Computer News

Nvidia Geforce Game Ready WHQL Driver 441.87
– Game Ready for Wolfenstein: Youngblood with Ray Tracing
– Maximum Framerate: In response to overwhelming demand from the community, we have introduced a new Maximum Framerate Setting into the NVIDIA Control Panel.
– Image Sharpening Improvements, Variable Rate Super Sampling, Share Freestyle Filters
Download | Release Notes

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

50 Greatest Hair Metal Albums of All Time
It’s a surprisingly good list considering Rolling Stone sucks.

Ricky Gervais’ Monologue – 2020 Golden Globes
I give zero f’s about award shows. Ricky Gervais monologue for the Golden Globes was in the news today. It caught my eye because my wife and I just streamed season one of his show After Life:
“Struggling to come to terms with his wife’s death, a writer for a newspaper adopts a gruff new persona in an effort to push away those trying to help.” It was outstanding. If you know pain this will hit home.
Anyway, Ricky takes no prisoners. He went after Hollywood, Apple, Amazon, Disney…
“So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg.
So if you win, come up, accept your little award, thank your agent, and your God and fuck off, OK?”
Article with full transcript

New Intel Wireless Drivers
Windows 10 Wi-Fi Drivers for Intel Wireless Adapters
Intel PROSet/Wireless Software and Drivers for IT Admins
Intel Wireless Bluetooth for Windows 7
Intel Wireless Bluetooth for Windows 8.1
Intel Wireless Bluetooth for Windows 10
Intel Wireless Bluetooth for IT Admins

Intel Performance Maximizer Updates
Intel Performance Maximizer for 9th Generation Intel Core Processors
Intel Performance Maximizer for Intel Core X-series Processors

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

A top Google exec pushed the company to commit to human rights. Then Google pushed him out, he says.
“I didn’t change. Google changed,” LaJeunesse, who was Google’s global head of international relations in Washington, told The Washington Post. “Don’t be evil” used to top the company’s mission statement. “Now when I think about ‘Don’t be evil,’ it’s been relegated to a footnote in the company’s statements.”

Someone Compares The Minimum Wage In 2010 vs 2020, And If That’s Not Sad Enough, Other People Share More Statistics
“Everything started when reporter Ken Klippenstein tweeted that the minimum wage in the US has remained the same for a decade – $7.25. Pretty soon, people began replying to him with other gloomy numbers. The thread has already received over 172K likes and 53K retweets, and it looks like it continues to grow. Unlike the wallets of the minimum wage workers.”
IMHO the national minimum wage should go to $15 an hour immediately. Anything less is amoral, immoral, unethical, low-down, and rotten. Raise your prices if need be but if you can’t pay that you should close your doors. If I hurt your feelings, too damn bad.

Your smart TV is spying on you. Here are step-by-step instructions to stop it
“Those smart TVs that sold for unheard of low prices over the holidays come with a catch. The price is super low, but the manufacturers get to monitor what you’re watching and report back to third parties, for a fee.
Or, in some cases, companies like Amazon (with its Fire TV branded sets from Toshiba and Insignia) and TCL, with its branded Roku sets, look to throw those same personalized, targeted ads at you that you get when visiting Facebook and Google.”
It just never stops does it?

How we survive the surveillance apocalypse
“For the past year, I’ve been on the trail of the secret life of our data. What happens when you put your iPhone to sleep at night? Does Amazon’s Alexa eavesdrop on your family? Who gets to know where you drive – and where you swipe your credit card?…Learning how everyday things spy on us made me, at times, feel paranoid. Mostly, my privacy project left me angry. Our cultural reference points – Big Brother and tinfoil hats – don’t quite capture the sickness of an era when we gleefully carry surveillance machines in our pockets and install them in our homes.”

‘Cherry Pie’ girl Bobbie Brown says Warrant rocker Jani Lane was haunted by past before death
“At the moment that he admitted [he was drugged and raped by a member of a famous heavy metal band and their manager], it was devastating to hear. He admitted this to me before his death. It was traumatizing to watch him reveal those things and how much it had affected his life up to that point. When we were married I had no clue. This occurred when he was just starting out on the Strip. So when I’m hearing all of this with him, I’m crying with him. I was going, “We have to do something, we have to say something.” He was like, “No! No!” It was a humiliation for a man to be in that position.”

FinalCrypt 6.3.1 Download | Changelog
Macrium Reflect 7.2.4601 Download | Release Notes

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

MUST READ – One Nation, Tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry from Times Opinion (Links at bottom of article). Mentioned earlier. Series now complete.
Bypass Paywalls Firefox | Bypass Paywalls Chrome
Part 1 – Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
Part 2 – Protect Yourself
Part 3 – National Security
Part 4 – How It Works
Part 5 – One Neighborhood
Part 6 – Protests
Part 7 – Solutions

*$#!^ New Yorkers react to being named ‘rudest city in America’
“Americans think New Yorkers are the biggest jerks in the country, according to a new survey — released just days before Christmas, no less.”
Many of us also think as a group you are self-important. Can’t put all the blame on you though. Every media outlet acts like life starts and stops there. The rest of us just roll our eyes at that notion. And yes, I’ve been to New York. It was summertime in the mid 80’s and the entire city smelled like urine.

Dan’s Disaster: How the Washington Redskins Plummeted to Rock Bottom
“The professional football team in the nation’s capital was the hottest ticket in town for decades. But under Dan Snyder’s ownership, the franchise has lost a lot of games and managed to alienate even some of its most dedicated fans. What made one of most unshakable fandoms in America give up on its team?”
Four of us used to go up there to one game a year and tailgate like it was our last party. That’s over now, we’ve all lost interest. I haven’t watched a full football game of any kind this year. I still root for Dallas to lose though.

Zac Brown Band – The Woods (Official Music Video)

Latest Downloads
AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2020 Edition 19.12.3 Optional Drivers Download | Release Notes
Intel Graphics – Windows 10 DCH Drivers 26.20.100.7584
Sysinternals Process Explorer v16.31
Sysinternals Process Monitor v3.53
Winaero Tweaker 0.16.1 Download | Info

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
As usual we went to the first showing. I liked it. I don’t understand the negative reviews.

Twelve Million Phones, One Dataset, Zero Privacy
“After spending months sifting through the data, tracking the movements of people across the country and speaking with dozens of data companies, technologists, lawyers and academics who study this field, we feel the same sense of alarm. In the cities that the data file covers, it tracks people from nearly every neighborhood and block, whether they live in mobile homes in Alexandria, Va., or luxury towers in Manhattan.”
This is part one of a series of articles called One Nation, Tracked An investigation into the smartphone tracking industry from Times Opinion (Links at bottom of article).
Bypass Paywalls Firefox | Bypass Paywalls Chrome
Part 2 – Protect Yourself
Part 3 – National Security
Part 4 – How It Works
Part 5 – One Neighborhood
Coming Sunday Protests
Coming Sunday Solutions

Wawa announces data breach at ‘potentially all’ locations
“The malware accessed customers’ payment card information, including credit and debit card numbers, expiration dates and cardholder names at potentially inside the store and at the self-serve pumps”

Over 267 million Facebook users had their names, phone numbers, and profiles exposed thanks to a public database, researcher says
#DeleteFacebook

Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us
“Here is the most alienating fact about the Digital Nation we live in: It incentivizes forms of engagement that make Americans feel less empowered and more alone than ever, to the benefit of very few. It seizes some of the best, noblest human instincts — to share, to know, to connect, to belong — and harnesses them to a degrading system of profit. Anesthetization to these conditions is dangerous. Cynicism and powerlessness are the hallmarks of another form of digital life, an authoritarian one Americans should badly want to avoid.”

The Miseducation of the American Boy
“Why boys crack up at rape jokes, think having a girlfriend is “gay,” and still can’t cry—and why we need to give them new and better models of masculinity“

Google Chrome Updated
Version 79.0.3945.88 for Windows/Mac/Linux and 79.0.3945.93 for Android.
Download | Release Info
Android: Download | Release Info

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

The Most Popular Christmas Cookie in Every State
“While not unique to Christmastime, chocolate chip cookies and sugar cookies with frosting are staples during the holiday season and favorites among Americans. By count of state, sugar cookies with frosting was overall the favorite Christmas cookie in the U.S. It won the most popular Christmas cookie in 21 of the 50 states.”
Everyone that didn’t pick gingerbread is wrong.

Top Gun: Maverick (2020) – New Trailer

Thanks to readers Arthur and Allen for a few of these.

AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2020 Edition 19.12.2 Recommended WHQL Drivers
Support for RX 5500 XT, performance improvements, new Radeon Software, lots of other stuff. Be sure to see the release notes.
Download | Release Notes

Macrium Reflect 7.2.4557
A few small fixes
Download | Release Notes

FinalCrypt 6.1.1
Download | Changelog | Home Page

IrfanView 4.54
Download & Info | History of changes

Americans Ranked The 50 Greatest Christmas Movies Of All Time, And I Am Very Disappointed In Everyone
My Top Eleven
1. How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1967)
2. Scrooged (1988)
3. A Charlie Brown Christmas
4. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer
5. Santa Claus is Coming to Town
6. A Christmas Carol / Scrooge (Almost any year)
7. The Santa Clause
8. Frosty the Snowman
9. Four Christmases
10. It’s a Wonderful Life
11. Bad Santa
What say you?

Busy, Busy

Windows Updates
Windows 7, 8.1, and 10 all got security updates.
Windows 7 Update history
Windows 8.1 Update history
Windows 10 Update history

I’ve updated my article Remove And Block GWX In Windows 7 to stop the new Windows 7 EOS nagware BS.

Google Chrome 79
Improvements, fixes, 51 security fixes
Download
Download for Android

Adobe Reader Updated
Download | Security Bulletin

VirtualBox 6.1.0
“This is a major update.”
Download | Changelog

Nvidia Geforce Game Ready WHQL Driver 441.66
Download | Release Notes

O&O ShutUp10 Updated
1.7.1405 – released December 06, 2019
FIX: Application of predefined settings via menu were not saved
Download & Info

FinalCrypt 6
Improved User Interface with better overview
Improved file manager behavior & presentation
Improved UserGuidance, Display & Button Layout
Download | Changelog | Home Page

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not

Supposed crack for Windows 7 Extended Updates that don’t exist.
The hack installs 4 .dll files. Cool trick but quite possibly a big security risk IMHO.

The PC was supposed to die a decade ago. Instead, this happened
“And so, here we are, a full decade after the PC’s untimely death, and the industry is still selling more than a quarter-billion-with-a-B personal computers every year. Which is pretty good for an industry that has been living on borrowed time for ten years.
Maybe the reason the PC industry hasn’t suffered a mass extinction event yet is because they adapted, and because those competing platforms weren’t able to take over every PC-centric task.”

FCC tries to bury finding that Verizon and T-Mobile exaggerated 4G coverage
“Verizon, T-Mobile, and US Cellular exaggerated their 4G coverage in official filings to the Federal Communications Commission, an FCC investigation found. But FCC officials confirmed that Chairman Ajit Pai does not plan to punish the three carriers in any way.”

Start10 v1.8
Couple of fixes
Download | Changelog

Microsoft Office 365 Updated
Fixes and a few new features.
Release Info for 365
See MS How-To: Install Office updates
Speaking of MS Office there is a killer deal TODAY ONLY
Microsoft Office 365 Home 12-month subscription for up to 6 people + $50 Amazon.com Gift Card for $99.99
12-month auto-renewing subscription for up to 6 people
1TB OneDrive cloud storage per person
For use on multiple PCs/Macs, tablets, and phones (including Windows, iOS, and Android)

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not

Mozilla and Opera remove Avast extensions from their add-on stores, what will Google do?
“A month ago I wrote about Avast browser extensions being essentially spyware. While this article only names Avast Online Security and AVG Online Security extensions, the browser extensions Avast SafePrice and AVG SafePrice show the same behavior: they upload detailed browsing profiles of their users to uib.ff.avast.com. The amount of data collected here exceeds by far what would be considered necessary or appropriate even for the security extensions, for the shopping helpers this functionality isn’t justifiable at all.”

Google founders Page and Brin step back from Alphabet lead
“GOOGLE HAS entered a new phase of life, following the announcement that its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin are to step down from their roles at the top of the business.
The two boffins were Chief Executive and President of Google’s parent company Alphabet, but following the departures, it’s Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai who will fill the void, expanding his role to the wider company…
The slight paradox here is that by bringing the Google and Alphabet CEO roles together, the company is effectively bringing the alignment of the two companies back together, making it a little bewildering as to why they’re separate in the first place.
The real reasons are that of accounting and accountability, but it just feels like Google wants to realign as much as it can get away with without bringing anti-trust accusations to the table.”

Genius Allegedly Caught Google Stealing its Lyrics With an Ingenious Watermark
“Their watermark, which is applied to all of their content, makes the apostrophes in their lyrics alternate between straight and curly single-quote marks (’ and ’). In a delightful Agatha Christie-like twist, when converted to Morse code, the apostrophes spell out “red handed.”
Huh, another site that starts with G being content thieves.

Ring let police view map of video doorbell installations for over a year
“The company once offered a map, now withdrawn, that allowed police to zoom in to see the specific location of Ring customers.”

Def Leppard, Mötley Crüe, Poison on Tour 2020
Details?

SCORPIONS Plot July 2020 Las Vegas Residency, Tap METALLICA Producer For New Album
“So the plan is to record until the first of July, where we have a residency in Las Vegas for a whole month.”
I would love to see these guys again.

DISTURBED’s Performance Of ‘The Sound Of Silence’ Becomes First ‘Conan’ YouTube Clip To Surpass 100 Million Views
I had linked to it here: https://www.tweakhound.com/2016/04/01/friday-random-stuff-2/

A tiger went on an 800-mile odyssey in search of food, a mate, and a place to call home
I feel ya bro. I did this when I was 18.

Microsoft PowerToys 0.14
Changes and bugfixes
Download | Release Info

Intel Chipset Drivers v10.1.18
“Certified for 19h1” That’s awesome except we are on 19h2.
Download | Release Notes

AMD Radeon Adrenalin 2019 Edition 19.12.1 Optional
Support for Radeon RX 5300M, fixes for RX 5700. If you don’t have one of those cards then skip this.
Download | Release Notes

Firefox 71
Download: 64-bit (en-US) | All Downloads | Release Notes
Related:
Tor Browser 9.0.2
Tails 4.1

FinalCrypt 5.6.9
Bugfixes and performance improvements
Download | Changelog | Home Page

Kali Linux 2019.4
Lots of changes. Apparently there is an ‘Undercover’ mode. Haven’t had a chance to try it.
Download

Stuff I bookmarked recently. Some off topic, some not:

Vulnerability in fully patched Android phones under active attack by bank thieves
“The vulnerability allows malicious apps to masquerade as legitimate apps that targets have already installed and come to trust, researchers from security firm Promon reported in a post. Running under the guise of trusted apps already installed, the malicious apps can then request permissions to carry out sensitive tasks, such as recording audio or video, taking photos, reading text messages or phishing login credentials. Targets who click yes to the request are then compromised.”
See: The StrandHogg vulnerability
Not good. Not good at all.

Wired: I Ditched Google for DuckDuckGo. Here’s Why You Should Too
“It all started with a realization: Most the things I search for are easy to find. Did I really need the all-seeing, all-knowing algorithms of Google to assist me? Probably not. So I made a simple change: I opened up Firefox on my Android phone and switched Google search for DuckDuckGo. As a result, I’ve had a fairly tedious but important revelation: I search for really obvious stuff. Google’s own data backs this up. Its annual round-up of the most searched-for terms is basically a list of names and events: World Cup, Avicii, Mac Miller, Stan Lee, Black Panther, Megan Markle. The list goes on. And I don’t need to buy into Google’s leviathan network of privacy-invading trackers to find out what Black Panther is and when I can go and see it at my local cinema.”
There are good points in the article. I use DuckDuckGo on my computer and phone. I have to say this, for real research there is nothing that tops Google. They know almost everything about almost everyone.

Oregon FBI Tech Tuesday: Securing Smart TVs
“Welcome to the Oregon FBI’s Tech Tuesday segment. Today: building a digital defense with your TV.
Yes, I said your TV. Specifically your smart TV…the one that is sitting in your living room right now. Or, the one that you plan to buy on super sale on Black Friday.”
Unplug it from the internet. My gripe is we went from waiting for the tubes to heat up, to instant on, to waiting for the TV to boot up.

For banks, data on your spending habits could be a gold mine
“For years, Google and Facebook have been showing ads based on your online behavior. Retailers from Amazon to Walgreens also regularly suction up your transaction history to steer future spending and hold your loyalty.
Now banks, too, want to turn data they already have on your spending habits into extra revenue by identifying likely customers for retailers. Banks are increasingly aware that they could be sitting on a gold mine of information that can be used to predict — or sway — where you spend. Historically, such data has been used mostly for fraud protection…Unlike Google or Facebook, which try to infer what you’re interested in buying based on your searches, web visits or likes, “banks have the secret weapon in that they actually know what we spend money on”…“Consumers aren’t aware of the subtle nudges apps are giving them to buy, buy, buy,” Mierzwinski said. “They are basically digging deep into your psyche and figuring out how to manipulate you.”

American jobs are getting worse, new economic index shows
“In 1990, the jobs were pretty much evenly divided” said Daniel Alpert, a founder of Westwood Capital and one of the creators of the index. In the process of running the numbers, he said, “We discovered that 63% of all jobs that were created since 1990 were low-wage, low-hour jobs. That was a pretty stunning statistic.”