Weekly Tech Insights: Issue 14
Table of Contents
Introduction
News
Windows
Linux / FreeBSD
Mobile
Browser
Privacy and Security
Software Updates
Gaming
Other
Editorials and other articles
Brave Browser’s Speedreader Mode is quite the useful tool
How to use ChatGPT for movie and TV show recommendations
Software review of the Week
Reboot Blocker for Windows
Links
Introduction
News
Welcome to the first newsletter of 2023. I hope you had a pleasant New Year’s celebration.
This week, like the last week, has been rather slow in terms of news. Still, you will find information about next week’s end of support for Windows 7 and 8.1, several bits about privacy, and more.
There is also an interesting article about using ChatGPT for recommendations, and a quick one about the Speedreader of the Brave web browser.
As always, let me know if I missed something, or when you have suggestions on how I can improve the newsletter.
If you have not, feel free to subscribe below to never miss a new issue.
Windows
As a reminder, next week is the last Patch Day for Windows 7 and Windows 8.1. Microsoft will release a last batch of security updates for the two operating systems on January 10, 2023.
Administrators of Windows 7 devices who can’t or don’t want to switch may check out 0Patch’s commercial offer to get at least 2 years of critical security updates for the operating systems.
Gabriel Sieben, a software developer from St. Paul, published a PowerShell one-liner that is removing lots of bloat from Windows 10 devices. All he does is run Get-AppxPackage | Remove-AppxPackage from an elevated PowerShell window. This removes the Microsoft Store, most of the included apps, and components that Store apps use.
Creating a backup is advised, and it is best to test this before going ahead, as it may have unforeseen consequences. This can be undone by running Get-AppxPackage -allusers | foreach {Add-AppxPackage -register "$($_.InstallLocation)\appxmanifest.xml" -DisableDevelopmentMode} from PowerShell.
Helmut Wagensonner, a Cloud Solution Architect Engineer at Microsoft, published an updated comparison between the Windows 10 and Windows 11 GPO ADMX. It highlights major differences between Windows 10 version 22H2 and Windows 11 version 22H2.
I published an overview of what is in store for the Windows operating system in 2023. It mentions all supported versions of Windows.
Linux / FreeBSD
Mobile
Browser
Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge and maybe some other browsers will stop receiving updates on Windows 7 and 8 systems starting next week. The last supported versions of the browsers will continue to work after support end, but they won’t receive any more security updates. Note that smaller patches may be released until the next major version release, which will happen in February 2023.
Mozilla had to change the user agent of Firefox temporarily because of sites that mistakenly identified it as Internet Explorer 11. The new user agent is used until the Firefox 120, which is scheduled for a release in October.
Google Chrome remained the top desktop and mobile web browser. It’s market share did not change much throughout the year. Microsoft Edge managed to gain about 2% in 2022, Firefox lost a bit on desktop.
Chrome users need to be aware that Google plans to release Chrome Early Stable releases starting in January 2023. These come about a week earlier and are used to test the waters. It is unclear how user systems are picked for this and if there is an option to block it from happening.
Privacy and Security
1Password released a comment on last year’s LastPass hack. Apart from revealing that 1Password customer data is secure even if vault data is copied from company servers, 1Password used the post to attack LastPass’ claim that it would “take millions of years to guess” the master password of LastPass user vaults.
The main argument against the claim is that it applies only if the master password is generated by a machine. Many users of password management services pick passwords that are not totally random.
Threat actors use this to target passwords first that are more likely selected by humans. This reduces the number of potential combinations to “a few billions”, which do not take as long to crack.
For those wondering: 1Password generates a local Secret Key on first use that never leaves the user’s device. Without it, attackers can’t crack the encrypted data. Since it is high-entropy, it can’t be guessed efficiently.
Google Home speakers had a bug that allowed hackers to control it remotely and turn it into a snooping device. The issue was fixed by Google in April 2021.
Wladimir Palant on online security in South Korea, how some banks require users to install several applications just to log in to their sites, and more.
Software Updates
I have released a top 10 list of good applications that have received major updates or entirely new releases in the year 2022.
A new version of the video converter Handbrake was released this week. Handbrake 1.6 introduces support for AV1 among other new features.
Gaming
The Steam Winter Sale ends tomorrow. There is also a New Year’s sale over on Gog.
Other
The Hidden Cost of Cheap TVs explains why TVs have gotten cheaper while the majority of consumer products have risen in price. Besides improved manufacturing, companies make money by tracking and selling usage data of their customers.
Microsoft Office 2013 support ends in April 2023. The Office version won’t receive security updates or technical support from Microsoft after the April 2023 Patch Day anymore. It will continue to work, though.
An interesting article by L.C. Bakken about restoring legible text in qBittorrent 4.5.0 by creating a simple theme that changes just the text color.
Editorials and other articles
Brave Browser’s Speedreader Mode is quite the useful tool
Speedreader is a feature off Brave Browser that improves the readability of articles by removing any element on a website that is not directly related to the article. You end up with text, link and images, but that is it. Text is formatted for legibility.
Elements that are not displayed anymore include advertisement, menus, sidebars, related content, or additional content that is loaded once you reach the end of the page.
The browser displays a Speedreader icon in the address bar on pages with articles. The detection works well, but there may be issues on some pages. I did not run into any, but the Web is a vast place and there is a chance that it won’t work on all sites.
When you click the icon you get the option to display all articles of the active site using Speedreader. It is a simple toggle that makes Brave remember the selection.
Each article features a “view original” link to load the original webpage and not the version that is optimized for reading.
While that is useful already, Brave Browser includes a preference to enable Speedreader on all sites. Here is how you enable it:
Load brave://settings/appearance in Brave Browser’s address bar.
Scroll down until you find the Speedreader preference.
Toggle it to ON to enable it.
You may restore the default functionality by toggling the preference to OFF. Brave loads all articles that it encounters in Speedreader mode from the moment the preference is set to ON.
How to use ChatGPT for movie and TV show recommendations
It seems that almost everyone is talking about (or with) ChatGPT these days. ChatGPT, for those who do not know, is a language model developed by OpenAI. It is optimized for dialogue and text in general, and works similarly to chatbots, only more human-like and not limited to certain keywords.
ChatGPT is used for numerous tasks, including getting answers for knowledge-based questions, research, ideas for novels, getting answers for homework and exams, and more.
While there are some limitations, notable that the majority of data comes from 2021 and earlier, it is also well suited to give recommendations.
If you have used an online streaming service in the past, especially those for TV show and movie streams, you may have noticed that the provided recommendations miss the mark quite often.
You can ask ChatGPT for recommendations. When asked for five TV shows that are similar to Game of Thrones, it returned The Witcher, Vikings, Outlander, The Tudors, and The Crown. Good but not excellent recommendations. If you modify the request to “Give me 5 recommendations for TV shows that are similar to Game of Thrones and include dragons”, it provides the better matches: The Dragon Prince, Eragon, The Last Airbender, Merlin and Kulipari: An Army of Frogs.
It is possible to adjust the results even more, e.g., by excluding animated shows and making sure that dragons are characters and not displayed on a banner, by adding specific themes, characters, actors and other information.
Similarly, you could ask ChatGPT to give a number of recommendations for your favorite movies and TV shows. It is always possible to add more details to the request to exclude certain types of genres or suggestions.
Other options include listing movies by popularity (top 10 star wars movies, movies by Quentin Tarantino), the top grossing movies (in a country and year), or movies that received an award. All of these can be combined to give excellent recommendations based on user input.
Makes me wonder why no streaming service has started to use ChatGPT or a similar technology for its recommendations.
ChatGPT does not know about movies produced after 2021. Another limitation is that the service does not know which streaming services have specific movies or shows in their database.
Software review of the Week
Reboot Blocker
Reboot Blocker is a free program for Windows 10 and 11 designed to prevent the operating system from restarting the system automatically.
Automatic system restarts, which happen often after the installation of updates, are still a major nuisance on Windows. Microsoft tried to improve things for users, but it is still common that users lose work because of automatic restarts.
Microsoft introduced Active Hours in Windows 10 to prevent automatic restarts during that period. When Active Hours is enabled, Windows can’t restart the system automatically.
Problem is: there is no option to set the period to 24 hours. Reboot Blocker uses Active Hours to block automatic restarts during use. It does so by changing the period every hour so that Active Hours is never exited on the system.
Reboot Blocker needs to be installed. It adds a Service to the Windows device and is active automatically. There is no configuration. Administrators may remove it from the Installed Apps section in Settings again when it is no longer needed.
Links
Can the North Sea become Europe’s new economic powerhouse? (The Economist)
Eating viruses can power growth, reproduction of microorganism (University of Nebraska)
New blood test can detect 'toxic' protein years before Alzheimer's symptoms emerge, study shows (Science Daily)
The Odin Project offers free programming courses in Ruby on Rails and JavaScript.
Welcoming 1927 to the Public Domain (Archive)