What's New

Security company McAfee announced the acquisition of TunnelBear, a Toronto-based company best known for its VPN product TunnelBear, today.

NordVPN is a fairly popular VPN service provider that supports many of the features that users come to expect from a service of its kind this day and age.

It claims that it has a strict no logging policy, allows P2P traffic, offers servers in a lot of countries and regions, and does not restrict user bandwidth.

When you set up Windows 10 on a computer or in a virtual machine, a privacy settings screen is displayed during setup which lets you change some privacy-related settings before the first start of the operating system.

The page lists options to turn privacy-related settings off, as all are enabled by default. You may use it to switch from the collection of data from full to basic, disable tailored experiences (Edge uses less battery than your browser), and turn off location-based experiences or speech recognition.

Any.Run, an interactive malware analysis tool based in Russia opened its doors to the public yesterday. A free community version is available at the time which allows anyone to register an account and start analyzing Windows programs, scripts and other files.

While you can use established services like Virustotal to analyze files, most are not interactive. Any.Run supports a full sandboxed environment that you may use to analyze files interactively.

Malwarebytes, maker of the security software of the same name, released Malwarebytes 3.4.4 for the Microsoft Windows operating system yesterday.

The new version is the first stable release for Windows in 2018. Existing Malwarebytes installations should pick up the update automatically as automatic updates are enabled by default.

Google started the rollout of the web browser Google Chrome 65 for desktop and mobile systems earlier today.

The release post on the official Chrome Releases blog does not reveal much about changes, improvements or new features but an hour-long combing through of the official changelog revealed several interesting changes in Chrome 65.

Microsoft released non-security updates for Microsoft Office 2010, 2013 and 2016 yesterday. The company releases non-security updates for Office on the first Tuesday of each month, and security updates along with security updates for Windows and other Microsoft products on the second Tuesday of each month.

Note that the updates listed below are only available for Microsoft Installer (MSI) based editions of Office.

The updates don't apply to click-to-run editions of Microsoft Office such as Microsoft Office 365 Home.

Netflix announced plans to improve the built-in parental control functionality of the streaming service to give parents more control over what minors may watch on the service.

The service's parental controls are straightforward right now. Parents set up a four digit PIN and a maturity level in the Settings.

One of the really confusing things for users who are new to messing with the command line, can be trying to search with specifics. A useful little tool for aiding in this process, is called grep, or “global regular expression print,” which will search for regular statements in anything you pipe it through, and show you matches for what you looked for (if any exist.)

A rather straightforward example of this, before we continue, would be to use grep to search through the list of processes given with the command ps aux, to search for a specific application.

There is a terminal command called alias, that many users may not know exists, but likely will be very happy to find out about it.

The alias command, allows you to redefine what you type, to make things happen. It gives you the option to map large commands to an alias that you may run then instead of the large command to execute it.

A very straightforward (although risky) example of this would be:

alias dla="rm -rf *"

The developers of Pale Moon released two new versions of the browser in the past couple of days. Pale Moon 27.8.0 was released on March 2, 2018 and the follow-up release Pale Moon 27.8.1 on March 6, 2018.

Pale Moon users who want to update to the newest version may do so from within the application. A click on the Pale Moon button and the selection of Help > About Pale Moon displays the current version of the browser in a new window. A click on "check for updates" runs an update check.

Windows Firewall Control is a standalone program for Microsoft Windows PCs that extends the functionality of the built-in Windows Firewall and improves manageability significantly.

A free version is provided but you need to donate to the developer to get a lifetime license for the registered version which adds a notification system for outbound connections and an option to create temporary rules.

Microsoft released the cumulative update KB4090913 for Windows 10 version 1709 (Fall Creators Update) on March 5, 2018. The update fixes an issue with some USB devices connected to the Windows 10 device.

Nemp is an open source music player for Microsoft Windows PCs with a rich feature set that runs on very old versions of Windows as well as all supported versions of the operating system.

Nemp, which stands for Noch Ein MP3 Player (Yet Another MP3 Player), is offered as a portable program. You can run the music player without installation, for instance on a USB Drive that stores your music collection.

Windows Firewall Control 5.1 is the latest version of the security program for Windows that extends the functionality of the built-in firewall called Windows Firewall.

We reviewed Windows Firewall Control back in 2009 for the first time and concluded that it was an excellent application for Windows systems that were configured to use Windows Firewall for protection.