News
Operating Systems
Microsoft announced this week that it wants to improve its approach to app pinning and app defaults in Windows. The company has been criticized in the past for using techniques to make some of its programs the default on Windows and making it difficult in Windows 11 for changing defaults.
Now, with Microsoft promise comes the following commitment:
Microsoft will introduce default options regarding app defaults on Windows and pinning.
These new methods apply to Microsoft and third-party developers once they are implemented.
No ETA on the features, but a likely candidate is this year’s feature update for Windows 11.
Some users noticed drive slowdowns after installation of the March 2023 update for Windows 11. Boot time doubled for one user, another noticed that benchmark scores halved after installation of the update.
Microsoft did confirm a new bug this week that affects some Windows 11 22H2 devices:
After installing "Update for Microsoft Defender Antivirus antimalware platform - KB5007651 (Version 1.0.2302.21002)", you might receive a security notification or warning stating that "Local Security protection is off. Your device may be vulnerable." and once protections are enabled, your Windows device might persistently prompt that a restart is required.
Microsoft suggests to ignore the warning notifications and ignore restart notifications, if LSA is enabled and the device was restarted at least once. No ETA on a permanent fix for the issue.
Microsoft plans to change the target for Windows’ preview updates, which are optional. Starting in April 2023, these updates will always be released in the fourth week of the month.
Amazon Linux 2023 was released this week. It is a cloud-optimized Linux distribution, which has been available since 2010.
Every generation of Amazon Linux distribution is secured, optimized for the cloud, and receives long-term AWS support.
Mobile
Browser
An update for Microsoft Edge Stable introduced the new PDF viewer, powered by Adobe. Microsoft announced some time ago that it would remove the native Edge PDF viewer to replace it with Adobe’s viewer. Microsoft promised that functionality would remain the same, at least, and revealed that a new Adobe subscription button would be displayed in the PDF viewer interface
This button would allow users to subscribe to a commercial plan to gain access to additional features. I described how to get rid of it here.
Tor Browser 12.0.4 was released this week. It is a bug fix and maintenance release for the most part, and now based on Firefox 102.9 ESR.
Firefox 111.0.1 was released yesterday. It addresses a single crash on macOS systems.
Brave Browser on the desktop has a new VPN button, which is an ad for a commercial VPN and Firewall solution by Guardian, which Brave integrated into the browser. A right-click on the VPN button displays an option to remove it.
Yandex discovered that faking to be Chrome reduced crashes and improved performance of the Chromium-based browsers. In this particular case, the culprit is hardcoded process names that drivers use for optimizations.
Popular content blocker uBlock Origin is now showing the readiness status of the extension at browser launch. It visualizes a problem, especially in Chrome 110 and later, which has websites loaded before uBlock can start its work.
The three new icons are:
Yellow shield icon: uBlock Origin is loading filters currently, but is not yet ready.
Yellow shield icon with exclamation mark: Ublock Origin is loading filters currently, but network requests have been made already, which the extension could not process.
Regular shield icon with yellow exclamation mark: uBlock Origin is operational, but content on the current site has not been processed properly by the extension.
Reloading of the site in question should resolve this.
Opera Software introduced AI Prompts and ChatGPT support in the stable version of the browser today. ChatGPT gives sidebar access to the AI, AI Prompts suggests actions, such as summarizing an article, based on text selections or the entire webpage.
Both features require a free sign-up and come with paid upgrades.
Privacy and Security
The site Fingerprint claims that its commercial fingerprinting solution has an accuracy of 99.5%. I ran some tests, and it did very well if the same browser was used. It identified the browser even when using private browsing mode, clearing all site data or changing IP addresses. What it could not do was identify users if the browser was changed, or if Tor Browser, or Firefox with resist fingerprinting was used.
This week, researchers discovered that Google Pixel devices were not properly erasing original image data from cropped or edited screenshots taken on the devices. Yesterday, the same researcher discovered that the Windows 10 and 11 screenshot tools are vulnerable to a similar issue. It is a rarer issue, as users have to save, then crop the image, and then save it again to the same filename, for it to become exploitable.
Software Updates
The first Rufus 3.22 Beta comes with a new feature to disable BitLocker device encryption in the Windows User Experience dialog, and SHA-1 and SHA-256 acceleration support if the processor supports it.
Gaming
The Steam Spring Sale has started. It runs from March 16 to 23, and features thousands of discounted games. If you want a tip: get Brotato. It is available for just $3.99 and a steal for that. It is an area shooter with lots of different characters and strategies to try out. It may not look like much, but it is tremendous fun, if you like the genre, or don’t mind trying out new things.
Other
Microsoft launched Image Creator as part of Bing Chat and Microsoft Edge yesterday. It is based on Dall-E and users may instruct the AI to create images based on their descriptions.
There is a public option available to test it, but it does require a Microsoft Account.
Turns out that the makers of Raymond.CC have become active again. New articles get posted there regularly right now, always a good visit.
Google has opened a waitlist for Bard, its AI companion. Sign-ups are only available for users from the UK and US at the time.
Article(s)
A VPN for $1.99 per month: a closer look at Google One’s Basic plan
Google announced recently that it is making available its VPN to all Google One customers. Previously, customers had to subscribe to the costly 2 terabyte plan to gain access to the VPN. Now, anyone who pays $1.99 for Google One Basic gets access to the VPN as well, without limitations.
A VPN for $1.99 is a solid offer, considering that users do get other benefits, such as an upgrade to 100 gigabytes of storage space and advanced Google Photos editing features.
Admittedly, there are some drawbacks to the offer. The main one is that the VPN service is only available in a small number of countries, including the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Germany, Italy, and Spain.
Subscribers can use the VPN from any region, but they need to reside in one of the supported countries to gain access to it in first place.
Those opposed to the idea of handing over data to Google won’t be convinced by the improvement to the service to give it a try.
Google claims that it is never logging network traffic, including DNS, IP addresses of the devices that connect to its VPN, bandwidth used and connection timestamps. In addition, it states in the VPN by Google One white paper that it separates the user’s identity from the data tunnel that handles the network traffic.
Google One VPN supports a few features that one expects from a VPN, but it lacks others. On the positive side, Google’s VPN supports split tunneling, a feature to use the VPN connection and the regular Internet connection on a device at the same time. The VPN supports a kill switch next to that, which will block Internet connectivity if the VPN connection drops.
On the negative side, Google One VPN supports just one protocol — IKEv2/IPSec — and not the newer Wireguard or established protocols such as OpenVPN. The VPN lacks support for common features, such as selecting a custom DNS provider, basic firewall features that block malware, or the ability to select a specific server or servers in a specific region to connect to.
With Google One VPN, there is no such thing as selecting a regional server, e.g., to connect to the home country while abroad. This is a major use case that Google One VPN lacks.
There are a few use cases for Google’s VPN solution, but not nearly as many as what other VPNs offer. The main use case is protection of the Internet connection, especially when the device is connected to insecure networks, e.g., public wireless networks. A VPN is ideal for that, but Google’s solution lacks automation. Users need to enable the VPN connection manually each time to protect the data flow.
The second use case improves privacy by hiding the device’s IP address.
In closing: Google One offers relatively cheap access to a VPN, but the VPN lacks basic features that limit it significantly. It is a nice add-on feature that may be used to protect Internet traffic when a device is connected to an insecure network and may improve user privacy by hiding the device’s IP address.
Avoiding bad YouTube recommendations is quite easy
More than 3.5 million videos are uploaded to YouTube every day. That is a lot of video content and a constant battle to get on the good side of YouTube’s recommendations system.
Google never revealed how the recommendation system works, but users who have spend their fair share on YouTube watching videos may have noticed that it sometimes acts erratic.
A click on the wrong video and suddenly, most recommendations are about the same topic. While it is sometimes easy to get new recommendations by YouTube based on viewing habits, it is sometimes extremely difficult to get them flushed out again.
A miss-click on a video may show suggestions based on it months after the click happened.
A couple of options exist to avoid YouTube’s recommendation system going wild. Here are a few suggestions:
Use private browsing mode for certain videos. Also called Incognito Mode in Chrome, it can be launched in most browsers from the main menu or through the use of shortcuts. YouTube does not link the watched videos to the actual session.
Avoid signing in to YouTube. Without signing in, YouTube may display fewer recommendations, if any at all.
Use a different web browser for certain YouTube activities. May also mix and match with a different account, if available.
Use a third-party frontend for YouTube, e.g. Invidious, to watch YouTube videos.
Invidious is particularly good, as it comes without advertisement and is privacy focused.
Links
Intel Thunder Bay Is Officially Canceled, Linux Driver Code To Be Removed
Learning the ropes: why Germany is building risk into its playgrounds
NVIDIA's big AI moment is here