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Whenever you use Google or Facebook without being logged in to an account, a cookie is saved to the local system.

It is anonymous at this point in time even though it reveals information about your browsing habits to the company that set it.

Most of the devices and hardware that you connect to a PC running a recent version of Windows work out of the box without any configuring or driver installations.

While that is certainly not the case for all of them, things have gotten a lot better in this regard in the past ten years.

It may still make sense to install driver updates regularly or even install drivers provided by the manufacturer instead of making use of the generic drivers that Windows ships with.

Microsoft will release a new Windows 10 Preview build in January to the public. Most expect it to be the consumer-focused build company representatives were talking about earlier this year but no one outside of the company knows for sure right now what it will ship with.

It can sometimes be difficult to tell if a web page or domain a link points to is a legit site or not. While the url of the site may give you clues at times, for example if you know it already, it is at other times not possible to determine whether it is secure to visit a site or not based solely on a link.

SocketSniff is a free portable program for Windows that enables you to watch WinSock activity of a selected process in the Windows operating system.

It can sometimes be useful to find out if a process connects to a computer network or the Internet, and if it does, what it uploads to the Internet or downloads from it.

While all of that may not always be possible to tell, for instance when encryption is being used, there are still information that can be gathered during the process.

Only one program window has the focus in the Windows operating system at any given time. This means that you cannot interact with other programs unless you activate them first or use third-party software that enables you to interact with them even if they are not focused (Wizscroll is one program that offers that feature).

WinPrivacy is a new program by the maker of the popular WinPatrol application that has been released as a beta version today.

The program, just like WinPatrol, is not free but commercial. It has been designed to improve user privacy on the Internet in numerous ways.

While you could assume that it is a CCleaner type of application, it is in fact complementary to the program as it concentrates on other privacy related issues.

Adobe added Protected Mode to Flash for Firefox back in 2012 to improve the security of it. We covered the release back then and suggest you check it out if you want additional information about the mode.

If you hang out a lot on social media sites such as Twitter or Facebook, you have encountered countless links that were shortened.

What is meant by that is that proxy links tend to get posted on these sites that do nothing but redirect you to the real site when you click on them.

While that may make sense on Twitter with its artificial 140 character limit, it is a dangerous habit that has no real advantage other than reducing the number of characters displayed on the screen.

The Windows installer does not offer many customization options. While it is possible to enable or disable some features afterwards, you generally end up with a selection of common tools and features that you may not require.

What's the purpose of installing Bluetooth support for example if you know you never need it? One could say that it does not really matter if features are installed or not as they don't get in the way usually and don't use lots of disk space either.

Math, hate it or love it, there does not seem to be any middle ground. If your line of work requires math, or if you are in school or college, then you may find the math helper application AutoMath Photo Calculator quite useful.

If things go right, all you need to do to solve math problems is to take a photo of the equation. The app does all the heavy lifting and presents the correct answer to you.

AutoMath supports a variety of math questions or problems including algebra, fractions, polynomials and division.

If you have been following the news lately you know that the torrent indexing website The Pirate Bay has been shut down after the data center servers of the site were hosted in was raided by Swedish police.

One could see this as a success for organizations such as the MPAA or RIAA as a notorious site has been removed from the Internet.

The outcome however it turns out is quite different than expected.

Update: Tribler security not as good as claimed. Read this for a first basic analysis.

Bittorrent has not one but two Achilles' heels: torrent indexing services and a lack of anonymity. While it is possible to overcome the latter through the use of virtual private networks or proxies, there is no viable alternative available yet for indexing services.

If you are running an ad-blocker or script-blocker in a browser, you may experience high memory usage because of it.

Depending on how it is working, it may bring the memory easily over the 1 Gigabyte mark. One test to find out how well your extension works is to load the VIM Color Scheme Test website.

If you are using Windows, hit Ctrl-Shift-Esc prior to that to monitor the browser process or processes to see if loading the page increases the memory use of it significantly.

Microsoft announced back in October 2014 that its upcoming operating system Windows 10 will ship with DirectX 12. Windows 10 is expected to be released in Fall 2015, three years after the release of Microsoft's current state of the art operating system Windows 8.

DirectX is widely used, not only on Windows but also on Microsoft Xbox gaming systems and even other devices such as Sega's Dreamcast console.