Unlike Tor, which hides messages with several layers of encryption for sending them through random servers on the Internet, Vuvuzela takes a different approach, one that uses less encryption, but a lot of dummy traffic.

MIT researchers claim that attackers can even infiltrate more than half of its mailbox network, but if at least one mailbox server is left intact, users will be able to safely communicate because of all the fake traffic.

For the past 12 years, NetHack 3.4.3 has been the most recent version of the classic roguelike dungeon exploration game. On 7 December 2015, the official NetHack DevTeam announced the release of NetHack 3.6.0.

NetHack 3.6.0 is dedicated to the memory of the author Terry Pratchett. Besides the Tourist character class inspired by his stories, NetHack now contains "a huge number of quotes from many of the Discworld novels."

“I believe Thunderbird should would thrive best by separating itself from reliance on Mozilla development systems and in some cases, Mozilla technology,” Baker wrote in her open memo, posted on Mozilla’s public governance forum.

Mozilla now views any support for Thunderbird, even the limited support it has been providing for the past three years, as akin to “paying a tax,” in Baker’s words, on top of the work those engineers spend building Firefox.

Over at Github, Ola Flisbäck offers up a depressing demonstration of just how easy it is to zero in on an individual by watching the stream of presence and status notifications.

Here's the problem: in trying to make sure Telegram is usable, it's been made way too chatty. For example, Flisbäck writes, “The Telegram Android app sends a notification to all contacts when it becomes or stops being the "foreground" app on the device.

If The Grugq and Matthew Green are right and Telegram's encryption is also problematic, the app is probably more like the spook's friend than the enemy of civilisation

Systems can still be upgraded to the November update, but direct installation is no longer possible. Instead, the original RTM version must be installed, and the upgrade to 1511 performed through Windows Update.

Others are reporting all manner of bugs, such as machines that instantly wake after sleeping, excessive processor usage by the Mail app, the lock screen failing to hide the full desktop, and more besides. Given that Microsoft is still pushing 1511 out through Windows Update, none of these issues would appear to be fatal, showstopper issues, but clearly this release is not without its problems.

The way Windows is developed has changed radically as a result of two things: laying off large numbers of dedicated software testers, and shipping regularly both to members of the Insider program using pre-releases, and to mainstream users with monthly updates and twice-yearly larger upgrades (of which the November release was the first).

Back in 1995, University of California students Peter Mattis and Kimball Spencer were members of the eXperimental Computing Facility, a Berkeley campus organization. In June of that year, the two hinted at their intentions to write a free graphical image manipulation program as a means of giving back to the free software community.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary, there is an update of the current stable branch of GIMP.

The researchers said the vulnerabilities uncovered by Project Zero and in the Fraunhofer analysis should be fixed but that there's no indication that they can be exploited to provide attackers access to encrypted data stored on an unmounted hard drive or thumb drive.

The conclusion means that the millions of people who have relied on TrueCrypt will probably have a grace period to safely continue using the program until VeraCrypt or another TrueCrypt replacement is farther along in development.

According to PYPL, which pulls its raw data for analysis from Google Trends, Python has grown the most over the past five years—up 5 percent since roughly 2010. Over the same period, PHP also declined by 5 percent.

For developers and other tech pros, these lists come in useful when deciding which languages to pursue. Ones near the top of the rankings are in wide use, usually making them worth your valuable learning time.

The problem is with software in one of the four critical patches issued in yesterday's Patch Tuesday bundle – MS15-115. This was supposed to fix a flaw in the way Windows handles fonts, but has had some unexpected side effects for some Outlook users.

The SysAdmin sector of Reddit is awash with reports of problems with the patch, and it appears to be a cross-OS problem. The general consensus is to disable the patch on Windows Server Update Services and wait for a reissue.

Many corporate and business users—particularly IT managers—are all concerned about the havoc that the update might wreak on the performance of their applications and computers.

Microsoft responded in a blog post by Executive Vice President Terry Myerson explaining the existing options for upgrades and also revealing that, starting next year, Windows 10 would be installed on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 through the normal update process.