block all traffic on the device in a comfortable easy manner.

While you could say that most software and hardware firewalls allow you to do the same,  none make the process that easy.

Basically, all you need to do is flip a switch to enable the traffic blocking mode. All traffic is blocked from that moment on, and it is up to you to allow certain applications or system services to connect to Internet servers.

SABnzbd 1.0 is the latest version of the popular binary newsreader. The version change may come as a surprise to existing users as the last was 0.7.11 and everyone expected 0.8 to be the next version.

The developers of the application decided to switch to 1.0.0 instead "in order to start using a common release numbering method".

The new version of the program ships with several improvements and feature additions, but also a few changes that users need to be aware of.

Microsoft shipped build 14291 of Windows 10 to the Fast Ring insider channel a few hours ago, and with it an update for the system's default browser Microsoft Edge that introduces initial support for extensions.

The version of Microsoft Edge that is available on stable builds of Windows 10, does not support extensions currently but Microsoft plans to change that this year by integrating an extensions engine to Edge that is very similar to that of Google Chrome.

A recent security analysis of OEM laptops running Windows 10 by Duo Security Inc concluded that all analyzed devices had privacy and network protocol related issues.

The seven laptops, produced by Dell, HP, Lenovo and Acer, shared many of the privacy and security issues, while some laptops had additional issues caused by installed OEM software.

The team looked at the network traffic that each device produced, and noticed -- among other findings -- the following:

HTTPS Checker is a free program for Windows that provides you with the means to scan all pages of a website for HTTPS related issues.

Rolling out HTTPS on an established site has become a lot easier in recent time. While that is the case, it still very important to make sure that the implementation does not cause any issues such as duplicate content, mixed content warnings or certificate validation issues as it can backfire if that is the case.

LastPass Authenticator is a new mobile application by the makers of LastPass for Google Android, Microsoft Windows and Apple iOS devices to generate 2-factor authentication codes for the software and other programs.

2-Factor authentication is one option to improve the protection of accounts. It has been supported by LastPass for a while but relied mostly on third-party authentication applications and services such as Google Authenticator, YubiKey or Authy to power the functionality.

Reddit announced a week ago that it decided to start tracking outbound links on the site which effectively means that they know on which outbound links Reddit users clicked.

According to Reddit, doing so will open up new possibilities for the site, for instance to better combat spam or better stats such as clicks to votes.

Reddit tracks what each individual user clicks on but does not share the data with third-parties.

If you are using Microsoft Edge occasionally or as your main web browser all the time you may have noticed today that Google started to serve older versions of its site to the browser.

If you visit Google.com for instance using Microsoft Edge, you get a black bar at the top which you don't get when you use Chrome, Firefox or the majority of other modern browsers.

You may have read Samer's Ten software trends that are (or should be dying) recently here on ComTek4u which listed disk defragmentation as one of the trends that is dying.

It is undeniable that the rise of Solid State Drives and better defragmentation support of operating systems have made the need to defragment disks or files less of an issue on many computer systems.

Google introduced several new features in Google Chrome Stable 49, among them smooth scrolling to improve the scrolling behavior in the web browser.

While that may work well or better for most users, some users have noticed lag when scrolling after upgrading their browser versions to 49.

Pale Moon is a web browser that you find recommended fairly often here on ComTek4u, especially in the comment section as an alternative to Mozilla Firefox.

The browser is a fork of on an old code base of Firefox ESR but heavily modified. One of the main appeals of the web browser is that its developers refused to integrate changes to the browser that take away functionality from it.

F.Lux for Android brings the same day and night shifting of colors from the desktop to rooted Android devices.

One of my must have Windows programs is F.Lux which makes the colors of the screen adapt to the time of day. The main idea behind the feature is to make the screen more pleasing to the eye at night and to improve sleep for those of us who work on the computer late at night.

The Android version of F.Lux offers similar functionality but is limited to Android 5.x devices or newer devices for the most part and requires root on top of that.

Mozilla and Google announced today that they have added experimental WebAssembly support to Firefox Nightly and Chrome Canary.

Microsoft revealed that it will launch a version of Microsoft Edge in the future that supports WebAssembly as well.

So what is WebAssembly, and why is its introduction important?

WebAssembly is an emerging standard whose goal is to define a safe, portable, size- and load-time efficient binary compiler target which offers near-native performance—a virtual CPU for the Web.

Samsung’s line of Galaxy Note phablets and tablets have a single important feature that is unavailable in any other Android or iOS device: the built in S-Pen that fits inside the device.

For those unfamiliar with it, the S-Pen is not a regular stylus but one that has evolved since it’s introduction with the original Note 1 in 2011 and become a highly sensitive stylus that recognizes speed, tilt, rotation, and pressure, in order to provide an excellent user experience.

Mozilla revealed in a new blog post on the official Addons blog why Webextensions, a new API for Firefox add-on developers, are advantageous to the development community.