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Say goodbye to unproductive Linux habits and switch to the express lane with Working with Linux -- Quick Hacks for the Command Line from Packt Publishing.

Websites, online services, databases, and pretty much every other computer that offers public services runs on Linux. With such a broad usage, the demand for Linux specialists is ever growing. Through this book, you will improve your terminal productivity by seeing how to use different tools.

A new beta of the Android tweaking tool Xposed Framework has been released. The big news is that the release brings support for Oreo, something of a surprise considering how recently Google pushed the latest version of its mobile operating system out of the door.

The latest Xposed Framework release comes mere months after Nougat support was added. While the Oreo-supporting release will be welcomed by mobile tweakers, the developer says it should be treated as a beta, and may be buggy.

Following reports that its Spectre and Meltdown fixes were leaving some AMD systems unbootable, Microsoft has stopped the patches from rolling out to certain devices.

The company is blaming AMD's failure to comply with "the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown."

We are living in very scary times, and I'm only referring to technology. Concerns about nuclear war and unstable world leaders aside, our computers and devices are like Swiss cheese nowadays thanks to Spectre and Meltdown. Hell, there are hardcoded backdoors in consumer devices! What a sad state of affairs...

If you want to help keep your home network safe, a quality router is always a smart purchase. Not only do you want something that is reliable, but it should be from a reputable manufacturer that issues regular updates. One such company is D-Link, and today, it unveils a new 802.11ac wireless router that leverages the McAfee Secure Home Platform to keep you safe. Called "DIR-2680," it features an absolutely gorgeous industrial design that, quite frankly, makes it appear as something other than a router entirely.

The annual scourge is upon us, as tens of thousands of attention seekers descend on Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show. Nowhere else can you watch bloggers and journalists in a constant chase of their public relations foibles, who desperately hunt for all the attention they can get their clients. Think a thousand kids in a small room, calling for mommy and groping her dress. Then multiply ten times.

My last CES pilgrimage was 2008. That's right, I haven't gone in 10 years. No-o-o-o regrets. Nothing important ever comes out of the show, even though each year the hype suggests otherwise. Most new unveiled products won't ship until second half of the year. If ever. There's more vaporware at CES than hot air—and that's no easy feat. Surely the Las Vegas Convention Center installs extra carbon dioxide scrubbers so that participants don't asphyxiate. If there was an alarm for toxic babble, it would sound incessantly.

Following the Meltdown and Spectre revelations, let's just say that 2018 is off to a bad start for many tech companies. Apple is among the biggest players affected by the two security vulnerabilities, with all iOS and Mac users at risk.

The company was quick to patch Meltdown, however, with iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2 and tvOS 11.2 getting mitigations against the vulnerability. And, now, it's tackling Spectre too through new updates for its major operating systems.

Amazon and Microsoft said that Alexa and Cortana would be able to talk to each other by the end of the 2017, but the two personal assistants have yet to receive this functionality until today. However, even without Cortana's help, Alexa is making a big leap forward in the Windows space.

Amazon has teamed up with leading PC manufacturers Acer, ASUS, Lenovo and HP to include its personal assistant on new Windows 10 devices that will arrive in 2018.

The Bitcoin bubble means there is a massive interest in cryptocurrencies, particularly from those looking for an easy way to make a quick buck. It's also led to secretive mining tools making use of people's CPUs without their knowledge, mining for profitable cryptocurrency for persons unknown.

We've seen this with both websites and browser extensions, and now a security researcher has discovered a series of fake Android apps harboring an undisclosed Coinhive cryptocurrency miner. The repackaged APKs take advantage of the CPUs of the smartphones the apps are installed on.

Businesses are increasingly turning to software to allow them to spot cyber threats. But this can lead to a problem in the form of alert fatigue, where there are just too many warnings to allow them to be properly investigated.

Network threat detection specialist Bricata has put together an infographic to highlight the problem of alert fatigue.

Given the high number of data breaches in the past year and the number of records involved, many consumers now rank identity theft as one of their top concerns with 66 percent of Americans saying it's the crime they most worry about.

Security company McAfee is using this week's CES to move beyond its traditional antivirus products and launch its own Identity Theft Protection.

Fans of the game Fortnite have been frustrated by a combination of reduced performance, and an inability to log into the game at all. The company behind the title, Epic Games, says that patches installed to mitigate against the Meltdown and Spectre bugs are to blame.

Since installing patches to address the vulnerabilities, Epic has noticed a very significant spike in processors usage. The extra strain on backend cloud services has noticeably slowed down Fortnite for some users, and rendered others unable to play the game at all.

Microsoft has had something of an on-off relationship with Bitcoin over the years, and once again the Windows-maker has chosen to drop support for the cryptocurrency -- at least temporarily.

It has been reported that Microsoft is uncomfortable with the fluctuating value of Bitcoin, as well as the increased transaction fees. As such, customers will no longer be able to add to their Microsoft account balances using Bitcoin.

As if the Meltdown and Spectre bug affecting millions of processors was not bad enough, the patches designed to mitigate the problems are introducing issues of their own. Perhaps the most well-known effect is a much-publicized performance hit, but some users are reporting that Microsoft's emergency patch is bricking their computers.

We've already seen compatibility issues with some antivirus tools, and now some AMD users are reporting that the KB4056892 patch is rendering their computer unusable. A further issue -- error 0x800f0845 -- means that it is not possible to perform a rollback.

I must be honest -- I am starting to become fatigued by all of the vulnerabilities and security failures in technology nowadays. Quite frankly, between Spectre and Meltdown, I don't even want to use my computer or devices anymore -- I feel exposed.

Today, yet another security blunder becomes publicized, and it is really bad. You see, many Western Digital My Cloud NAS drives have a hardcoded backdoor, meaning anyone can access them -- your files could be at risk. It isn't even hard to take advantage of it -- the username is "mydlinkBRionyg" and the password is "abc12345cba" (without quotes). To make matters worse, it was disclosed to Western Digital six months ago and the company apparently did nothing until November 2017. Let's be realistic -- not everyone stays on top of updates, and a backdoor never should have existed in the first place.

With the popularity of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, it's perhaps little surprise that a number of websites have recently been discovered using visitors' computer to do a little mining. The latest site found to be indulging in the activity is BlackBerry Mobile -- but this time it's thanks to the work of a hacker.

As with other sites carrying out surreptitious mining, it was a CoinHive mining tool that was found embedded in the code of the site. The same hacker also placed the same miner on a handful of other sites.