What's New

Google announced today on the official Chromium blog that it will improve the Chrome browser’s protection against deceptive inline installations.

When Chrome launched, extensions could be installed from anywhere. Sites sprang up that hosted multiple extensions, and any developer or company could offer extensions on their sites. The Chrome Web Store was released in December 2010, more than two years after the release of the first version of Google Chrome.

Google changed the process in 2012 when it introduced inline installations as a way to better protect users.

NoBot is a portable spyware and malware scanner for the Windows operating system that focuses on detecting bots, spyware, and other types of malware.

I like portable security applications as I run them regularly on Windows machines as second opinion scanners. Fact is, no antivirus solution is perfect, and some may even introduce issues of their own on user systems.

A second opinion scanner may find threats that the resident security solution did not detect. It may, on the other hand, introduce issues of its own.

Mozilla released Firefox 57.0.4 to the Stable browser channel on January 4, 2018. The new version of Firefox comes with two timing-based mitigations designed to protect Firefox users against Meltdown and Spectre attacks.

Meltdown and Spectre are designed vulnerabilities in modern processors that allow attackers to read virtual memory arbitrarily. What this means is that attackers may read the memory of computer systems to steal passwords and other sensitive data.

Opera Software released Opera 50 to the Stable release channel today on January 4th, 2018. The new version of the Opera web browser comes with anti-cryptocurrency mining support, improved VR360 support, and other improvements.

The new version of the web browser is already available via the web browser’s automatic update functionality and as a separate download on the Opera website.

Microsoft released out-of-band security updates for Windows yesterdays that address a recently revealed major security bug in Intel, AMD and ARM processors.

The updates are filed under the IDs KB4056888 , KB4056890. KB4056891, KB4056892, and KB405689. All updates share the following description:

Security updates to Internet Explorer, Microsoft Scripting Engine, Microsoft Edge, Windows Graphics, Windows Kernel, Windows Subsystem for Linux, and the Windows SMB Server.

The release of Linux Mint 18.3 in November 2017 put the development focus of the team on Linux Mint 19, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution.

Linux Mint 19 is the first significant release of the operating system since June 2016 when Linux Mint 17, codename Sarah, was released by the team.

Fakespot is a free online service that helps you uncover fake reviews on Amazon, Yelp, and Tripadvisor by analyzing reviews and grading them.

Most shopping, travel and business listing sites support user reviews. Reviews are designed to assist Internet users in making decisions. Should you eat in restaurant A or B, or buy that motherboard or another one.

Microsoft released updates for Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 yesterday on the January 2018 Office non-security Patch Day.

Microsoft reserves the first Tuesday of the month for the release of non-security patches for Microsoft Office. The second Tuesday of a month brings security patches for Office, Windows, and other Microsoft products.

The company released updates for Microsoft Office 2013 and 2016 only. Patches were not released for Office 2010 or 2007.

Ever since Microsoft released Windows 10, users and administrators had options to upgrade Windows 7 or Windows 8 systems to Windows 10 for free.

Microsoft lost a lot of trust in the beginning with its Get Windows 10 campaign as it pushed harder and harder until the whole campaign backfired.

You may get the error message api-ms-win-core-libraryloader-l1-1-1.dll is missing when you try to upgrade a PC running Windows 7 to Windows 10.

The error is not limited to the upgrade from Windows 7 to Windows 10 and the Windows10UpgraderApp.exe. Windows 7 users ran into the error when they tried to run other programs on Windows 7 as well, but the bulk of issues is caused by Microsoft’s upgrade tool.

If you visit Yahoo Search right now from a location in the United States, the chance is high that you get more ads on the search results page than organic results.

It is quite easy to set up virtual machines using VirtualBox and other virtualization programs. You configure a few parameters such as disk size or memory, select an ISO image of an operating system, and wait for the program to create the virtual machine and install the operating system on it.

Virtual machines are useful for many different tasks. You can use them to test updates or new software programs, to browse the Internet, and to chain VPN connections.

Visual C++ Installer / Uninstaller is a free program for Microsoft Windows devices to install or uninstall Visual C++ runtimes in one swift operation.

We talked about Visual C++ Redistributables before here on Ghacks and how you may get an ever-increasing number of them installed on your Windows PC over time.

Grammarly is an online spell and grammar checker for the English language. It is available as a free and limited version and a premium version.

I always wanted to try the premium version of Grammarly but found it to be quite an expensive affair. Grammarly Premium is available as a subscription service; the lowest price, if you pay annually, is $11.66 right now. That's $139.95 for spell and grammar checking.