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As a big fan of the GNOME desktop environment, I have long been a Fedora user. After all, that operating system uses GNOME as its primary environment. Since Canonical killed Unity and moved its focus to GNOME, I have a renewed interest in Ubuntu and Ubuntu-based distributions, such as System76's wonderful Pop!_OS. I suspect I am not alone in my feelings.

Today, Ubuntu Linux 18.04 'Bionic Beaver' Beta 1 becomes available for download. Ubuntu 18.04 is significant, as it will be an LTS (Long Term Support) version. As was the case when Unity was the primary DE, GNOME is not available in this beta stage. Instead, there are other flavors from which to choose, such as Kubuntu with KDE Plasma and Xubuntu, which uses Xfce.

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My first-ever console was Atari 2600. My favorite game for it was Mario Bros. -- it was before the brothers became super on Nintendo Entertainment System. It was Super Mario Brothers on NES that made me -- and countless others -- huge video game fans, however. My love for Mario, Luigi, and the rest of the Nintendo world, remains strong to this day.

To celebrate Mario, an annual holiday has been established -- MAR10 Day. Get it? It is on March 10, as the abbreviation looks like the word "Mario." Well, Google is apparently getting in on the Mario love, as it is bringing the plumber to its Maps service for a limited time.

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Cloud platform Dropbox and leading CRM provider Salesforce have announced a new partnership to connect their platforms, allowing companies of all types and sizes to collaborate and connect with their customers across sales, service, marketing, commerce, and more.

Users will be able to create branded, customized Dropbox folders within Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Marketing Cloud using a new digital asset engagement solution. Folders will be available to both internal teams and external partners.

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If you're a Chrome user, you may well have taken advantage of the password saving feature of the browser to make it easier to log into your various online accounts. However, it's not a perfect solution, and you may well have been considering one of the various password management tools that exist instead.

Until now, it has not been possible to extract the passwords and login data you have saved in Chrome ready to import into your new password database. This has now changed, so you can easily switch to a new password manager without having to retype everything by hand.

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It's long been known that the Chinese government has links to hacker groups, but new research into the country's national vulnerability database (CNNVD) reveals evidence of data being changed to hide influence by the country’s intelligence service.

Research by security intelligence specialist Recorded Future back in November finds that CNNVD is faster than the US national vulnerability database (NVD) in reporting vulnerabilities -- NVD trails CNNVD in average time between initial disclosure and database inclusion (33 days versus 13 days).

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Burnaware Technologies has released PDF Shaper Free 8.2, a major update to its freeware PDF toolkit for Windows users. PDF Shaper provides a series of tools for managing and optimizing PDF files, and is also available in Premium and Professional editions.

It’s the paid-for editions that get the most love in this new release, with the non-free Watermark tool gaining three new features. All versions gain support for system TrueType fonts, codepages and styles as well as an option to select specific pages when converting a PDF to an image file.

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Donald Trump's use of Twitter is well known, and it's also been the source of some controversy for one reason or another. As well as his seemingly ill-thought out ramblings causing delight, amazement, disbelief and horror in just about equal measure, it has been suggested that the president's decision to block people who criticize him is unconstitutional.

Now a district judge may have come up with a solution, avoiding concerns about potential violation of the First Amendment. She suggests that rather than blocking people, Trump should just mute their accounts.

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Microsoft has stopped a large scale malware distribution campaign that tried to infect almost 500,000 Windows PCs with a cryptocurrency miner.

Windows Defender antivirus software detected 80,000 instances of several Trojans with the payload known as Dofoil or Smoke loader, at noon PST on March 6.

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In an attempt to improve trust and transparency, ad-blocking tool Ghostery has gone open source. It comes after Ghostery was acquired by Cliqz last year and raised a few eyebrows with the business model it put in place.

As well as going open source, Ghostery is also introducing new ways of making money. Rather than selling anonymized user data to third parties, there are now two income streams: Ghostery Insights and Ghostery Rewards. The former is a premium product for which details have not been revealed, the latter an opt-in marketing system.

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For a large number of Twitter users, there is one question that crops up time and time again -- "How do I get verified on Twitter?". Once dominated by celebrities and politicians, Twitter eventually allowed anyone to ask for a coveted tick -- but then closed down open applications after problems with white supremacists.

A lot of users were stripped of their verified status, but gaining the tick still remains a goal for many. Now Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey has some good news. The plan is to open up verification to everyone -- and Twitter will not be acting as judge and jury.

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If you like to travel internationally, you know that language differences can be a huge pain point. English speakers are lucky, as that language is often spoken as a second language. That isn't always the case, however, so communication can be a huge barrier. This isn't just an issue for those that travel for pleasure, but for business travelers too.

Luckily, technology has minimized this pain. Software allows convenient translation, making both communication and the consumption of foreign language media much easier. Microsoft translator is one such great solution, and today, it gets six new text-to-speech languages -- Bulgarian, Croatian, Malay, Slovenian, Tamil, and Vietnamese.

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Cisco's Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP) software has a hardcoded password that could be used by an attacker to gain full control of a system. The company even says that "extenuating circumstances" exist that could enable an attacker to elevate privileges to root.

The vulnerability (CVE-2018-0141) affects version 11.6 of the software. A patch has been made available, and users are encouraged to install it as soon as possible as there are no other workarounds.

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Advertising Trojans were the top mobile malware threat in 2016, however, new figures from Kaspersky Lab show their numbers declined last year but their creators turned to improved monetization methods.

Taking advantage of super-user rights to secretly install various applications or bombard an infected device with ads to make use of the smartphone impossible, ad trojans have become a major threat and are also extremely difficult to detect and remove.

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Security firm McAfee has announced the acquisition of VPN company TunnelBear. Full details of the deal have not been revealed, and it is not known how much money has changed hands.

With a growing awareness of the importance of online security and privacy, VPN tools have grown in popularity in recent years, and the Canada-based TunnelBear has managed to gather 20 million users around the world.

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Among IT professionals Malwarebytes is one of the most trusted names for malware detection and removal.

Perhaps less well known is that it also provides endpoint protection for businesses and it's now extending that to cover Apple Mac computers.

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