The free-to-use nonprofit was founded in 2014 in part by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and is backed by Akamai, Google, Facebook, Mozilla and more. Three years ago Friday, it issued its first certificate. Since then, the numbers have exploded. To date, more than 380 million certificates have been issued on 129 million unique domains. That also makes it the largest certificate issuer in the world, by far....
Valve announced today a beta of Steam Play, a new compatibility layer for Linux, to provide compatibility with a wide range of Windows-only games. We’ve been tracking Valve’s efforts to boost Linux gaming for a number of years. As of a few months ago, things seemed to have gone very quiet, with Valve removing SteamOS systems from its store. Last week, however, it became...
Mozilla is taking a bold stance against more insidious web advertising practices with an announcement today that its Firefox browser will soon block web trackers by default. The move, which will involve a series of updates over the course of the next few months, is among one of the most proactive approaches to protect consumer privacy that it’s ever employed. “Anyone who isn’t an...
If you’re a Gmail and Dropbox user, keeping all your files in one place is about to get a lot easier thanks to a new Dropbox add-on for Gmail. In March, Dropbox announced a new partnership with Google Cloud in a bid to centralize content, secure collaboration, and make for more effective communication. In other words, allow Google services users to seamlessly store and...
Hard drive manufacturers have been using helium to help boost hard drive storage capacity for several years. Now a team of Canadian researchers has made a major storage breakthrough thanks to another element. Scientists at the University of Alberta have successfully used hydrogen atoms to store data. The atoms were applied to a silicon chip roughly half the size of a fingernail. To write...
Intel has previously said its 10nm chips will arrive in 2019. But on Thursday, the company got more specific: the upcoming processors will land on store shelves at the end of 2019, during the holiday season. The first 10nm chips to launch will be for consumer PCs, with server-based chips to shortly follow, Intel executives said during an earnings call. Why the continued delays?...
Mozilla may be working on a voice-controlled platform of its own. A listing for an all-hands internal meeting appeared about what seems like a new project: Scout. “With the Scout app, we start to explore browsing and consuming content with voice,” it read. It’s very unclear what the platform may or may not end up doing, as the meeting is focused on technical requirements...
Microsoft is redesigning its Office productivity apps to make them easier to use, as it faces stiffer competition from Google. Microsoft said Wednesday it’s refreshing Office 365 apps, including Word, Excel, Outlook and PowerPoint, in part so that they’re more accessible for users with disabilities. The company is vastly reducing the size of the ribbon — the toolbar that for so many years has...
Apple has updated its rules to restrict app developers’ ability to harvest data from mobile phones, which could be bad news for a Facebook-owned data security app called Onavo Protect. Onavo ostensibly provides users with a free virtual private network (VPN) which, it claims, helps “keep you and your data safe when you browse and share information on the web”. What is not immediately...
The Tor Project announced that it’s working with Mozilla to integrate Tor into Firefox. Eventually, this should completely eliminate the need for the Tor Browser, as most of its features would be merged into Firefox’s new “super-private mode.” Tor Browser Development Largely Redundant The Tor Browser is based on the Extended Support Release (ESR) version of Firefox, because it’s a more stable development cycle...
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