When you run the updated version, you’ll notice some worrying changes -- active monitoring refuses to stay turned off, and the privacy settings have been removed in the free version. Avast has also stopped users from being able to quit the software -- yes, really.

That means, for most users, CCleaner will run continually in the background, reporting back to Avast.

Avast is clearly in no hurry to fix these issues, and given its past behavior this probably won’t be the last time we have to warn users off installing or upgrading the software.

Today, as Windows 10 turns three years old, I am writing to you to ensure that you are aware of the dissatisfaction your customers have with the updates released for Windows desktops and servers in recent months.

Recently many of the participants on the listserve have expressed their concerns and dissatisfaction with the quality of updates as well as the timing of updates.

Some are disabling Windows Update as a drastic measure to ensure that updates do not reboot systems when they are not wanted.

The Mozilla Foundation, the organization behind the Firefox browser, is working on adding a new feature to its browser that is similar to the Site Isolation feature that Google rolled out to Chrome users this year.

But Chrome won't be the only browser with Site Isolation. Work on a similar feature also began at Mozilla headquarters back in April, in a plan dubbed Project Fission.

While flinging these patches at expectant Windows 10 machines would be a good idea, admins do need to exercise caution and should perform some testing first. All three packages suffer from a known issue where installing the July 2018 .NET Framework Security Updates could bork some COM components with a System.UnauthorizedAccessException error triggered when an affected application tries to load them.

A new bot called “Who’s buying drugs on Venmo” tweets the usernames and photos of Venmo users who have marked their transaction with a particular drug keyword or emoji.

The bot also potentially exposes people in ways they didn’t originally anticipate, touching on issues of consent and privacy.

Venmo, owned by PayPal, is a social-network-mobile-payment-service crossover, allowing users to easily and quickly send money to each other. Users can make all their transactions and activity private, but by default, Venmo publicly presents the username, name, photo, and message sent with the money within the service’s app for others to see.

Flushed with success having "fixed" the disastrous Windows Vista with the jumped-up service pack of Windows 7 in 2009, Windows boss Steven Sinofsky had a relatively free hand with the next version of the platform.

Coming six years after the release of the beloved Windows 7, Windows 10 had a lot to live up to.

From now on changes would be incremental, regular and a lot more frequent. Whether users wanted them or not.

A hacker has gained access to a developer's npm account and injected malicious code into a popular JavaScript library, code that was designed to steal the npm credentials of users who utilize the poisoned package inside their projects.

"We determined that access tokens for approximately 4,500 accounts could have been obtained before we acted to close this vulnerability. However, we have not found evidence that any tokens were actually obtained or used to access any npmjs.com account during this window," Silverio said.

This is the third incident in the past year when a hacker has inserted malicious code in an npm package.

Exploit broker Zerodium is offering rewards of up to $500,000 for zero-days in UNIX-based operating systems like OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, but also for Linux distros such as Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, and Tails.

Since Zerodium drew everyone's attention to the exploit brokerage market in 2015, the market has gotten more and more crowded, but also more sleazy, with some companies being accused of selling zero-days to government agencies in countries with oppressive or dictatorial regimes, where they are often used against political oponents, journalists, and dissidents, instead of going after real criminals.

The release builds on Firefox Quantum, which the company calls “by far the biggest update since Firefox 1.0 in 2004.”

Mozilla doesn’t break out the exact numbers for Firefox, though the company does say “half a billion people around the world” use the browser. In other words, it’s a major platform that web developers have to consider.

The web has reached a new low. It has become an annoying, often toxic and occasionally unsafe place to hang out. More important, it has become an unfair trade: You give up your privacy online, and what you get in return are somewhat convenient services and hyper-targeted ads.

Most notably, Firefox now offers privacy tools, like a built-in feature for blocking ad trackers and a “container” that can be installed to prevent Facebook from monitoring your activities across the web. Most other browsers don’t include those features.

In addition to the normal Firefox browser, Mozilla offers Firefox Focus, a privacy-centric mobile browser that blocks trackers by default and purges your web browsing history as soon as you close out of a page.