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Google launched a new Chrome plugin dubbed Password Checkup, that will alert users when their login details have been compromised, whose information is found in their recent “Collections” leak, and will prompt a warning message to update their information.

While the “Collections” leak is Google's Archive of about 4 billion usernames and passwords, and all credentials that it feels have been compromised in recent times.

On installation, all your login details entered across various sites will be checked against the database of breached usernames and passwords and a warning will be issued if your details matches any compromised record.

The Password Checkup extension automatically identify when a login details is compromised in any third-party data breach, with the passwords stored in an encrypted form, and the warnings against it stored locally on your machine.

Google maintains that users personal information are safe, as such sensitive data are encrypted, there is no way anyone can intercept or access the data.

As Chrome already offers password generator tool, if it detects that your credentials has been stolen, the Password Checkup will ask you to change the login details, and Chrome will store the new password automatically in a password credential file, that is if you choose the option, and use it to log you into a site automatically in any future visits.

Google also rolled out a related security feature called Cross Account Protection, to help in availing another line of defense to users using third-party apps, that is if you use your Google account to log into other sites.

The company will be working with the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) and OpenID Foundation, with other major technology companies to secure users accounts using the Cross Account Protection tool behind the scene.

And any event your account is compromised, Google will notify all the apps and websites that you’ve logged into with your Google account to make sure your other accounts are protected.

How Chrome's Password Checkup plugin can help in securing against data breaches



ClusterFuzz, which offers scalable fuzzing infrastructure that finds security and stability issues in software, used by Google for the fuzzing of Chrome Browser, and serves as the backend for OSS-Fuzz is now open source.

It has helped to unravel over 16,000 bugs in Chrome and more than 11,000 bugs in other 160 open source projects integrated into OSS-Fuzz.

While the term fuzzing implies the method for detecting bugs in software by feeding unexpected inputs to target program, which is very effective at finding memory corruption issues that's often the cause of some serious security problems.

Especially applicable in software projects written in C or C++, fuzzing is crucial in ensuring their security and stability as these languages are mostly unsafe.

Albeit, these issues can be manually sorted out, but it's difficult and rather time consuming, as bugs can often slip through even a rigorous code review, ClusterFuzz offers effective, continuous debugging at scale and fully integrated into the development process of a software project.

ClusterFuzz is able to detect bugs in software within hours after they are live and verify a fix within days.

Google had earlier offered ClusterFuzz as a free service to the open source projects via OSS-Fuzz. Now, the company has fully open sourced ClusterFuzz, making it available for anyone to use via GitHub, with instructions provided for guidance.

Google open sources ClusterFuzz, the fuzzing infrastructure for detecting bugs



If you've been following recent happening in the torrent ecosystem, then you must have known about the growing onslaught against torrent sites, with almost every major torrent sites like the Pirate Bay (TPB) and KickAsss Torrents haven been shutdown by the government authorities at one time or the other.

But no matter how hard the government kicks, they just can’t stop users from visiting torrent sites. Still, there are quite a lot of working Piratebay proxy sites available now, and many serving as torrent search engine which does not host torrent files, but provide ways for users to find good torrents on different active torrent sites.

While the Pirate Bay remains the largest and most popular torrent site, offering numerous torrent files via magnet links for the latest movies, games, software and much more; but sadly, TPB has had many ups and downs over the recent years.

Albeit, the Pirate Bay has notorious reputation for copyrighted files, the more reason its various domains have been taken down by different countries, but torrenting is not all about illegalities, as many users do share bits of larger files via torrents as it enable potentially fast download speeds.

And the rise in torrenting also meant a rise in the popularity of VPNs, which ensure you are safe and your connections secure as you sort out the different torrents. Similarly, with many ISPs in different countries constantly blocking the Pirate Bay, you can use a VPN to bypass the blockade.

3 Best VPN for TPB torrenting in 2019

1. ExpressVPN: With availability and support in over 90 countries, ExpressVPN is arguably the top notch VPN to consider for safe torrenting given the extensive support it offers. Moreover, it also allows access to the Pirate Bay from virtually anywhere in the world securely and anonymously.

ExpressVPN is equally super-fast, and offers tons of great features which makes performing tasks like torrenting an absolute pleasure.

2. NordVPN: NordVPN pride itself as one of the first service with ultra-secure connection, supporting OpenVPN and protocols like: IKEv2/IPsec, PPTP and L2TP, armed with ‘Double VPN’ servers which passes your data through two separate servers for extra security.

Additionally, NordVPN supports Onion over VPN for extra privacy, making it the number one for security and privacy conscious users.

3. Ivacy VPN: Ivacy VPN offers tons of robust features for privacy and rock-solid grade encryption to keep your data secure while torrenting, and possess highly optimized servers in several locations for a seamless experience.

And when it comes to pricing, Ivacy VPN has the cheapest prices combined with awesome features that makes it one of the most favorite VPN for the Pirate Bay any day.

If you wish to know more about these listed VPN Services, do check out their respective websites for comprehensive pricing and free options available.

And always remember, using the Pirate Bay or any other torrent site without VPN can be pretty dangerous, you just don't want to experience any nasty surprises, as these sites are infamous for hosting pirated contents, and the authorities are always in the lookout for offenders.

But with VPN you are amply covered, and VPNs have made the torrenting experience so much better with their network encryption and IP masking features.

The Ultimate List of Best VPN (Both Paid & Free) for the Pirate Bay Torrents in 2019



Cranelift, an open source project developed by Mozilla in conjunction with Fastly Labs aims to help in the translation of the functions of WebAssembly portable code format to native machine-code functions, for more efficient execution on the web.

It is being built with the support of Crane Station, the Crane Compiler Organization; the Cranelift will also be useful for the running of WebAssembly code outside of the web, as it makes WebAssembly fully readable as input with native machine code as output. And the functions can be converted into static single assignment (SSA) form, with optimizations performed before the conversion to machine code, and packaged into native object files (.o files) or executed directly as a just-in-time (JIT).

Though still in developmental stage, and the APIs unstable, it has enough functionality to run certain programs such as WebAssembly MVP (minimum viable product) functions execution, with WebAssembly embedded externally as part of the complete implementation.

While the currently finished Cranelift-based product is available in Fastly’s Terrarium, a browser-based editor and deployment platform that uses Cranelift in its compiler and server launched in November 2018.

Mozilla is also working to integrate Cranelift into Firefox browser, which will be useful to generate native code to the Rust compiler, albeit Cranelift is seen as a library for bigger products rather than a product on its own. It is also working on an embeddable, nonbrowser VM for WebAssembly, which uses Cranelift for compilation and runs WebAssembly outside the web, called Wasmtime.

Wasmtime can be used as command-line utility or as library embedded in bigger application; and quite similar to LLVM compiler project, with both having textual and in-memory factors of their intermediate representation and cross-compile without rebuilding the code generator by default.

The Cranelift intermediate representation (IR), however is less friendly for mid-level optimizations, but it doesn't currently perform any by itself, and Cranelift has a larger set of instructions and no intrinsics.

Cranelift: An Open Source Project to translate WebAssembly into native Machine-code functions



A project tagged “Met x Microsoft x MIT” partnership born out of last December collaboration between New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a combination of Microsoft’s AI technology and the museum’s data, part of the Met’s Open Access Program, designed to make the museum’s art collections more accessible on the Web.

Microsoft partnered with New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on a series of “hackathon projects" - with Microsoft Azure cloud services, including Azure Cognitive Services, conversational AI, and Azure Machine Learning, employed in the making of the projects that pair the company’s AI with Met’s collection of artwork to transform connections between people and art.

Albeit, the projects are still in developmental stage, it's not yet certain if and when it will become publicly available, but the different collaborations include: Tag, that’s it!: Which suggests the pairing of humans with machines to crowdsource keywords for art works from the Met archives, and using those keywords, they will suggest related art on the Web in conjunction with the Wikimedia platforms.

Another instance, Artwork of the Day: Utilizes Bing search engine's photograph on homepage, tagged Artwork of the Day in a slightly different genre. It uses AI to match a piece of art in the Met collections that relates to events of the day or an individual, based on available public information.

Third on the list, Storyteller: Takes a different perspective from the “Tag!” hack: with telling a story out loud, Microsoft’s conversational AI listens in for related keywords and select the appropriate art to illustrate the story. And Microsoft plans to make it possible to share the resulting stream of arts on social media or print out.

Then, My Life, my Met: Changes the focus to you and your social media feed; it intelligently matches the images in on Instagram feed with the over 400,000 images that are available via The Met’s Open Access program.

Finally, the Gen studio: Makes images the actual hack, whereby each image is matched against other works of art in the Met archive, with the intent that users will be able to explore cross-cultural connections, that is enact visual relationships between cultures. For instance. the images of the sun in Mayan art works could lead into depictions of the sun in Native American or African art.

Microsoft AI can transform Instagram Feed into literal art with Met's art collection



Piggybank.ng platform was started by the trios: Odunayo Eweniyi, Somto Ifezue and Joshua Chibueze, all former students of Covenant University, Nigeria, with the aim of solving the endemic problem of lack of savings across the country.

According to statistics, about 80% of Nigerians are required to save at least 40% of their monthly earnings to be able to survive the hard times. And especially in our society, where there is no credit system, people tend to depend on the accumulated savings to make any headway in business startup, and the majority of payments are made in cash.

The Piggybank concept is pretty straightforward and simple; just deposit as little as $1 a day in your online Piggybank.ng account, which you can not touch until an agreed withdrawal date, except perhaps for an emergency, albeit you are required to pay a 5% early withdrawal fee.

Whilst the accumulated savings are entitled to around 6% interest per annum, you can always set an agreed withdrawal date, unless perhaps you are okay with 5% early withdrawal charges.

Unlike conventional banking system, the platform restricts withdrawals until an agreed date or users can set to withdraw their savings on a quarterly basis.

The idea of a fee is actually to discourage unnecessary withdrawals, which in itself will defeat the real purpose of the platform - to help users save up some tangible amount of funds - instead of ending up using all income in servicing some unforeseen expenses.

It is particularly targeted at Nigeria’s Millennials, whom online activities via mobile phones for day-to-day communications and transactions are becoming hugely popular, and currently these demography make up about 60% of its registered users.

Piggybank.ng recorded some staggering growth in savings of 3000% between 2016-17, with savings amounting to over $5M, which statistics drew the attention of a group of investors, led by Olumide Soyombo, Co-Founder of Leadpath, who have been instrumental in the raising of $1.1M by the company.

To get started is as easy as signing up via PiggyBank.ng portal, and there’s a Quick Save option that allows you to quickly save money at hand. Both Quick Save and Auto Save can work at the same time.

You can add funds to your PiggyBank.ng account by choosing from the different payment options, including: debit cards (VISA, MASTERCARD, etc), or other means that are available on the dashboard.

Additionally, there is PiggFlex Account which is different from the Core Savings account, that gets you rewarded with points which can be converted to cash from your use of the PiggyBank.ng app, and also offer upfront interest for using the SafeLock feature within the PiggyBank app.

Piggybank.ng Review: The Platform that Let's Nigerians Save Money with Ease



Google with Chrome 70 brought the full desktop take-on on the Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) functionality, which feature served as a way to deliver amazing experiences on the web, whereby mobile applications behave more like a hybrid of regular web pages and mobile applications.

The desktop PWAs also appears in the Start Menu just like you'd expect a native app on Windows to function, and it can serve up notifications using the Action Center with the added support for native notifications in Chrome.

Now, the PWAs API has finally arrive with latest Chrome version 72, and with the Trusted Web Activity functionality, so that developers can be able to distribute PWAs on the Play Store. While developers are currently using two ways to integrate the browser experience within app, namely: Web view and Custom tabs; the Trusted Web Activity feature will help developers to incorporate their own contents, and serve it directly from the Web.

It came as no surprise as Google has been advocating for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs), with the initial touting of it as a way of improving applications and alternative to native desktop apps.

Starting with Chrome 72, which is now rolling out for Android including the Trusted Web Activity functionality, which means that it will open Chrome in standalone mode devoid of any toolbar or UI experience within the scope of native Android package, and as a new way to integrate web content with an Android app.

Albeit, the publishing process on the Play Store won't be as normally applicable, that is using the currently available WebAPK to publish it. As Java API, it will need to communicate with Chrome through web services, which still in the early stages, there are possibly lots of manual works to be involved.

Google is most definitely shooting for the best native experience, and there is no denying of the fact that the implementation remains a core Chrome functionality.

Finally, Progressive Web Apps (PWAs) are now supported on Google Play Store



Google's latest mobile software iteration, Android 9 Pie has got lots of tricks and options available for users, whether you're just getting on with your first taste of Pie, or you've been on Android 9 for a while now, there's certainly something new to discover.

While many OEMs modify the original Android operating system to infuse their own unique features and UI experiences, some fundamental functionality remains the same, but may look quite different on certain devices.

Here, we'd be highlighting Android 9 Pie's most common features, and showcasing its distinct functionality from earlier versions of the renown operating system.

Unique Features of Android 9 Pie

  • Adaptive Battery & Brightness: Android 9 Pie makes your phone even smarter through learning from you and adapting to your usage patterns. With features like Adaptive Battery, which learns the apps you use most and prioritizes battery for them, and Adaptive Brightness, learns how you set the brightness in different settings, and does it automatically for you.




  • Navigation System: Android 9 Pie brings a new gesture navigation system that makes it easier to get to the app drawer by swiping up from the navigation bar twice, and also by doing a long-swipe up from the screen bottom to halfway point or higher. And either of those gestures will work from anywhere on your phone, not just from your home screen.


  • Gesture Commands: Android 9 Pie's gesture commands for moving between apps via swiping right to scrolling between recently used apps will work from anywhere in the navigation bar area, and there's no need to begin with your finger on the base.




  • App Actions: This nifty feature helps you get things done faster, by predicting what you’ll want to do next based on context and displays action right on your phone. Pie will try to guess what you're up to next and offer you specific commands within apps, like you’re preparing for your commute, it will suggest actions like navigation on Google Maps.


More Control Options for Android 9 Pie

The coolest options of all is that you can select and copy any text within an image right from the overview screen, such as words in a screenshot, or even words within a website. And you can copy selected text, or share it to any of the social media apps.

Android 9 Pie offer some more powerful commands, by touching and holding your finger on text within an app's card to select the text and take action on it: like copying, sharing, or even performing some context-specific actions like navigating to an address, or opening a website's URL.

Additionally, you can press and hold an image within an app's thumbnail overview, an image on a web page and share it to any other app on your smartphone.

Android Tips: Google's latest mobile operating system, Android 9 Pie tricks



Google is working on the introduction of autosuggestion for lookalike URLs on Chrome browser, with the aim of warning users when accessing a possible clone website, which are often coded with malicious intent to trick users into entering their personal or banking details.

Starting with the release of Chrome Canary 70, Google has been testing a feature called "Navigation suggestions for lookalike URLs" - Chrome Canary been Google's testing ground for new features on Chrome - the feature when live will attempt to correct users who misspell's a website’s name in the Chrome Omnibox.



The feature which is now only available for Chrome Canary users, can simply be enabled by typing “chrome://flags/#enable-lookalike-url-navigation-suggestions” in the Omnibox. While the flag is present in the stable version of Chrome, it is not working as at the time of the post, which possibly means Google is still fine-tuning the feature before enabling it on the stable version.

Google's effort to make Chrome safer for users surfing the Web also led to the earlier introduction of some basic antivirus features last year, with the Chrome Cleanup Tool (CCT) for Windows which runs on ESET’s antivirus engine.

Though the Chrome Cleanup Tool is not a general purpose anti-virus, its sole purpose is to detect and remove unwanted software that could affect the browser's performance.

Google is poised to continue making massive improvements to the browser for better security and ultimately the best web experience.

Chrome to Warn users on entering URL with close resemblance to a more Legitimate Site



Facebook Research app available for iOS devices, is targeted at teenagers who opted for the tracking service in exchange for $20 gift card reward, while the company claims to use it for analyzing the smartphone usage patterns of the teenagers.

The social media company scout for participants by putting up ads on Instagram, and also via Snapchat, and seeks to monitor all the activities of the users who installed the spy app, without the required permissions.

While Facebook maintains that parental consent forms were filled by the parents of the consenting teenagers to participate in the research, there is no concrete proof to validate that it's actually the parents that filled the forms.

Facebook had to bypass the App Store by directly rewarding the teenagers to download the Research app and sort for root access to network traffic so that it can decrypt and analyze their phone activity, which is an outright violation of Apple's policy.

And to cover its track, the research app is administered by some beta testing services, including: BetaBound, Applause and uTest which conceals Facebook’s actual involvement, and it refers to it in the documentation as “Project Atlas” and serves as its effort to map new trends from rivals around the world.

Apple had responded by blocking the app as it presents a stark breach of it’s policies, and thus revoked Facebook’s Enterprise Developer Certificate for distributing such creepy apps to consumers.

It also warns that anyone using Facebook Enterprise Certificates to distribute apps in the App Store will have their certificates revoked, which is exactly what it did in this case to protect Apple users.

The Creepiness of the Facebook Research App that spy on teenagers

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