What's New

A security notice was posted on the official Linux Mint blog on January 9, 2017. It informs users of the Linux distribution about the recently discovered security issues in modern processors called Meltdown and Spectre, and how these affect Linux Mint.

The notice contains instructions to protect Linux Mint systems from potential attacks that target the vulnerabilities. It covers web browsers, Nvidia drivers, and the Linux kernel.

Welcome to the first Microsoft Patch Day review of the year 2018. Microsoft released security updates for all supported versions of Windows and other company products on January 9, 2018.

This overview offers information on the release. It covers all security updates and non-security updates that Microsoft released since the last Patch Day in December.

VirusTotal Graph is a new feature of the popular virus scanning service that visualizes the relationship between files, URLs, domains and IP addresses of analyzed data sets.

Virustotal is a handy service as it lets anyone upload files to scan them using more than 60 different antivirus engines. The service is not without criticism though; software developers have criticized it in the past for including engines that are prone to false positives.

The Wi-Fi Alliance announced the WPA3 standard officially on Monday. The new wireless network security standard will replace WPA2 eventually.

WPA2, which stands for Wi-Fi Protected Access 2, is the current security standard for wireless networks.

Microsoft released an out-of-band security update for Windows on January 4, 2018, to fix vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown.

Nvidia released the Nvidia GeForce Game Reader 390.65 WHQL driver for GeForce graphics cards on January 8th, 2018.

The update improves support for specific games, includes fixes, and patches The Spectre variant 2 security issue.

The CVE ID of the issue is CVE-2017-5753; Nvidia’s issue number is 1975134.

Microsoft published security updates for all supported versions of Windows recently that protect systems running Windows from Meltdown and Spectre attacks.

The company released updates for Windows 10 via Windows Update. Cumulative update patches for all supported operating systems are available on the Microsoft Update Catalog website as well.

At today’s CES 2018, Nvidia revealed what the company calls Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGD). Nvidia calls it the “world’s first big-screen PC gaming display” that is optimized for PC gaming.

YSP Dermatology Image Database is a free cross-platform program that provides you with imagery and information of various skin conditions.

The program is designed for patients and regular people, and not intended for doctors, pharmacists or nurses. It may be used for educational purposes in most countries though.

The program’s main purpose is to provide patients with accurate dermatology images and information. The images can be useful for monitoring skin conditions and range from insect bites and burns to various types of cancer.

Ghacks published the article Microsoft Edge Annoyances back in mid-2016. Edge was about a year at that time, and it was still largely unusable (for me) then and there.

The article that you read right now looks back at the annoyances to find out if Microsoft resolved them. I will mention other issues that I have with Edge that I did not mention back then.

I use Edge on my Surface Pro 4 laptop almost exclusively to get a feel for the browser. Things have gotten better in the past year as far as I can tell.

Waterfox 56.0.2 is out. The new version of the web browser patches security issues that made the round recently.

In short: security researchers found flaws in processors that attackers can use to read data in memory that they should not have access to.

Mozilla plans to roll out a change in Firefox 59, out 13.3.2018, that gives users better options to block notification, microphone, camera and location requests.

More and more websites and services display prompts to users when they are accessed. Many want permission to send notifications to the browser and others may want access to the microphone, camera, and location requests.

The friends over on DonationCoder hold an annual software development event called NANY — New Apps for the New Year — in which programmers pledge to release programs and apps.

The results of the NANY 2017 event have been published on the DonationCoder forum, and you may head over to the forum to download any app or program from there for free.

Passwords are everywhere. You use them to sign in to operating systems and devices, web services, email accounts, computer games, audio and video chat services, or websites that you have user accounts at.

If you are tech savvy, you know that it is important to use unique secure passwords for accounts. This is best done with the help of a password manager unless you only use a single account on the Internet.

Logan Kart is a cart racing game for Windows PCs that plays a lot like Mario Kart. Mario Kart is probably the most popular fun-racing game out there, but it is only available for Nintendo devices.

Logan Kart is a free game for PCs that brings some of the excitement of Mario Kart to PC. While the developers took some of the things that make Mario Kart great, Logon Kart is not a pure Mario Kart clone for PC.