This new standard offers improved compression, which reduces data requirements by around 50% of the bit rate relative to the previous standard H.265/High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) without compromising visual quality. In other words, H.266/VVC offers faster video transmission for equal perceptual quality.

Because H.266/VVC was developed with ultra-high-resolution video content in mind, the new standard is particularly beneficial when streaming 4K or 8K videos on a flat screen TV. Furthermore, H.266/VVC is ideal for all types of moving images: from high-resolution 360° video panoramas to screen sharing contents.

Microsoft engineer Dale Hirt confirmed the change on the PHP mailing list, warning that the Windows behemoth was not "going to be supporting PHP for Windows in any capacity for version 8.0 and beyond."

The move is not altogether surprising. Between December 2018 and December 2019, Microsoft saw the market-share of its Windows-based Internet Information Services (IIS) slump from 42 per cent to 15 per cent, according to Netcraft, falling behind the likes of Apache and NGINX.

Few technologies have yielded such divisive and widespread passion as Flash. Many gush over its versatility and ease of use as a creative platform or its critical role in the rise of web video. Others abhor Flash-based advertising and Web design, or they despise the resource-intensiveness of the Flash Player plugin in its later years.

So even if many of us now scoff at pop-ups asking us to enable Flash or sigh at news of the platform’s involvement in a security issue, when looking back at the platform’s totality it’s not difficult to argue it provided far more good for the Web than bad.

We found that many apps quietly read any text found in the pasteboard every time the app is opened. Text left in the pasteboard could be as simple as a shopping list, or could be something more sensitive: passwords, account numbers, etc.

We have investigated many popular apps in the App Store and found that they frequently access the pasteboard without the user being aware. Our investigation confirms that many popular apps read the text content of the pasteboard. However, it is not clear what the apps do with the data. To prevent apps from exploiting the pasteboard, Apple must act.

We identified an executable file displaying highly unusual behavior and sending system information to a suspicious Chinese domain. Discussions with our client revealed that this was part of their bank’s required tax software.

Basically, it was a wide-open door into the network with SYSTEM level privileges and connected to a command and control server completely separate from the tax software’s network infrastructure.

We believe that every corporation operating in China or using the Aisino Intelligent Tax Software should consider this incident a potential threat and should engage in threat hunting, containment, and remediation countermeasures, as outlined in our technical report.

Three years ago, long after the rise (and fall) of Flash, Adobe announced that its once-ubiquitous multimedia platform was finally going away. But Adobe never provided a specific date for when Flash would reach its end-of-life. Now we know: Adobe Flash is going to officially die on December 31, 2020.

For a software platform that lasted more than two decades and played a huge part in the Dot-com bubble of the late 90s and early 2000s, Flash lasted a lot longer than most people probably ever expected.

In the Ubuntu 20.04 package base, the Chromium package is indeed empty and acting, without your consent, as a backdoor by connecting your computer to the Ubuntu Store. Applications in this store cannot be patched, or pinned. You can't audit them, hold them, modify them, or even point Snap to a different store. You've as much empowerment with this as if you were using proprietary software, i.e. none. This is in effect similar to a commercial proprietary solution, but with two major differences: It runs as root, and it installs itself without asking you.

Inkscape can be seen as an alternative to commercial products such as Adobe Illustrator or Serif Affinity Designer – though unlike Inkscape, neither of those run on Linux.

Inkscape 1.0 seems polished and professional. Adobe, which sells Illustrator on a subscription basis starting at £19 (if you inhale the rest of the Creative Cloud), will likely not be worried, but apart from the cost saving there are advantages in simpler applications that are relatively lightweight and easy to learn, as well as running well on Linux.

Firefox 76 includes new Firefox Lockwise password functionality, Zoom improvements, and a handful of developer features.

Mozilla this year sped up Firefox releases to a four-week cadence (previously they arrived every six to eight weeks).

The company specifically called out Zoom, which has become a phenomenon of its own during the pandemic. In short, you now join Zoom calls in Firefox without having to download or install the Zoom client.

"We're updating our bug bounty policy and payouts to make it more appealing to researchers and reflect the more hardened security stance we adopted after moving to a multi-process, sandboxed architecture," reports the Mozilla security blog.

They point out that Firefox has one of the world's oldest bug bounty programs, dating back to 2004 -- and it's still going strong. "From 2017-2019, we paid out $965,750 to researchers across 348 bugs, making the average payout $2,775 — but as you can see in the graph below, our most common payout was actually $4,000!"