What's New

Paint.net 4.1 is out; the new version of the popular image editor for Windows introduces new functionality and changes that improve the user experience.

The new version is the first desktop release in more than six months. The developer of the image editor released two new versions of Paint.net in January 2018 but those have been the only two updates for the program up until the release of Paint.net 4.1.

Paint.net 4.0.20, released in January 2018 was a big release as well. It introduced support for a dark theme and other improvements.

Tails 3.9 is a new version of the privacy-focused live operating system that is based on GNU/Linux. The new version of Tails includes security updates and major changes such as native VeraCrypt integration or usability improvements when installing additional software.

Bittorrent Inc, which was recently sold, has launched the first public version of uTorrent Web, a web-based torrent client optimized for streaming media.

While uTorrent is under heavy criticism ever since Bittorrent Inc began integrating adware, offers, advertisement and other unwanted things in the client, it is up to this day a very popular client for seeding and downloading torrent files.

The Tor Project team has released Tor Browser 8.0, a brand new version of the web browser to the public today.

Tor Browser is based on Mozilla Firefox; more precisely on Mozilla's Extended Support Release version of the Firefox web browser. Tor Browser includes Tor which users of the web browser can use to connect to the Tor network to anonymize their Internet connection and various improvements especially when it comes to online privacy.

Privacy Enhanced Mode for Embedded YouTube is a browser extension for the Mozilla Firefox web browser that enables the privacy enhancing mode for all embedded YouTube videos that you encounter on the Internet.

I talked about YouTube's Privacy Enhanced Mode here on ComTek4u this year as I enabled it for all embedded YouTube videos here on this site to comply with the GDRP, the General Data Protection Regulation.

Users of Microsoft's Skype messaging application for desktop and mobile operating systems can use a new call recording feature that Microsoft built into the application recently.

Call recording functionality has been a much requested feature and while there have been options in the past to record Skype calls, all of them required the use of third-party software or direct audio & video recording.

Google started to roll out Google Chrome 69 Stable to all supported systems yesterday. The new version of the web browser arrived in time for the browser's 10 year anniversary.

While Google's release notes are usually short and not very descriptive when it comes to new features or changes, it is different this time around thanks to the anniversary.

Microsoft released a batch of updates for supported versions of Microsoft Office yesterday. The released updates for Microsoft Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 are non-security updates only. Microsoft will release security updates for Office on the second Tuesday of September, on September 11, 2018.

The released updates are only applicable for MSI-installed versions of Microsoft Office and not for Office 365.

Only one update was released for Microsoft Office 2010, three for Microsoft Office 2013, and nine for Microsoft Office 2016.

Welcome to the Mozilla Firefox 62.0 release information overview. Mozilla plans to release Firefox 62.0 for desktop and Android devices on September 5, 2018.

All Firefox channels have received updates: Firefox Stable to version 62.0, Firefox Beta to version 63.0, Firefox Nightly to version 64.0, and Firefox ESR to Firefox ESR 60.2

The new version of Firefox ESR is a milestone release, at least for Firefox ESR users who are still using Firefox ESR 52.x as the version is no longer supported and Firefox 60.x does not support legacy extensions anymore.

WhatsApp backups created by the built-in backup option of the messaging client on Android are not encrypted when they are stored on Google Drive.

WhatsApp users on Android can enable the application's automatic backup functionality to store backups on the device itself or upload backups to Google's Google Drive web storage service.

Backups are useful as they can be used to restore data on the device they were created on initially but also on new devices of the user so that media and messages become available on the new device as well.

Mozilla tests a new feature in Firefox Nightly at the moment that suggests extensions to users when they visit certain sites on the Internet.

The recommendation feature is turned off by default and needs to be enabled at this point. Extensions may increase the user experience on sites they are designed for, for example by blocking advertisement, enhancing search functionality, or improving privacy.

Chrome users who run version 69.x of the web browser will notice that Google changed how the address of webpages is displayed in the browser.

Chrome displayed the scheme, the http:// or https:// part of the address, previously in front of the address which highlighted the type of connection, e.g. a secure connection using encryption for https, to the user.

Starting with Chrome 69, Chrome omits http and https from the address. and replaced "secure" with a lock icon for https sites.

SingleFile is a cross-browser open source extension for Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera to save any webpage you come across as a single HTML file.

All modern web browsers come with options to save webpages; all you have to do is press Ctrl-S to save the webpage to the local system. While that works okay most of the time, it is not optimal for many use cases as a folder with required files is saved for each HTML document you save in the browser.

England-based Serif Ltd. released the first beta version of Affinity Publisher, a desktop publishing application for Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

KeePass is an open source password manager for the Windows operating system (and other operating systems thanks to ports) that ticks all the right boxes for me.

While I can understand the appeal of cloud-based password managers -- access your passwords everywhere as long as you have your credentials for the account at hand -- it is always overshadowed by the fact that your data is saved in the cloud which has privacy and security implications.