Google Chrome to Block Local Extensions Installations on Windows

Malicious extensions are real headache for user, such as Ask and few others, they hijack your settings and make changes that are difficult to restore for normal users. Back in October Google added “Reset browser settings” button to recover from such disaster, but malicious extension makers are finding new ways to bypass that.

Google has now announced that from today local extensions installations are no longer allowed in Chrome for Windows. In order to install the extension, it must be hosted on the Chrome Web Store. Google says with this new policy, extensions previously installed not from Chrome Web Store will be automatically disabled.

Developers are not affected by this policy though. They will be able to locally install extensions during development and websites providing extension installation on their own can use inline installs feature.

Source: Google Chrome Blog

Android Apps Can Take Photos and Videos without Your Knowledge – Potential Privacy Issue

 

Recent blog post by Szymon Sidor, showed that it is possible for an Android app to take photos and videos without any notifications and also you won’t see this app on installed applications. He also demoed how this works.

Szymon and his team wanted to try something with web cams on PCs without turning on indicator light, but later Szymon wanted t0 try it with android devices. He tried many things and succeeded at last.

Technically this is not a bug, but rather loophole in the Android SDK, which allows the workaround to actually work. He also pointed out how to identify any such culprit apps in his blog.

There is a big problem here, Android may update or patch this issue, but more than 90 percent of the devices will never get the update, only handful of premium devices are going to get updated, that is also questionable on how long for the manufacture to release the patch even after Google made it available. This is all linked to fragmentation of Android’s eco system.

Szymon also points out how some of the shady features of Android can be avoided and also he sent the photo/video issue to Android team.

Source : Snacks For Your Mind

New Windows Phone 8.1 Video Surfaces

Windows Phone 8.1 is around the corner, Microsoft is already releasing new devices with 8.1 such as Lumia 630. For all other phones such as old Windows Phone 8 family Lumia phones, the 8.1 update will come in next month.

Now Microsoft has released 2 videos explaining basic functionality of Windows Phone 8.1 and other useful features that it brings.

How to Change the Default Font in Microsoft Word

Changing the default font in MS Word 2010 or 2013 is easy as just opening the Font dialog (Ctrl+D) box and click “set as default” and then select “All documents based on Normal.dotm template?” and click Ok. Well sometime this never works. Sometimes even after setting the defaults as mentioned earlier, new documents seems to be created with same old default font.

Clover 3 Adds Tabs Support to Windows Explorer

Windows Explorer has been modified in Windows 8 and include ribbon UI and it is good, one feature that I miss still is the way to open multiple tabs. Tabs are really a neat feature and comes naturally after years of using them with advantages in the web browsers.

Tabs help organize explorer windows in logical way. I work with lot of files and opened explorer windows just grows in number and becomes very difficult to manage. I was looking at third party explorer replacements, but I didn’t like them much, the one I liked, Directory Opus, very expensive, so I was looking for a way to add tab support for my Windows Explorer and I found a great program for that.

Nodepad2 is An Awesome Tiny Replacement for Windows Notepad

Not everyone deals with plain old text documents (txt files), when it comes to documents, we use word processing software like MS Word or LibreOffice. Plain text documents, including program source codes are something few people deals with every day, and Windows has built-in notepad for opening these files, but since Windows 98 tis tiny notepad program stayed the same and it does what is supposed to do – opening plain text files.

But reading program source files are hard with there is no color coded view like the one in the IDEs and no way to change the encoding and no line numbers can be hard. That’s where this tiny notepad replacement comes in.

Moto E – Budget Phone with Good Specs for $129

After the success of Moto G, a phone with above normal spec generated quite a fuzz when it was released for just $179. Now Motorola is releasing another phone with lower spec that Moto G, but this is not a cheap and slow phone, for the price $129, it has really good specs that should deliver smooth performance for the android OS.

Image : arstechnica

It has 1.2 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon 200 CPU coupled with Adreno 302 GPU and 1GB of RAM. It also features 4.3 inches IPS display with 960x540 pixels. It only has 4GB built-in storage, but it also has expandable Micro SD slot that can support up to 32 GB. It has 1980 mAh battery, considering the screen and hardware, and provide more than 9 hours of Wi-Fi internet surfing.

Antarctica Ice Sheet Starting to Collapse - Sea-level Rise is Unstoppable, NASA Says

Global warming has hit us again, new study by NASA shows that huge west Antarctica ice sheet is collapsing into sea, and this west Antarctica ice sheet holds enough water to increase the sea level up to 2 feet. But this also acts as an acceleration process and help melt the rest of the ice sheet and that will increase the sea level by another 10 to 13 feet – that is 3 to 4 meters.

Glaciers in Antarctica

Scientists from University of Washington says this full collapse will happen within few centuries, and the process has already begun. A NASA’s study with the help of 40 years of ground and satellite data shows that this process of gradual melting is happening much faster than scientists predicted before. This process is now like a chain of domino's and reached the critical threshold.

NASA says that there are 3 major evidence for this glaciers’ collapse –

1. The change in the glaciers’’ flow speed.
2. How much these glaciers float on the sea water.
3. The slope of the terrain these glaciers are floating over and its depth below sea level.

Researchers believe that shortest time period for the full collapse takes 200 years or so, but longest is more than 1000 years. But this is heavily depends on our global heating rate, but however long it might take, the collapse is inevitable.

Read more about this from NASA’s study

Source: University of Washington Blog

Beautiful Remnants of Star Explosions–Nebulae

When star dies in a violent cataclysmic supernova, it becomes the kitchen for the recipes of the universe, all the elements heavier than iron are produced in one of these explosive supernovae. When a star goes supernova it releases so much energy, that it outshines the galaxy it is from.

Do you know that supernova explosion can release energy as much as our star Sun can release over its entire life span – that is almost 10 billion years!

This post is not about supernovae but the beautiful remnants left behind the supernova called nebula. Nebula is a broad term, and it means interstellar clouds of dust, hydrogen, helium and other ionized gases and it is formed by many means, supernovae is one of them.

Let’s see some of the most beautiful remnants of stars.

Free Alternatives to Adobe Reader – A Guide for Lightweight PDF Reader (Windows)

When it comes to PDF files, which is a great format for sharing documents, we may use the official PDF reader from Adobe called Adobe Reader. It is really good and always updating, but it is very slow and use extra bits of resources in your PC. These days, computers are powered with lot of processing power and lot of RAM, so an app being a resource hog won’t be a bigger issue, but if you want to check out other lightweight applications which can handle PDFs and also loads faster than Adobe Reader, here is the guide.

Malwarebytes Anti-Malware 2.0.2 Public Beta Available to Download

Malwarebyes’s Anti-Malware is known for its aggressive malware hunting and it is a great companion for any anti-virus product you use. It is also free to use for home users and it is just $25 for 1 year for 3 PCs – that is really good price for what it does.

With version 2.0, Anti-Malware brought many new things with UI changes too. This is a small update (beta) to bring more stability, user friendliness and more effectiveness against latest malwares.