Interesting Weekend Reading – 04.24.21
We gleaned some of the most interesting articles we read this past week and found three we thought would be most interesting to most of you.
Microsoft’s new Windows 10 taskbar widget starts rolling out today
News and weather on your Windows taskbarMicrosoft is starting to roll out its biggest change to the Windows taskbar in years. A new weather and news taskbar widget will be available in Windows 10 starting today, offering weather information directly in the Windows taskbar. The widget also expands to include a feed of news, stocks, sports, and weather information.
The mini-feed of content only appears when you activate the widget, and it can be fully personalized with the latest sports news, headlines, and weather information. Microsoft is using its Microsoft News network to surface news and content from more than 4,500 sources, and the company will use AI to learn what news is relevant to you when you dismiss or like stories in the feed.
Interested? You can read more here.
It’s Time to Switch to a Dummy Email Address on Facebook
Whether the loophole lasts a day, month, or forever, a new “Facebook Email Search” program again shows why you might not want to use your regular email address for the sprawling social media site—or any, really. As researchers found, it’s pathetically easy to hammer through a big list of of (sic) email address and link them to real Facebook accounts.
The scope of the tool is pretty significant—up to five million email addresses per day when it’s really cruising along—and it can link Facebook accounts to said emails regardless of the account owner’s security settings. You might have made your Facebook profile as private as it can get, but that doesn’t stop the tool from working its magic.
Interested? Read more here.
If you use Google’s Chrome browser, install this update immediately
There are plenty of things you can do to keep yourself safe while browsing the internet, and near the top of that list is making sure that all your apps and programs are up-to-date. For example, Google rolled out Chrome 90 to the stable channel for Windows, Mac, and Linux on April 14th with dozens of security fixes, but less than a week later, another update has arrived that everyone who uses Google’s browser should install as soon as possible.
As Chrome’s technical program manager Srinivas Sista revealed in a blog post, Chrome version 90.0.4430.85 comes with seven security fixes, one of which addresses a zero-day vulnerability that Google says has been exploited in the wild. The zero-day is referred to as CVE-2021-21224, and Google describes it as ‘Type Confusion in V8.’ As Google explains, ‘V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine.’