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Oficiálně byla vydána (Mastodon, 𝕏) první RC verze GIMPu 3.0. Přehled novinek v oznámení o vydání. Podrobně v souboru NEWS na GitLabu.

It is hard to overstate the impact of this American election; it will change everything, everywhere. From the functioning of democracy within the United States to its influence and perception abroad, the effects will be profound. People in Utah, Ukraine, Uruguay, and even Uganda will feel its repercussions. There is no place on the planet […]

Microsoft has started testing AI-powered Notepad text rewriting and Paint image generation tools four decades after the two programs were released in the 1980s. [...]

Cisco has fixed a maximum severity vulnerability that allows attackers to run commands with root privileges on vulnerable Ultra-Reliable Wireless Backhaul (URWB) access points that provide connectivity for industrial wireless automation. [...]

** Spoušť foťáku u iPhonů 16 má nevyužitý potenciál ** Apple ji povoluje pouze ve Fotoaparátu a pro rychlý přístup k focení ** Komunita má však nápady k daleko efektivnějšímu využití...

A new malicious package called 'SteelFox' mines for cryptocurrency and steals credit card data by using the "bring your own vulnerable driver" technique to get SYSTEM privileges on Windows machines. [...]

An ongoing threat campaign dubbed VEILDrive has been observed taking advantage of legitimate services from Microsoft, including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive, as part of its modus operandi. "Leveraging Microsoft SaaS services — including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive — the attacker exploited the trusted infrastructures of previously compromised organizations to

An ongoing threat campaign dubbed VEILDrive has been observed taking advantage of legitimate services from Microsoft, including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive, as part of its modus operandi. "Leveraging Microsoft SaaS services — including Teams, SharePoint, Quick Assist, and OneDrive — the attacker exploited the trusted infrastructures of previously compromised organizations to Ravie Lakshmananhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/[email protected]

** I za částku do třinácti tisíc korun lze pořídit použitelný notebook ** Výrobci i sem začali osazovat šestijádrové procesory ** Kompromisům se nevyhnete, nejsou ale tak výrazné jako dřív

​​Court systems across Washington state have been down since Sunday when officials said "unauthorized activity" was detected on their networks. [...]

The Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox open-source browser, said it has laid off about 30% of its employees as part of a reorganization to increase its “agility.”

As of 2023, the foundation had between 80 and 300 employees, according to varying reports. A spokesperson declined to say how many employees the company has now.

Established in 2003, the group is best known for its development of the Firefox web browser, as well as its advocacy for internet privacy, digital rights, and freely-available, open-source software.

A Mozilla Foundation spokesman said the non-profit is reorganizing teams to boost agility and impact as it accelerates efforts for “a more open and equitable technical future. That unfortunately means ending some of the work we have historically pursued and eliminating associated roles to bring more focus going forward,” Brandon Borrman, vice president of Mozilla’s communications, said in a statement to Computerworld.

The non-profit arm is distinct from the Mozilla Corporation, which is the for-profit company responsible for generating revenue through products like the web browser. The corporation employs a much larger number of people, likely 700 or more.

The Mozilla Foundation’s executive director, Nabiha Syed, said in an email last week that two of the foundation’s major divisions — advocacy and global programs — are “no longer a part of our structure,” according to a TechCrunch report.

Contrary to reports, however, Borrman said the restructuring will not impact its goal of open-source and free internet advocacy. “On the contrary, advocacy is still a central tenet of Mozilla Foundation’s work,” he said. “Fighting for a free and open internet will always be core to our mission, and advocacy continues to be a critical tool in that work. We are in the process of revisiting our approach to it.”

Along with the Mozilla Foundation, Mozilla currently consists of five organizations: the Mozilla Corporation, which leads consumer product-based work; Mozilla Ventures, a “tech-for-good” investment fund; Mozilla.ai, an AI R&D lab; and MZLA, which makes Thunderbird.

In 2020, the Mozilla Corporation cut about 25% of its 1,000-person global workforce, saying that the coronavirus pandemic’s impact on economies “significantly impacted our revenue.”

Borrman said the layoffs did not affect any of the other Mozilla entities.

Let’s face it: For many people, web browser performance could well be more important than general PC performance.

Browser makers are wising up to this, too. Google Chrome just introduced new performance controls, while Microsoft Edge has attempted to stand out with its own browser performance options. And every web browser out there has long fought over the title of fastest in the land.

So let’s talk browser performance — and how you can get more of it, specifically when working within Windows. In a world where websites feel like they’re getting heavier and heavier, upgraded browser performance means everything from faster load times and a better all-around browsing experience to more reliable all-around PC performance and longer laptop battery life.

Want more Windows PC tips? My free Windows Intelligence newsletter delivers all the best Windows tips straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get free in-depth Windows Field Guides as a special welcome bonus.

Windows web browsing boost #1: Cull your extensions

Does your browser feel inexplicably slow? Before you do anything else, I’d recommend pruning any installed browser extensions. Add-ons can be useful, but they can also add some serious overhead to your browsing. They may be always running in the background, or they may run some code on each web page you load.

In Google Chrome, you can click the main three-dot menu icon > Extensions > Manage Extensions to see a list of what’s installed. From there, you can disable or remove them. Other browsers have a similar menu and mechanism, potentially with slightly different placement and phrasing.

You might want to try disabling a few browser extensions first to see if your browser feels faster. If not, you can easily re-activate them by flipping their switches back on in that same area of your browser’s settings.

Windows web browsing boost #2: Put those tabs to sleep (or keep them awake)

Modern web browsers — including Chrome, Edge, and Mozilla Firefox — all have features that put tabs to “sleep.” If you don’t use a tab for a while, your browser will stop it from running. It won’t be able to use resources in the background. When you click back to the tab, your browser will reactivate it.

This saves memory, and it also stops pages in background tabs from using CPU resources. Overall, it will boost your browsing speed.

However, in some cases, it could slow things down. Perhaps you often find that you switch back to a tab and your web browser quickly reloads it. If that’s a problem, you’ll want to make your browser stop putting tabs to sleep — especially if you have a powerful computer with a lot of RAM and a fast CPU. (You can also tell your browser to stop putting specific websites to sleep if it causes a problem with a website.)

To control tab suspending:

• In Google Chrome, click menu > Settings and select “Performance” in the left pane. Look under “Memory Saver” and choose an option: Moderate, Balanced, or Maximum. You can also disable Memory Saver entirely — or add websites you never want Chrome to suspend to the “Always keep these sites active” list there.
• In Microsoft Edge, click menu > Settings and select “System and performance” in the left pane. Use the “Save resources with sleeping tabs,” “Put inactive tabs to sleep after the specified amount of time,” and “Never put these sites to sleep” options to control this behavior.
• In Mozilla Firefox, this feature is always activated — unless you dig deep into Firefox’s settings to turn off tab unloading.

Modern browsers can suspend, sleep, or unload tabs to save system resources. These are all names for the same trick.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

Windows web browsing boost #3: Preload more pages

Your web browser of choice can “preload” some pages. In other words, it might load them in the background if it thinks you’ll visit them. If you do, the page loads very quickly — because by the time you’re looking at it, it’s already loaded in the background and ready to go!

Most browsers offer different preloading options, some of which are more aggressive than others. And preloading has some potential privacy implications, as your browser might load links you wouldn’t have clicked. But, for maximum speed, you’ll probably want the most aggressive preloading options available.

To control preloading:

• In Google Chrome, click menu > Settings and select “Performance” in the left pane. Scroll down to the “Preload pages” option. For maximum speed, ensure “Preload pages” is active and that it’s set to “Extended preloading.”
• In Microsoft Edge, click menu > Settings and select “Cookies and site permissions” in the left pane. Click “Manage and delete cookies and site data,” and ensure “Preload pages for faster browsing and searching” is activated.
• In Mozilla Firefox, prefetching is always active — unless you’ve gone out of your way to dig into about:config and disable it.

Windows web browsing boost #4: Check your browser’s task manager

Want to see what’s actually using CPU and memory? Modern Chromium-based web browsers — including Chrome, Edge, Brave, Arc Browser, and more — have task managers that will show you. (Firefox has something similar, too.)

In a Chromium-based browser, just right-click an empty spot on the tab bar and select “Task Manager” or press Shift+Esc to open it.

You will see a list of processes — including open web pages, browser extensions, and browser components — along with how much CPU and memory they’re using. If your web browser is mysteriously slow, this is a good place to check: You might spot an open web page that’s dragging everything down, and you can close it from here. You can also click the “CPU” heading to sort processes by CPU and see the most CPU-hungry items at the top of the list.

In Firefox, you can access something similar by plugging about:processes into Firefox’s address bar and pressing Enter. (The Shift+Esc shortcut will work, too!)

Your browser’s task manager will show you if a web page or browser extension is hogging system resources.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

Windows web browsing boost #5: Clear your browser cache (or stop clearing it)

Ah, the browser cache. As you browse, your web browser remembers the pages you visit and the things you type in a history, it stores images and other bits of downloaded pages in a cache, and it keeps cookies with information from websites — like your sign-in status.

Many people frequently clear this browser cache. If your browser is slow, you can try clearing browsing data. In fact, Microsoft’s official Edge browser documentation says “Clearing your browser data on a regular basis will improve the performance of your browser” — and who am I to argue with Microsoft? Surely, it understands how its own browser works.

Clearing that data is worth a shot. But, conversely, if you’re clearing your browsing data too regularly, you might want to stop doing that. The browser cache is there to speed things up: Your browser can pick images and other bits of web pages out of its cache rather than redownloading them, which improves load times when you revisit a page.

You’ll find options for clearing browsing data in your browser’s menu, but you can also just press Ctrl+Shift+Delete to quickly open the browser-history-clearing tool.

Clearing your browser data can speed things up — but clearing your browser cache too aggressively can also slow down page-load times.

Chris Hoffman, IDG

Windows web browsing boost #6: Scan for malware

We have to talk about malware for a minute. Whenever a PC is running mysteriously slow, malware is always one of the first things you should check for.

Be sure to run a scan with your installed antivirus tool of choice if you’re concerned about questionable performance drops. If you haven’t installed anything special, your PC is using Microsoft’s Windows Defender antivirus. You could also get a second opinion with a different antivirus tool, if you’re not too confident in your current security solution. (Our friends over at PCWorld have a list of highly recommended free antivirus tools.)

Windows web browsing boost #7: Switch up your ad-blocker

When it comes to ad-blockers, one thing people don’t often talk about is the fact that such systems can both speed up and slow down your browsing. The speed-up part is obvious: By refusing to load advertising resources on web pages, ad-blocking plugins reduce download size and produce a lighter page that opens more quickly.

But there’s also a slow-down factor: Ad-blockers might also run extra code on the pages you visit, increasing memory use and making them take longer to load.

Different ad-blockers will have different effects on performance. There’s been a lot of controversy about Google Chrome’s switch to Manifest V3 and how it stops the popular “classic” uBlock Origin ad-blocker from functioning. But here’s the thing: While the new way Chrome blocks ads with Manifest V3 is less powerful, it’s also faster. So if you happen to be using uBlock Origin and install the new uBlock Origin Lite, you could see improved page load speeds.

That’s because those new Manifest V3-compatible ad-blocker extensions work by providing a list of resources they want to block. The Chrome browser engine then blocks those resources. That means the ad-blocking browser extension itself doesn’t have to get involved and run a bunch of code on the pages you access.

If you want a speed boost, it’s something worth chewing over. If you’re not yet using any ad-blocker, consider installing one. If you are using an ad-blocker, consider switching — for example, to something like uBlock Origin Lite.

Just bear in mind that you might occasionally break a page; you might need to turn it off for a page if you run into issues. 

Windows web browsing boost #8: Try a fresh browser profile

If a device isn’t working properly, factory-resetting it is a good tip. You might reset a Windows PC to its default settings or factory-reset an Android phone to get it to a nice fresh state if you can’t pin down a performance problem. The same is true for browsers.

To be clear: I’m not recommending you run out and factory-reset your PC! But popular browsers have built-in “fresh start” tools that will clean up your browser profile and its settings, wiping away any configuration changes, disabling extensions, and erasing cached files to give you a like-new browser. It’s worth a shot.

Here’s how to do it:

• In Google Chrome, click menu > Settings and select “Reset Settings” in the left pane. Use the “Restore settings to their original defaults” option.
• In Microsoft Edge, click menu > Settings and select “Reset Settings” in the left pane. Click the “Restore settings to their default values” option.
• In Mozilla Firefox, click menu > Help > Troubleshoot Mode. You can then click “Refresh Firefox” in the dialog box that opens.

It’s a good way to start over. And hey — if you’re experiencing any kind of PC performance issue, browser-related or otherwise, the old standby advice is always good: Try turning it off and on again.

There’s more where this came from! My free Windows Intelligence newsletter delivers all the best Windows tips straight to your inbox. Plus, you’ll get free copies of Paul Thurrott’s Windows 11 and Windows 10 Field Guides (a $10 value) just for subscribing.

Zooming out, will Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential race give Apple more bargaining power when negotiating with European regulators — and to what extent will the ongoing US anti-trust investigation of the company (shaky as it is) gain presidential support? 

Those could be the kind of questions Apple CEO Tim Cook is asking himself this morning as the former President inches toward a new administration in 2025. We can surmise this based on what Trump said during the campaign, when he explained how Cook rang him up to complain about the fines levied against the company by Europe.

What Trump told Cook

Speaking on a podcast, the incoming President alleged that he told Cook he would not let the EU “take advantage of our companies.” If he keeps that promise, this suggests we may have a new entrant in the Europe versus Apple (and hence, Big Tech) ring.  With more regulatory investigation — including the first-ever potentially $38 billion fine under the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — headed Apple’s way in Europe, could the former and future president intervene some how? 

It’s hard to tell; after all, most people have become cynical about politicians and the promises they make (and later break) on the campaign trail. We don’t know yet whether the next Trump administration will keep promises made on the way to the White House, or just cherry pick those it wants to keep and ignore the rest.

If the new government does choose to support American tech business against what Republicans might see as overreach by the EU “deep state,” then the next time Europe decides to take a few billion from Cupertino things might not go quite so easy.

When the gloves are off, what happens?

While it is understandable that Europe desperately wants to blunt foreign behemoths in the tech sector in a strategic attempt to support the growth of its own players in that space, it is possible that plan may fail. After all, as events in Valencia, Spain, suggest, Europe has other problems. 

The thing is, given the inherent nativism of so much of Project Trump, can European regulators afford to play hardball here? Future history will tell. But there is no doubt the answer to these questions does matter to many in the US tech sector, and also, inevitably, to supply chain partners elsewhere. 

One thing that does seem likely is that Apple’s investment in manufacturing in India will continue to accelerate, as the new administration seems set to continue the policies toward China it maintained last time it held power. Cook’s strategic vision to set up shop in India seems likely to pay long-term dividends, as does the considerable work the company has already done and continues to do to repatriate jobs to the US — an ongoing effort on which it has spent hundreds of billions of dollars so far.

(TSMC’s move to begin manufacturing Apple processors in America is another facet of this attempt.)

On the telephone

Cook, meanwhile, will continue to follow his own approach toward engaging with others who hold opinions he perhaps does not share. “Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be,” he told employees in 2019. 

That approach led him to become one of Trump’s top tech advisors during the first administration. 

Cook’s way of doing things also seems to have won some support from Trump, who recently said he thought that if Cook didn’t run Apple it wouldn’t be nearly as successful as it is now. “I think Tim Cook’s done an amazing job,” he said. “And I’m not knocking Steve Jobs.”  

Trump also seemed impressed at the eye-watering size of Europe’s fines levied against Apple, which he characterized as “a lot.” With all of this in mind, it is perhaps important to note that Trump in 2019 said Cook has a direct line to the (now) newly-re-elected President. 

The art of the deal

Might this contribute to the art of some kind of new EU deal? We don’t know that, either, but as America — and the world — digests the election results, it might yet prove an important moment for Apple’s business, too. European regulators need to think about it.

Please follow me on Mastodon, or join me in the AppleHolic’s bar & grill and Apple Discussions groups on MeWe.

** Pixel 9 Pro a iPhone 16 Pro pořídíte za hodně podobnou cenu ** Při pohledu na komponenty jsou však cenové rozdíly o dost vyšší ** Cena součástek ale není vše, do cenotvorby toho zasahuje více...

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Byla vydána nová verze 8.11.0 řádkového nástroje a knihovny pro přenos dat po různých protokolech curl. S oficiální podporou WebSocket. Opravena byla bezpečnostní chyba CVE-2024-9681.

22,000 IP addresses taken down, 59 servers seized, 41 arrests in 95 countries

Interpol is reporting a big win after a massive combined operation against online criminals made 41 arrests and seized hardware thought to be used for nefarious purposes.…

The Federal Ministry of Justice in Germany has drafted a law to provide legal protection to security researchers who discover and responsibly report security vulnerabilities to vendors. [...]