One of the new additions to Windows 10 is how the OS handles tablets and desktops. In Windows 8, you were in either the modern environment or using the desktop, but with Windows 10, these two environments are blended together to create a seamless experience.

This is a small change in Windows 10, but one that gives you more granular control over the OS and how it operates.

Many users of the popular BitTorrent client uTorrent are complaining about it silently installing a cryptocurrency miner with a recent update. The Epic Scale tool, which slows down host computers, is reportedly being installed without consent and for some is particularly hard to remove.

In a lengthy blog post Feb. 26, Charles Morris, program manager lead for Project Spartan, admitted that as the IE version numbers crept upward, Microsoft "heard complaints about some sites being broken in IE—from family members, co-workers in other parts of Microsoft, or online discussions."

"In addition, we revised our internal engineering processes to prioritize real-world interoperability issues uncovered by our data analysis. With these processes in place, we set about fixing over 3000 interoperability bugs and adding over 40 new Web standards (to date) to make sure we deliver on our goals," he stated.

Aggrieved users who'd thought far enough ahead to install Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or any of the other alternatives took to Norton's official forum to vent their spleens.

Tales of woe, heartbreak and downloads of new browsers spread, until about 0400 GMT, at which point a member of Symantec staff posted: "Kindly run manual live update (right click on Norton icon on tray notification area > 'Run live update ')," helpfully adding "Kindly stop using work-arounds.

Yes, Java has glitches and bugs, but relatively speaking, it's the Rock of Gibraltar. The same faith in Node.js is many years off. In fact, it may be decades before the JavaScript crew writes nearly as many regression tests as Sun/Oracle developed to test the Java Virtual Machine.

The debate whether to use Java or Node.js on your servers can and will go on for years. As opposed to most debates, however, we can have it both ways.

"You may never have to reboot your Linux machine ever again, even for kernel patching," and excerpts from the long (and nicely human-readable) description of newly merged kernel code that does what Ksplice has for quite a while (namely, offer live updating for Linux systems, no downtime required), but without Oracle's control.

Microsoft's first Patch Tuesday of 2015 did not patch a single Internet Explorer flaw. Today's February Patch Tuesday update is a very different story, with Microsoft patching a staggering 41 vulnerabilities in IE. In total, Microsoft patched 56 vulnerabilities spread across nine security bulletins.

"I cannot remember when a single Microsoft patch included 41 CVEs, let alone an IE update so large," Andrew Storms, vice president of Security Services at New Context, told eWEEK. "If you consider that all of the Microsoft patches in 2014 added up to 343 CVEs, then we are well on our way already to surpass that number in 2015."

If you don't want to pay for an Office 365 subscription and you're not interested in cloud solutions like Google Docs, LibreOffice is an excellent—and free—productivity option. The free desktop suite has all the functionality you need, such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, and databases.

Google's security researchers have published another pair of Windows security flaws that Microsoft hasn't got a fix for, continuing the disagreement between the companies about when and how to disclose security bugs.

A greater willingness to ship patches outside the Patch Tuesday schedule would, in the short term, at least provide Windows users with the option of patching.

With the most recent work that has landed, the networkd component has been improved with new features. Among the additions are IP forwarding and masquerading support. This is the minimal support needed and these settings get turned on by default for container network interfaces. Also added was minimal firewall manipulation helpers for systemd's networkd. The firewall manipulation helpers are used for establishing NAT rules.