I recently discovered Etcher, which is a nice utility you can use to easily write disc images to USB drives and SD cards. It's great for things such as bootable Linux Live OSes or flashing an SD card for an IoT/SBC device.

Some notable features:

• It prevents you from overwriting your internal drives.
• It verifies that the media was flashed correctly.
• It's cross platform, working on Linux, Windows, and MacOS.
• It's portable. No need to install.

Check it out at etcher.io

An interesting article on how trivial it is to link "anonymized" data to real people, and how Web of Trust probably shouldn't be trusted.

In August 2016, a data broker received a phone call from a woman named Anna Rosenberg, who worked for a small startup in Tel Aviv. Rosenberg claimed she was training a neural network, a type of computing architecture inspired by the human brain, and needed a large set of browsing data to do so. The startup she was working for was well-funded and purchasing the data wouldn't be a problem. But given the number of brokers out there, Rosenberg wasn't going to purchase the browsing data from just anyone. She wanted a free trial.

[...]

After receiving her free trial data [...] Eckert's first task with the data was to find out if her browsing data was included in the dataset. To do this, she queried the data for the URL linked with her company's login page, which generates a unique ID for each employee.

[...]

Although it turned out her browser history wasn't in the data set, by querying the data for her company's login page Eckert discovered that a number of her colleagues were in the data by matching the unique login IDs from the company's page to the individuals.

With this information, Eckert would've been able to see her colleagues' entire browsing history for the last month. One of the colleagues included in the dataset was a close friend of hers, and she reached out to him to let him know that she had his browsing history. The question she had was which browser plugin was collecting and selling this data.

To answer this question, Eckert had her colleague delete one browser plugin every hour until he disappeared from the live data. On the seventh plugin, he disappeared. This suggested that the plugin collecting and selling his browser data was, ironically enough, called Web of Trust, which offers "free tools for safe search and web browsing."

-https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsing-data-isnt-actually-anonymous

Read the rest of the article here:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/gygx7y/your-anonymous-browsing-data-isnt-actually-anonymous

You can now download the Ubuntu command-line interface (AKA shell) from the Windows Store, with some caveats.

The store listing appears, but it says it's only compatible with Windows 10 version 16190.0 or higher, which is only available as part of the Windows Insiders program at the moment.

Even still. This is an interesting and useful development for anyone who ever fired up a VM just to run a few Linux commands.