Tech News Weekly: Issue 49
Modern cars are bad for privacy, WordPad being abandoned, identifying locations photos were taken from, and lots of changes for users in the European Union (for the better, this time)
News
Operating Systems
Windows 11 version 21H2, the first release version of Windows 11, reaches end of servicing in October. Most users may want to upgrade to Windows 11 version 22H2, which is supported until October 2024.
Windows 11 users who feel that File Explorer is rather slow at opening (some) folders may want to try pressing F11 on the keyboard twice. While not guaranteed to speed things up for everyone, using the keyboard shortcut to toggle Fullscreen Mode does improve loading times for some. It is definitely worth a shot.
Future versions of Windows will have TLS 1.0 and 1.1 disabled by default. There are still options to re-enable these protocols, if needed. The main reason for doing so is compatibility with apps and services that require them. Most Windows users won’t run into issues once the protocols are disabled though.
WordPad won’t be a part of Windows anymore going forward. Microsoft set the status of the rich text editor to deprecated. What this means is not really clear at this point, but a likely outcome is that WordPad won’t ship with Windows anymore. This leaves users with programs that they need to install to view RFT, DOC and some other document formats. My suggestion is LibreOffice, but Microsoft Office works as well.
Microsoft used a, rather nasty, popup in Windows to get users of Google Chrome to change their search engine to Bing. Microsoft used a separate application, BGAUpsell.EXE, for the campaign, and the general consensus is that it is clearly a PUP, a potentially unwanted program.
Mobile
Fairphone 5 is out. The repair-friendly Android device promises at least 8 years of support, better sustainability, and better repairability. If one of the supported major components gets damaged or malfunctions, users may buy a replacement and repair their device manually. No longer necessary to send in the device to replace a battery, SIM slot or some other components.
It looks that Android 14 may not be released in September 2023 to manufacturers. The release could be delayed by a month to October, and there is a chance that it will hit on the same day that Google is revealing its Pixel 8 device (on October 4, 2023).
Browser
Google continues to push its Ads Privacy system to more and more Chrome users. It is a good idea to remind users that they may turn this thing off in Chrome and also on Android.
Chrome users may load chrome://settings/adPrivacy in the browser’s address bar to check the status of each of the Ad privacy settings and access controls to toggle the functionality to off.
Privacy and Security
Meta considers introducing ad-free versions of Facebook and Instagram in the European Union. The move is seen as an attempt to please EU regulators and avoid further scrutiny and ally privacy concerns.
Speaking of privacy and the EU, Microsoft is also admitting defeat. The company’s Windows 11 operating system won’t enforce the use of Microsoft Edge anymore for certain links for users of the European Economic Area. Instead, the default system browser is used. Users from outside the EEA still have to cope with Edge, as Microsoft is not implementing the change for them.
Reports suggest that Google may be removing links that Google customers saved using the “Saved” feature. The Saved feature is integrated into several Google apps and services. The removed links, judging from reports so far, appear to have received DMCA takedown requests in search.
It looks as if the LastPass hack of last year may have something to do with an increase in attacks against owners of cryptocurrency. Krebs on Security has the details, but it looks a common denominator in the attacks is that most users have or had a LastPass account.
Attackers who manage to obtain a user’s seed phrase gain access to the funds and may transfer them using the information.
Twitter user Rainbolt is good at determining the flight number and seat an aerial photo was taken from. Soon, AI may be even better at identifying locations photos were taken from. The discussion on Hacker News is worth a read, as it touches on AI and provides additional information.
Software Releases and Updates
CPU-Z 2.07 introduces support for Intel’s new processor branding, new Intel processors, and AMD Radeon graphics cards.
PowerToys 0.73.0 Stable brings the new Crop and Lock tool with it. The tool has two purposes: crop an existing application window into a smaller window, so that it has to cope with the available space, or create a thumbnail of an application window. Does not sound too useful, let me know if you find any use for it.
QuickSetDNS 1.35 adds high DPI support, a new button for the Set Active DNS option, a new double-click action, and new Enter-key action. Good tool to quickly set and change DNS settings on Windows.
Gaming and Entertainment
Google is still tweaking its anti-ad-blocking tests on YouTube. Next to the dreaded “you are using an adblocker” prompts, Google appears to be experimenting with blocking videos if content blockers are detected. Users of uBlock Origin may want to try clearing the cache and updating the ad filters, as this may resolve this new attempt.
Hardware
ASUS has taken over Intel’s NUCs, Next Unit of Compute, business. A NUC is often described as a mini PC, but it is actually more than that. Now, ASUS has published information about its plans going forward and revealed some of its products:
NUC 13 Compute Element — Take advantage of modular computing for cost-efficient builds with NUC 13 Compute Element—featuring 13th Gen Intel® Core™ processors and the latest in memory, I/O, and wireless connectivity.
NUC 13 Pro — NUC 13 Pro Mini PCs, Kits, and Boards offer the perfect combination of size, performance, sustainability, and reliability to drive modern business.
NUC 13 Extreme — Prey on the competition with NUC 13 Extreme, the first NUC to combine support for triple-slot 12” graphics cards with dual-channel DDR5 memory and Wi-Fi 6E.
ASUS looks to expand the product portfolio, which traditionally focused on mini PCs for office use, to niches such as gaming or industrial equipment.
Other
RSS is wonderful. It is a time saver and helps millions of, usually advanced, users to keep up with new articles and content on many Internet blogs and sites. Some browsers display RSS icons, but it is sometimes difficult to find an RSS feed, especially on non-blogs.
RSS Feed Asap is a handy tool to reveal the RSS feed of a site, if available. All you have to do is paste the URL into the form on the site and hit the Get Feed button to have the service retrieve it for you.
The service works on blogs and many other sites, including YouTube, Spotify, iTunes and SoundCloud. It is a handy service to quickly get the, first only, RSS feed of a site.
OneDrive users who use the albums feature of the service extensively will soon see a doubling of the used storage space for photos included in albums. Microsoft plans to roll out the change in mid-October to all OneDrive users. A temporary storage bump is granted for a year, but afterwards, it may result in user’s running out of storage space unless they delete photos or content, or subscribe to a plan with more storage space.
Gizmodo parent company G/O Media seems to have fired its entire team on its Gizmodo en Español website and replaced it with AI that is now doing the translations of English language articles into Spanish.
Article(s)
Mozilla Study: Cars are very bad for privacy
Mozilla analyzed 25 different car brands under its “Privacy not Included” project to find out how well, or not, privacy is handled by car manufacturers. Turns out, not very good.
The review included cars from BMW, Mercedes, Toyota, Tesla, Ford, Renault, Volkswagen and KIA among others.
Mozilla rates cars as the “worst category of products for privacy” that it has ever reviewed.
Here are the key takeaways:
All 25 car brands “collect too much personal data”.
The vast majority, 84% to be precise, shares or sells the data.
Almost all, 92%, give “drivers little to no control over their personal data”.
Mozilla couldn’t verify if any of the car brands meet its “minimum security standards”.
Some car manufacturers collect an abundance of data, ranging from an owner’s age and gender to scarier sounding data such as genetic characteristics and even sexual activity. Whether that means that the car’s sensors collect information about sexual activities in the car or draws conclusions from stops made during car use is unclear at this point.
Tesla has received the worst rating out of all car brands reviewed. It was the only car brand that was flagged in every privacy category tested, and only the second product ever tested that received this disastrous rating.
Nissan got the second-to-last spot for collecting “some of the creepiest categories of data” Mozilla has “ever seen”. This included information about sexual activities, which KIA may also collect.
Mozilla reviewed the car brands in the United States and not in other regions. It is not clear at this point whether the same car brands handle data collecting in countries with stricter consumer privacy laws different, but it is likely that they do.
“Where” in the world is this file on my Windows system?
Locating the path or location of a file on a Windows device is not always a straightforward experience. While you can right-click on files, select Properties and check the Location field in the Properties window, it is cumbersome and lacks certain features that you may be interested in.
An alternative to using the Properties window is to use the command WHERE. The basic command is WHERE filename, e.g., where firefox.exe, which may then return the locations of firefox.exe on the system.
Where uses the active path and system path environment variables by default to find files. Parameters are available to search any location recursively, so that any matching filename is returned.
Even better, where supports wildcards, so that you may use it to return all files matching a certain pattern or file extension.
Here are a few examples:
where /R c:\ firefox.exe — This command searches the drive c: recursively for the filename firefox.exe. It returns the path of any matching file in the command window.
where /F /T *.dll - searches the current path and system environment variable paths for DLL files. Displays the matched filenames in quotes (/F) and displays file size, last modification date and time for all files (/T)
Where is a handy tool to locate any instance of a file on a Windows system, or to quickly look up the location(s) of files. It may also be useful to get a list of last modification dates for a number of files on the system quickly.
Naturally, you may save outputs to text files directly by using the “>” option, e.g. where /R c:\ firefox.exe > firefox.txt. This places the output in the same folder the command was run from, if possible.
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