James'Techblog

For those who are running older systems, and I’m talking systems with ancient AMD chips and Nvidia graphics. You might have updated kernels in Linux lately and got the following message; Spectre mitigation V2 LFENCE not serializing. What this most likely means is that AMD is pretty hardy and it turns out that most AMD processors were not as vulnerable as the Intel processors were. Thus, your processor is probably not vulnerable to certain variants. I’m speaking of variants 1 & 2. Variant 3, however… Any who, if this message shows itself at boot, it appears that it is so far, just words. I wouldn’t worry too much about it unless you later notice that something about your hardware configuration is acting strange. What it is doing is going back to a generic retpoline. If you didn’t catch anything at boot and are worried about the potential incompatibility, you can usually just revert back in Linux by hitting the shift key before the kernel loads itself. In most distributions you...

Pale Moon has recently released a new version 27.7. In this new version, many big changes have begun to take place in the browser. Mainly security and cosmetic related, however, there are a few important ones I wish to touch on today. As always, the  Release Notes page has more information. Pale Moon recently changed how it handles auto-fill information. By default, the previous versions of the browser automatically allowed auto-filling important forms and logins within the browser. Now Pale Moon no longer does this, but it allows the user to change this directly from the interface in preferences under the security tab. Auto-filling is a growing privacy concern within browsers lately. In Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, we are seeing sites stealing information this way. This is a privacy fix. Pale Moon also made a security feature freshly available in the browser’s back end for users who know what they are doing. This setting allows users to change how Pale Moon handles...