What's New

Microsoft updated the growing list of known issues with Windows 10 version 1809, the October 2018 Update, on November 21, 2018.

A new entry highlights that Microsoft blocks the upgrade to the new feature update on devices with certain Intel display drivers.

When you connect to a network for the first time in Windows, Windows saves the network profile and assigns a name to it.

Connections using Ethernet (wired) use a generic name such as Network 7 usually while wireless networks the SSID of the Wi-Fi network the device connected to.

Some users and administrators may dislike the non-descriptive nature of wired network connections on Windows.

Good news is that it is possible to rename network profile names to make them more descriptive on the operating system.

It seems that the twice per year feature update release schedule for Windows 10 is taking its toll when it comes to release quality.

Microsoft had to stop the distribution of the latest feature update for Windows 10 that it released on October 2, 2018 officially only days later after some customers reported that personal data was deleted during the course of the upgrade.

Microsoft confirmed that the issue and has fixed it already; the changes are currently being tested on the Windows Insider channel before the roll-out of the update continues.

Microsoft revealed a moment ago how much money it charges customers who would like to get their hands on the company's new Office 2019 Professional. The new version of Office is listed for $439 in the Microsoft Store in the United States.

The Internet Archive has just added more than 1000 new arcade games to the Internet Arcade. Revealed in 2014 for the first time as a way to preserve classic computer and arcade games, and provide users with options to play these games using emulation, it is now one of the largest arcade sites on the Internet.

SpecuCheck is an open source program for Microsoft Windows devices that reveals the state of Spectre and Meltdown mitigations on the system it is run on.

In particular, it returns the state of software and hardware mitigations against CVE-2017-5754 (Meltdown), CVE-2017-5715 (Spectre v2), CVE-2018-3260 (Foreshadow), and CVE-2018-3639 (Spectre v4).

Google announced a number of changes to Google Chrome's extensions system designed to make the use of extensions more secure.

The company has been in a constant battle against misuse of extensions that are either outright malicious or problematic from a privacy perspective.

Reachability Cursor: one-handed mode mouse pointer is a new application for Google Android to control big Android devices with a single hand.

Smartphones seem to get bigger with every passing year; while that is great on the one hand as that usually goes hand in hand with a bigger and better screen, it is not so great on the other hand for a number of reasons.

A newly discovered bug in the desktop version of the Firefox web browser may crash the browser and under certain circumstances the entire operating system.

Discovered and revealed by security researcher Sabri Haddouche, the bug causes the Firefox web browser to crash when a specifically prepared website is loaded in the web browser.

What happens then depends on the operating system. Firefox displays the browser's Crash Reporter prompt on Linux and Mac OS X which may be used to inform Mozilla about the crash and to restart Firefox.

Mozilla plans to launch a new anti-tracking method in Firefox 65 that blocks tracking resources from accessing storage on all desktop platforms. The new policy is designed specifically to limit cross-site tracking while minimizing site access and rendering issues.

The actual implementation depends largely on tests in pre-release versions of the Firefox web browser. Mozilla runs a Shield study in Firefox Beta 63 at the moment.

Mozilla released Firefox 62.0.2 on September 21, 2018 to the Release channel. The new version of the web browser is a minor update that addresses bugs and security issues in Firefox Stable.

The organization released Firefox 62.0 on September 4, 2018, a major version release that included security fixes, bug fixes and new features.

A group of administrators and users who tried to install the August or September 2018 patches on Windows 7 devices reported that the update installation would fail with error 0x8000FFFF.

Mozilla Firefox is one of the few web browsers out there that gives users and system administrators options to turn off Telemetry.

Telemetry, which Mozilla introduced in Firefox 7 back in 2011, provides data to Mozilla which the organization uses to refine its products.

While that is often beneficial to users, for instance when issues are detected and fixed, it has also been used in the past to justify the removal of features from Firefox. The removal of features based on Telemetry led to my suggestion in 2013 to keep Telemetry enabled to make "your voice" count.

The Firefox web browser will soon block autoplaying media on webpages visited in the web browser more reliable.

Mozilla added options to control HMTL5 video autoplay in 2015 in Firefox and while the functionality worked fine on many sites, it did not work on others.

Microsoft released new cumulative updates for supported versions of the company's Windows 10 operating system on September 20, 2018.

The updates KB4458469, KB4457136, KB4457141 and KB4457127 address a huge number of issues in the Windows 10 versions 1803, 1709, 1703 and 1607.