What's New

Traditional ways of tracking users have come under fire in recent years. Cookies and other small snippets of data that get saved on user systems may not be available forever to many companies.

That's why many have invested resources in finding other means to track users on the Internet. Fingerprinting is popular but not that reliable due to several factors.

Gmail users can access their account on the official website or by using first-party or third-party apps and services instead. A first party app is for instance Google's official Gmail app for Android, while Thunderbird and the mail client app of Windows 8 are third-party apps.

Google announced back in April 2014 that it would improve the sign-in security of its services and affect any application sending usernames and passwords to the company.

Whenever you build or buy a new PC, you may want to transfer data from the old to the new. Maybe you want to move documents or media to the new PC before you move the old one to the attic, or a program that you want to run on the new PC as well.

While there are many ways to achieve that goal, especially when it comes to files, they vary highly in terms of how easy it is to transfer the data.

Mozilla will install a hotfix on Firefox 10 to 28 Stable versions on Windows that have automatic updates enabled to get those installations to the latest release version of the web browser.

Most Firefox installations are updated automatically thanks to the built-in update functionality of the web browser. Stable and beta versions of Firefox check every 12 hours for updates while Nightly channel versions every two hours.

Whenever you open a video page on the video hosting site YouTube, it starts to play from the beginning. While that is not an issue if you never opened the video before, it is one if you want to resume a video that you played before.

Update: YouTube seems to have its own resume feature, but it only is available under certain conditions. You need to be signed in, the video you are playing needs to be at least 20 minutes, and you need to have watched at least one minute of it.

Sometimes when you want to delete, move or rename a folder or file Windows refuses to do so. You may receive a message that the action can't be completed because the folder or file is open in another program, and options to try again or to cancel the operation.

Trying again won't usually make any difference and while you can go hunting for the program that keeps the file or folder locked, it may not be that easy to do so manually.

Web browsers such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox use Google Safe Browsing to protect users before potentially malicious websites are loaded.

This works by checking sites against Safe Browsing's database to find out whether malware was hosted or distributed on the website in a 90 day period.

When you visit a flagged site in a browser supporting Safe Browsing, a warning page is displayed to you instead of the website itself.

Cisco announced back in October 2013 that it would release an open source H.264 codec in the near future that would be made available to open source projects so that these projects could integrate the codec into their applications without having to worry about licensing fees or integrating proprietary code.

Github was selected to host the OpenH264 repository and progress has been made ever since the announcement was made.

If you are the type of person who enables silent mode, either vibration or complete silence, on your phone usually when you get out or to specific places and locations such as work, the cinema or a crowded restaurant, you may want to use automation instead to avoid situations where you forget to silence your phone.

While some smartphone owners do not seem to have issues with it, some even seem to embrace loud phone conversations or music that plays so loud that everyone around hears it as well, it may be an unpleasant experience for others.

If you want to use your smartphone for communication, you either have to be connected to a network of sorts to do so, or use short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth to do so.

There are however situations where all of these communication options become unavailable. Say you are on a camping trip in the wilderness and lost a group member.

Chance is, you don't have any reception and since that group member is not close by, all the close-range options are not working as well.

Many computer systems are not overly well protected when someone else manages to get physical access to the computer. This can be a family member, a colleague at work, your boss, or a thief who just stole your laptop at Starbucks.

While user accounts are usually secured by a password, the computer may not always be locked which in turn means that a third-party can access most programs, files and information on it unhindered.

Google Chrome users who are regulars on Google's video hosting platform YouTube have been forced to use the HTML5 player on the website for some time now.

Google provided Chrome users as well as users of other browsers a choice in this regard in the past.

The HTML5 player was opt-in for example which meant that users had to visit the YouTube HTML5 Video Player page to switch from Flash to it if they wanted to use it as the main player on the site.

What would you do if your backup program would suddenly turn into a paid application asking you to sign up for a paid account to keep accessing the files that you have backed up?

If that is not communicated in the app or on the website prior to it happening?

This sounds like yet another ransomware ploy but that is not the case this time.

Keeping your Windows system up to date can be quite the time-consuming task if you do it manually, as you need to check for software updates regularly.

While some programs ship with update checking capabilities, the majority does not. While you could go ahead now and check the websites of the programs to see if updates are available, it would probably take hours to do so depending on how many programs are available on the PC.

Update Checkers automate the process at least for part of the installed software.

If you are a regular on the video hosting website YouTube, you may have had issues identifying music used in some of the videos.

This is generally not a problem for single music videos, as they are properly tagged more often than not, but it is an issue for many non-music videos that get uploaded to YouTube as no information about the music used in them may be listed in the description or title.

If you have a YouTube account, you may sometimes want to ask the author of the video about it and if you are lucky, may even get an answer that helps you out.