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Star Wars sucks. There, I said it. Other than A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back, the films are all horrible nonsense. Many current fans of the franchise are older men simply clinging to nostalgia. It's sad that Disney takes advantage of them, cranking out terrible new films and TV shows while selling them plastic tchotchkes. For the love of God, people, please stop buying figurines and make-believe laser swords.

If for some reason you are still a fan of the Star Wars franchise, I have some good news. You know that TV show The Mandalorian on Disney+? Remember that Baby Yoda puppet thing that fanboys went gaga over? Well, you can soon have Baby Yoda ears for you 3rd gen Amazon Echo Dot. Yeah, it is an Echo Dot holder with friggin' Baby Yoda ears jutting out from the sides. It is just for decoration, and it adds no features to the device.

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Biometrics have been a game-changer for consumer security. Not only can you unlock computers, tablets, and smartphones with facial recognition and fingerprints, but also, your finger can be used to decrypt encrypted storage devices. Are biometrics infallible? No. But still, the convenience makes consumers less likely to develop bad habits like having no password or pin at all on their devices! Never let perfect get in the way of better, folks.

Today, Google announces that it is integrating WebAuthn biometrics into its Chrome browser for Android. If you choose to store your credit and/or debit cards in the browser for easy checkout while shopping, you can now use your face or fingerprint rather than having to enter the CVC code from the card. In addition, Google is adding touch-to-fill, allowing you to easily fill in your information with one hand.

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Tonight the National Basketball Association season officially kicks off with the Pelicans at the Jazz and the Clippers at the Lakers. Hopefully this will go smoother than the start of Major League Baseball season did for the Marlins, who have had 17 positive tests for coronavirus already.

You can debate if the last season is starting late, or the upcoming season is starting early -- the NBA would prefer you to believe it’s the season that would have ended months ago, and that’s how they’re billing it.

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The growth of coronavirus cases in a number of countries has led to talk about a second wave of the pandemic. According to WHO, disturbing news is coming from China, the US, Israel, South Korea, Iran and other countries. At the same time, privacy problems are arising with new force in COVID mobile apps.

It is a common opinion that Android app users don’t know how exactly their personal data and the information transmitted by the apps are actually used. Alarm signals of privacy breaking are coming from different places around the world. If you add to that the shortcomings and even errors on the part of developers -- the threat of unauthorized access to personal information increases even more.

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A serious vulnerability dubbed BootHole has been discovered in the GRUB2 bootloader. Millions of systems run the risk of being exposed to hackers -- primarily those running Linux, but Windows is also affected. Discovered by security researchers at Eclypsium, the BootHole vulnerability has been assigned CVE-2020-10713 ("GRUB2: crafted grub.cfg file can lead to arbitrary code execution during boot process") and a CVSS rating of 8.2.

The flaw can be exploited to gain arbitrary code execution during the boot process, even when Secure Boot is enabled and virtually all Linux distributions are affected. But more than this, the vulnerability also leaves Windows systems that make use of Secure Boot with the standard Microsoft Third Party UEFI Certificate Authority open to attack.

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It's important for security teams to be able to respond quickly and effectively to threats and part of being able to do that is having good intelligence.

With this in mind, Netenrich is launching two new tools, Knowledge Now (KNOW), a free global threat intelligence tool, and Attack Surface Intelligence (ASI) combine to deliver rich, actionable context for faster, more proactive response to known and emerging cyber threats.

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We've been talking about the cybersecurity skills gap for more than a decade, but new research from the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA)  and independent industry analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) reveals it's not going away.

The shortage has impacted 70 percent of organizations, with consequences including increasing workloads, unfilled open job vacancies and an inability to learn or use cybersecurity technologies to their full potential.

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Google announced today that it will make some features of its Google One subscription-based service free for all Google users provided that Google One is available in the country of origin for a particular user.

If you have never heard of Google One before, you may find Brian's article on the launch of the service useful.

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If you have tried to install the Windows cleanup utility CCleaner recently, you may have noticed that Microsoft Defender springs into action warning you that it is a potentially unwanted application (PUA).

This is not the first time Piriform CCleaner has got on the wrong side of Microsoft -- it was previously blocked from being mentioned in the Microsoft Community forums. The Avast-owned software has been popular with people seeking to tidy up and optimize Windows 10 for a number of years, so what's going on and why does Microsoft flag it up as a PUA?

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Whenever I call Microsoft an open source champion or leader, the Linux fanboys come out in droves to tell me I am wrong. Unfortunately for them, I am extremely correct on the subject. Look, I get it, Microsoft was hostile towards both the open source and Linux communities years ago, but things change. The Windows-maker contributes to countless open source projects while also providing Linux programs, such as Procman. It is time for the open source and Linux communities to soften their stance on the company -- Microsoft is not your enemy!

Today, Microsoft proves once again that it is a friend of the open source community. You see, the storied company has become a Corporate Gold member of the Blender Development Fund. What does that mean? Essentially, Microsoft has handed over some of its money to help the development of popular open source program Blender -- free software for 3D creators.

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It’s Windows 10’s 5th birthday, and to celebrate -- or just by happy coincidence -- Microsoft has released a new Insider build to the Dev Channel (what used to be the Fast ring).

Build 20180 enables all of the new features that were first mentioned in Build 20161, including theme-aware tiles on Start. Some of these features were only available to a sub-set of Insiders previously.

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Developer Felix Rieseberg won our hearts and minds a couple of years ago, when he released Windows 95 as an Electron app that you could run in Windows, macOS and Linux. He even updated it a year ago to make it faster and bundled playable versions of gaming classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein3D alongside the OS.

Now he’s back with an installable version of Mac OS 8 that you can run on any modern computer, and he’s included a number of Mac apps and games with it, including Photoshop 3, Premiere 4, Illustrator 5.5, Oregon Trail, and Duke Nukem 3D.

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It’s been a couple of months since the Kodi Foundation last rolled out a major update for its hugely popular home theater software, but today the wait is over as it has a new release for you to install. Kodi 18.8 comes with a number of changes and improvements, as well as some big news regarding the future of the software.

According to the team this new build is "likely to be the final release in the 18.x 'Leia' series, before all effort now shifts to 19.x 'Matrix'". And in keeping with that announcement, it has switched Kodi 19 to the release cycle.

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Five years ago today Windows 10 hit general availability and it’s fair to say the operating system has had a lot of low points in its first half-decade.

Offered free 'for the first year', (leading people to think it would turn into a subscription service after that point), take up wasn’t quite what Microsoft hoped for, so the company started forcing it onto users against their will. Let’s look at some of the more infamous moments Windows 10 users have had to endure.

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Researchers at password manager NordPass have identified a total of 9,517 unsecured databases containing 10,463,315,645 entries with such data as emails, passwords, and phone numbers.

The databases are found across 20 different countries, with China being at the top of the list -- the country has nearly 4,000 exposed databases. This means that potentially more than 2.6 billion users could have had their accounts breached.

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