Microsoft may be making great claims about the speed and security of Edge, but a recent study found that the browser is one of the least private. Douglas J Leith from the School of Computer Science & Statistics at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, tested six web browsers to determine how often they phoned home, and what data they were sharing.

He pitted Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Brave Browser, Microsoft Edge and Yandex Browser against each other, and the results were rather damning of Edge. Among the findings was the disturbing fact that all URLs typed into Edge are shared with multiple Microsoft sites, as are unique hardware identifiers, opening up the possibility of history tracking.

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When I first saw the Kanguru Defender Bio-Elite30 flash drive, I was immediately intrigued. Having the ability to decrypt an encrypted flash drive with the touch of a finger was immensely convenient. And yes, convenience matters, as making encryption easy increases the likelihood that the user will actually use it. If encrypting files becomes too cumbersome, the user may not bother, leading to poor security practices.

Also cool was Kanguru's promise that it was operating system agnostic, meaning it would work with any OS, such as Windows, macOS, and desktop Linux distributions. I'd later find out that was only partially true, but more on that in a moment. It is even well-built -- the housing is a solid piece of aluminum that not only looks beautiful, but should lend to increased durability.

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When Google started to warn Microsoft Edge users about potential security issues to encourage them to switch to Chrome, it seemed as though the browser wars were in full effect once again.

But now Google seems to have realized that displaying the warning to users of Chromium-based Edge is, well, a little petty. The company no long displays such warnings -- a move which could remove an obstacle for those who have been sitting on the fence about switching.

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iXsystems has announced that its two open source operating systems for network attached storage are unifying. Moving forward, FreeNAS and TrueNAS will merge into TrueNAS Open Storage.

Despite the unification, there will still be two versions of the operating system available: TrueNAS CORE and TrueNAS Enterprise. Both are billed as enterprise-quality software, but TrueNAS Enterprise requires a license and offers an extended set of features, while TrueNAS CORE is free.

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Since switching to the Chromium engine, Microsoft Edge just became a whole lot more interesting -- and development has sped up dramatically.

As well as speeding up Edge, Microsoft has been busy adding new features such as a Potentially Unwanted Apps blocker, support for Chrome extensions and more. One of the latest changes does nothing to add new features, but it is important for anyone concerned with aesthetics; there is now support for Chrome themes to change the look of the browser.

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It is mere days since the last pair of updates to PowerToys for Windows 10, but there was really very little to get excited about. PowerToys 0.15 and 0.15.1 weren't much more than bug-fix releases, but version 0.16 is something to look forward to.

While it's not known quite when this version will be released, Microsoft seems eager to make it available as soon as possible. This time around, there are new additions to excite you. A total of four new tools, including the return of the Image Resizer PowerToy.

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Google competitor DuckDuckGo is already well-known as a search engine that goes further than others to protect user privacy. Now the company has open sourced Tracker Radar, its data set that details thousands of domains that track you as you use the internet.

DuckDuckGo Tracker Radar is something that the company already uses itself to power the tracker protection in the DuckDuckGo Privacy Browser mobile apps and DuckDuckGo Privacy Essentials desktop browser extensions. Now it is being made publicly available, and developers are invited to contribute to the ever-growing list of trackers to further protect user privacy.

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Chrissy Teigen is an absolute delight. She is wildly popular, not only from her modeling, but from her wonderful social media accounts too. Apparently, her husband is rather famous as well. Teigen's spouse, named John Legend, is a notable singer and pianist.

Likely thanks to his marriage to Chrissy Teigen, Legend scored a pretty cool partnership with Google, lending his voice to Google Assistant. In other words, when summoning Google Assistant, you can be greeted by Chrissy Teigen's husband's voice. Sadly, this is coming to an end, as the search giant announces the partnership concludes later this month.

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The threat of a global pandemic is alarming, but at least in this case, IT has some advance notice to prepare for the worst-case scenario. You do not want to be caught without a plan if local governments institute a quarantine or local schools are closed for several weeks. And even if we avoid a pandemic -- fingers crossed -- the planning you did won’t be in vain.

It’s important for every organization to always have a plan to deal with disasters large and small, whether it’s flooding, inclement winter weather or a particularly bad cold that sends half your team home. Here are the steps you should take to put together your plan and prepare for a potential pandemic.

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New research conducted by The Harris Poll on behalf of SE2 and Life.io finds the vast majority of respondents would opt to share real-time wellness data with insurance companies through wearable devices in exchange for ongoing benefits like a lower insurance premium or wellness rewards.

​The data, based on results from more than 2,000 adults, also finds that people want their policies to be more interactive. Roughly two thirds (68 percent) say if a provider offered a policy that included elements of gamification to reward healthy lifestyle and wellness habits -- like badges for hitting certain milestones, a leaderboard, financial rewards -- they would be likely to engage in those elements.

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Three-hundred-and-seventy-six in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 on the Microsoft Store in the past seven days.

Microsoft plans to turn Cortana into a business-focused tool and will remove Home functionality from the digital assistant in the next versions of Windows 10.

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It’s been a couple of weeks since Microsoft last rolled out a new Windows 10 build to Insiders on the Fast ring.

It can’t be said that latest flight, Build 19577, has been worth the wait as it’s mostly a collection of fixes and improvements, although Microsoft is making diagnostic data changes in Settings, and there's a new icon to get excited about too (or not).

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Microsoft's Windows 10 is hardly a new operating system anymore. In fact, it has been available to the public for damn near five years now. And yet, despite existing half a decade, it still feels very incomplete. The Control Panel still hasn't been merged with Settings, for instance, and the user interface still feels like a work in progress. Hey, at least those terrible Live Tiles are seemingly on their way out. Ultimately, using Windows 10 feels like you are in a constant state of beta. It shouldn't be this way -- Microsoft's operating system should be much better than it is. After all, the company essentially has unlimited resources.

Thankfully, Linux is here to save the day. Yes, thanks to Linux distributions, computer users can experience a sane operating system -- one that actually makes sense. There are countless great Linux-based operating systems, such as MX Linux 19.1, Netrunner 20.01, elementary OS 5.1.2, and Manjaro 19.0. One of my favorite Linux distros -- particularly for those switching from Windows -- is the excellent Zorin OS. Why? Well, it is very secure, looks great, offers a familiar user experience, and comes with some great free software. Today, a new version of that operating system -- Zorin OS 15.2 -- becomes available for download, and it looks awesome.

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Big changes are happening to mobile networks but many people remain confused or in the dark about what's going on.

A Ting Mobile survey of 1,500 customers across all US carriers finds 79 percent of people have no idea that the 3G network is being phased out across the country by 2021, nor how it will affect them.

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If you thought that Kilos were just a metric measure of weight, then we've got news for you. It's also the name of a dark web search engine that's becoming the Google of the internet underworld.

Thought to have evolved from an earlier search engine Grams -- see what they did there? -- Kilos clearly imitates Google's look and feel. Researchers at Digital Shadows believe that since going live towards the end of 2019 Kilos has indexed more platforms and added more search functionalities than Grams ever did.

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