Many of America’s voting machines are depending on an outdated Microsoft operating system, reports the Associated Press. “The vast majority of 10,000 election jurisdictions nationwide use Windows 7 or an older operating system to create ballots, program voting machines, tally votes and report counts.” That’s significant because Windows 7 reaches its “end of life” on Jan. 14, meaning Microsoft stops providing…
Tag: windows 10
Microsoft Stirs Suspicions By Adding Telemetry Files To Security-Only Update
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: As expected, Windows Update dropped off several packages of security and reliability fixes for Windows 7 earlier this week, part of the normal Patch Tuesday delivery cycle for every version of Windows. But some hawk-eyed observers noted a surprise in one of those Windows 7 packages. What was surprising about this month’s Security-only…
Microsoft Criticized For VPN-Breaking Windows 10 Update
“Windows 10 continues to be a danger zone,” writes Forbes senior contributor Gordon Kelly:
Not only have problems been piling up in recent weeks, Microsoft has also been worryingly deceptive about the operation of key services. And now the company has warned millions about another problem. Spotted by the always excellent Windows Latest, Microsoft has told tens of millions of Windows 10…
Microsoft Issues Warning For 800M Windows 10 Users
Consumer tech reporter Gordon Kelly describes “an important new Windows 10 warning (and the failure behind it)” for all 800 million of Microsoft’s Windows 10 users: What Microsoft confirms it did was quietly switch off Registry backups in Windows 10 eight months ago, despite giving users the impression this crucial safeguarding system was still working. As Ghacks spotted at the time,…
Microsoft Announces OneDrive Personal Vault For Sensitive Files
Microsoft today announced OneDrive Personal Vault, a new security layer for protecting sensitive and important files. The feature is rolling out “soon” to the web, Android, iOS, and Windows 10 in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. From a report: Furthermore, the company is increasing OneDrive’s cheapest storage plan from 50GB to 100GB at no additional cost. Office 365 subscribers are also…
Microsoft’s New Windows Terminal Is Now Available
You can now download a preview version of the new Windows Terminal app from the Store on Windows 10. From a report: Microsoft released this application on the evening of June 21 after a listing showed up earlier that day. After downloading the Windows Terminal app from the Store, you can take advantage of all the new features– including tabs, finally!…
Microsoft’s Plan To Split OS From Shell Takes Shape
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: The latest Windows preview from the 20H1 branch, build 18917, has some hidden components that signal a future where the Windows Shell UI parts, such as Action Center, will be separate from the rest of Windows and can be updated with shell packages. A developer who uses the Twitter handle Albacore gave a…
Ask Slashdot: Should All OSs Ship With a Programming Language Built In?
dryriver writes: If anybody remembers the good old Commodore 64, one thing stood out about this once popular 8-bit computer — as soon as you turned it on, you could type in BASIC (Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) and run it. You didn’t have to install a programming language, an IDE and all that jazz. You could simply start punching code…
Should Companies Abandon Their Password Expiration Policies?
In his TechCrunch column, software engineer/journalist Jon Evans writes that last month “marked a victory for sanity and pragmatism over irrational paranoia.”
I’m talking about Microsoft finally — finally! but credit to them for doing this nonetheless! — removing the password expiration policies from their Windows 10 security baseline… Many enterprise-scale organizations (including TechCrunch’s owner Verizon) require their users to change their…
Most Windows 10 Users Are Running the Update From Over a Year Ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s original grand plan for Windows 10 was an operating system that was always up-to-date. Updates were intended to be mandatory, and while you could delay them a bit, you couldn’t opt out of them entirely. And the software giant was committed to rolling out two major feature updates a year. Fast forward to now,…