What's New

A team of hackers claim that they have cracked "almost the entire Windows / Office software licensing protection". The breakthrough allows them to activate "almost any version of Windows and Office" permanently.

Windows and Office installations require activation. This may happen behind the scene or when users enter product keys.

Workarounds and hacks have been available for a long time. One popular choice requires running a single line of instructions from a PowerShell prompt to activate Windows 8 or later, or Office.

When you visit the uBlock Origin page on the Chrome Web Store in Google Chrome, you see a notification near the top that states that the extension is no longer available.

Google writes: "This extension is no longer available because it doesn't follow best practices for Chrome extensions."

What do Xbox Wireless Controllers, Microsoft Defender and Call of Duty: Black Ops 6, and Bing AI in common? All of them were advertised by Microsoft on Windows 11 in the past year.

What if I told you that there is an easy way to turn off these ads on Windows 11? It takes just a minute of your time and you are done with it.

Here is how it is done:

Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, Waterfox and Wavebox join hands to fight against Microsoft Edge have created the Browser Choice Alliance. The group has called the European Commission to list Microsoft Edge as a gatekeeper under the Digital Markets Act (DMA).

Meet the Browser Choice Alliance

Google, Opera, Vivaldi, BrowserWorks (Waterfox) and Wavebox (a premium, ad-free browser), have formed an alliance to highlight the problems associated with how Microsoft promotes its Edge browser on Windows PCs.

Mozilla has released a new stable version of Firefox a moment ago. Firefox 133 is the latest version of the open source browser.

It includes several major improvements, including protection against bounce tracking, and also security fixes.

The two maintained Firefox Extended Support Release versions, Firefox 115 and 128, are also updated today.

The details:

Google has added a new kind of ad that will appear as clickable texts on third-party websites. The feature, if you can call it that, is named Page Annotation.

Google's Page Annotations will inject search links on web pages

Page Annotations are currently only available via the Google app on iOS. The company says that it will "extract interesting information from Google Knowledge Graph entities and highlight them in line". A user clicking on the text ad will be shown more information about people, places or things without leaving the site they are on.

What is the most annoying feature of Windows 11? If we would collect the input we would probably end up with a large list of annoyance.

On that list is likely the inclusion of Windows Backup and here in particular the "start backup" item in File Explorer.

When you open certain paths in File Explorer, for example Pictures or Documents, you may see "start backup" at the front of the path in the address bar.

Are your games crashing or freezing after installing Windows 11 24H2? You are not alone.

Microsoft is blocking the Windows 11 24H2 update on PCs that have some Ubisoft games installed.

I have used Brave Search ever since it was first introduced as one of the search engines that I use regularly. Brave introduced AI-generated answers to the search engine some time ago.

These display AI-generated content before the organic search results. It is more hit-than-miss in my opinion, but far from perfect.

Microsoft released the official Bing Wallpaper application on the Microsoft Store this week. The app was available as a standalone download previously only.

It is a basic app that changes the wallpaper of the Windows desktop to a new image each day and helps users find out more about the images. The store app, in fact, is a Win32 application.

Turns out, the app has a darker side.

What is the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear "ad break"; probably TV or streaming ads.

What you probably did not have in mind is a new system that Facebook is rolling out to users in the European Union after it received a lot of flak for its "subscribe and pay money" or "continue to see ads" prompts in the EU.

Apple has released a critical update for macOS to patch a couple of zero-day vulnerabilities. The security patches are also available for iPhones and iPads.

Microsoft has released a lot of hardware throughout the years. Prominent examples are the company's Surface line of Windows devices, but also peripherals and other hardware.

The United States Department of Justice may force Google to sell Chrome. The news comes a few months after the company was found guilty of maintaining an illegal search monopoly.

Well, this is not completely unexpected, I had mentioned this in my previous coverage of the antitrust lawsuit.

I have visited Athens and Rome in the past couple of months and took a laptop with me to work from there. I refuse to use open Wi-Fi access points at airports, coffee shops, hotels or other locations.

The main reason for that is security and privacy. It is too easy to get attacked or your data snagged away. For that reason, I have switched to using my Android device as a mobile hotspot provider whenever I need to access the Internet, but do not have Ethernet or private Wi-Fi available.