Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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7.4% of software on PCs are past end of life
A new Secunia Research report states that the average private user in the U.S. has 75 programs installed on their PC, and 7.4% of them are past end of life and no longer patched by the vendor. By being past end of life, this software becomes a popular attack target by hackers because the programs are so widespread on devices today. This was the warning from Microsoft when it ended support for Windows XP in 2014—that people should no longer use it because exploits would no longer be fixed. The report from Secunia Research, which is owned by Flexera Software, covers findings for the fourth quarter of 2016 in 12 countries. In the U.S., it found 7.5 percent of private users had unpatched Windows operating systems in Q4 of 2016, up from 6.1 percent in Q3 of 2016 and down from 9.9 percent in Q4 of 2015.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Kaspersky announces its OS for IoT devices
Just what the world needs, another Linux distro. But does the fact it came from a top anti-malware vendor give it a competitive edge in the quest for security?Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the antivirus company that bears his name, took to his blog to announce KasperskyOS, a project that has been in the works for 14 years. Talk about slow development time. KasperskyOS is available for both x86 and ARM processors. It takes concepts from the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (FLASK) architecture, which was used in SELinux and SEBSD, but builds a new OS from scratch with security in mind, enabling what he calls "global Default Deny at the process level." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Kaspersky announces its OS for IoT devices
Just what the world needs, another Linux distro. But does the fact it came from a top anti-malware vendor give it a competitive edge in the quest for security?Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the antivirus company that bears his name, took to his blog to announce KasperskyOS, a project that has been in the works for 14 years. Talk about slow development time. KasperskyOS is available for both x86 and ARM processors. It takes concepts from the Flux Advanced Security Kernel (FLASK) architecture, which was used in SELinux and SEBSD, but builds a new OS from scratch with security in mind, enabling what he calls "global Default Deny at the process level." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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No new HoloLens hardware until 2019
A new report from a usually reliable site says there will be no new version of the Microsoft HoloLens, its virtual reality/augmented reality headset, until 2019. Not only that, but the company is skipping the second version design and going straight to the third version In a lengthy report on Thurrott.com, Brad Sims details how Microsoft decided that version 2 of HoloLens would feature only small, incremental improvements over the original version and that it wasn't right to come to market with a minor bump. Instead the company decided to shelve V2 and go straight to V3, which would feature a bigger leap in technology, and that meant taking a little longer to get it done.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft launches Insider program for business users
The Windows Insider program has been an important program for Microsoft, soliciting feedback from thousands of individual customers to help with the development and debugging of Windows 10. Now the company has launched an equivalent program for corporate users.Dubbed the Windows Insider Program for Businesses — or WIP4Biz, for short -- Microsoft is aiming to get more business involvement in the feedback process. At its recent NexTech Africa conference, the company recommended that SMBs and enterprise customers should run Windows 10 Insider Preview builds on 1% of their systems to see what's coming in future builds and prepare for them.Now, at the company's Ignite show in Australia, Bill Karagounis, the Windows 10 OS Fundamentals Director, formally announced WIP4Biz. According to Neowin, which must have had someone at the show, a major goal of WIP4Biz is to "make Insider systems and capabilities more friendly and easier to fit into your business environments."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Munich’s great Linux desktop initiative may end
A decade ago, there was much hoopla over the city of Munich discarding Windows desktops in favor of Linux, which were thought to be more secure and cheaper to deploy and maintain. Well, that experiment is coming to an end. TechRepublic reports the city is prepared to shift gears and allow users once again to choose Windows for their work PC instead of Linux after complaints of poorer productivity and compatibility issues. But it's not going to happen overnight; the Windows option won't come until 2021. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft outlines new Office 365 security capabilities
It's a sad state of affairs when business apps need security measures, but that's what it has come to these days. Microsoft has added some new features to Office 365 designed to add intelligence to catch suspicious behavior and mitigate risk, which it outlined in a recent blog post. Office 365 also needs these security measures because it is cloud based. That means its users are connecting outside their firewall, which adds all kinds of risk, both from intrusion and accidental data loss. There are three new security features: Office 365 Secure Score, Office 365 Threat Intelligence Private Preview, and Office 365 Advanced Data Governance Preview. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft outlines new Office 365 security capabilities
It's a sad state of affairs when business apps need security measures, but that's what it has come to these days. Microsoft has added some new features to Office 365 designed to add intelligence to catch suspicious behavior and mitigate risk, which it outlined in a recent blog post. Office 365 also needs these security measures because it is cloud based. That means its users are connecting outside their firewall, which adds all kinds of risk, both from intrusion and accidental data loss. There are three new security features: Office 365 Secure Score, Office 365 Threat Intelligence Private Preview, and Office 365 Advanced Data Governance Preview. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Windows 10 will soon have a very different security system
Microsoft announced a new service called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP) last year specifically for enterprises, meant to help detect, investigate and respond to attacks on their networks. It was released with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and is built on the existing security in Windows 10. WDATP offers a new post-breach layer of protection to the Windows 10 security stack, as well as a cloud service to help detect threats that have made it past other defenses and trace how far they penetrated into the enterprise. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Windows 10 will soon have a very different security system
Microsoft announced a new service called Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (WDATP) last year specifically for enterprises, meant to help detect, investigate and respond to attacks on their networks. It was released with the Windows 10 Anniversary Update and is built on the existing security in Windows 10. WDATP offers a new post-breach layer of protection to the Windows 10 security stack, as well as a cloud service to help detect threats that have made it past other defenses and trace how far they penetrated into the enterprise. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft celebrates 20 years of Visual Studio
Microsoft announced today it is celebrating 20 years of Visual Studio with the introduction of Visual Studio 2017, the latest iteration of its developer tool suite, on March 7.A lot has changed in those 20 years, as illustrated by a picture Microsoft posted of the contents of Visual Studio 97 (below), the first iteration of the IDE. Back then it was pretty much just a bunch of languages in one box with no real integration. Microsoft And most of the languages supported back then are gone—such as Visual J++, a Java compiler that caused all kinds of legal problems with Sun Microsystems, and Visual C++, which has been ditched in favor of C#. Also, Visual FoxPro is pretty much dead, and the support apps, including SourceSafe and InterDev, have been replaced with newer apps or functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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One-third of iPhones are the Plus model
It's no secret that the tablet market is in something of a freefall. It is being squeezed on the top end by high-end laptops that have detachable touch screens and on the bottom by large phones. Plus, the chief advocate for tablets was Steve Jobs, who is no longer with us, and no one has stepped forward to champion the tablet. NPD Group reports that tablet sales have dropped 15 percent from 2015 to 2016. It would have been worse if not for Amazon practically giving away the low-cost Amazon Fire Tablet. There is also some success to be had with the iPad Pro and Microsoft Surface Pro 4. + Also on Network World: iPhone 8 likely to feature 'wraparound' display design + But the real damage is being done by large phones, sometimes called phablets (a portmanteau for "phone-tablet"). In the fourth quarter of 2016, Apple sold just 13 million iPads, a 19 percent drop from the same period in 2015. However, Consumer Intelligence Research Partners says the iPhone Plus, with its 6.23-in. diagonal screen, made up 35 percent of the iPhone installed base as of the end of last year, up from 25 percent in Continue reading
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Microsoft overhauls Azure Marketplace for easier app shopping
Microsoft´s Azure Marketplace is to Azure what the Windows Store is to the client operating system: an online software marketplace, only the Azure version is for buying and selling cloud apps and services from independent software vendors (ISVs) that have been certified by Microsoft to run on Azure. Over the years, the Marketplac has grown along with the popularity of Azure, and customers got frustrated with its interface due to an increasing number of categories, app types and providers. Finding the apps they wanted became a chore.So, Microsoft introduced a whole new Azure Marketplace interface designed to make things easier. For starters, the search form now provides search suggestions as you type, just like a search engine would. Results are sorted by relevance and popularity. You can do searches on basic terms and then narrow it down to more specific categories, applications and functions. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How to prevent a bad case of cloud buyer’s remorse
The trend is clear: The percentage of IT infrastructure and application workloads residing in enterprise data centers is expected to shrink from 59% today to 47% in two years, primarily the result of companies shifting resources to the public cloud, according to a survey recently released by data center provider Datalink.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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Microsoft wants OEMs to build these kinds of PCs
Microsoft held the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in China last December, but it has just released a very interesting video that highlights where it would like to see the PC market head in the coming years. The video, from the session "Next Generation of Windows Devices," isn't all that surprising, as Microsoft has already been advocating for things such as Ink and Hello. Its description of the Modern PC falls into three categories: Cool Designs, Better Performance and New Experiences. + Also on Network World: Battle lines drawn as Chromebooks, Windows PCs renew rivalry + Microsoft had an interesting factoid. It said that there are over 600 million Windows devices in use that are more than 4 years old. Those are pretty much all Windows 7 and perhaps Windows 8 machines, since Windows 10 is only a year old. That's 600 million people Microsoft wants to upgrade. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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More evidence of a resurrected Windows RT in new Windows builds
Speculation about a new edition of the Windows operating system, called Windows Cloud, got a shot in the arm with references to new versions of the OS found in recent builds. A Twitter sleuth known as "The Walking Cat" posted a screenshot of in Windows 10 for PCs build 15003, showing references to "Cloud" and "CloudN," the latter of which is believed to be a version without Media Player pre-installed, according to on Petri.com. ZDNet's Mary Jo Foley claims that Windows 10 Cloud is pretty much a newer version of Windows RT, the mobile OS based on Windows 8 designed to be more locked down and controlled and using only authorized apps. RT was a dismal failure on early Surface tablets, and a Windows 10 version never emerged. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s shell game: 2 new ways to deploy Windows 10
Microsoft is rumored to be working on two new “shells,” but they should not be confused with PowerShell, which is replacing CMD as the primary prompt in Windows 10. While the term “shell” is being used interchangeably, these shells are more like an interface than a command line. First is a single, unified, “adaptive shell” for Windows 10, while the second will actually be a lightweight version of Windows 10. The unified adaptive shell is called “Composable Shell,” or CSHELL. According to a report from Windows Central, which cites unnamed sources, Microsoft's new universal shell will be a single Windows 10 experience that can adapt and scale to the device it’s on, from a phone to a PC. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s new mixed reality initiatives tap power of HoloLens
Late last year, Microsoft announced the launch of Trimble's SketchUp Viewer for its HoloLens headset, which would allow for 3D images designed in SketchUp to be viewed in a more life-like scenario. The Viewer is just for viewing models but is done on a flat monitor. With HoloLens, the models appeared real. Since then, Microsoft has been working with Trimble and the Construction Information Technology Lab at the University of Cambridge to expand on use of HoloLens and mixed reality technology in the architecture, engineering, construction and operations (AECO) industries. Today, the Microsoft announced details of two new trials that are underway at Cambridge. The first is Automated Progress Monitoring, a way to address routine maintenance and inspection of remote structures. It can be a laborious, time consuming and error-prone procedure, one where automation can replace humans because machines don’t get sloppy. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Game over for Solaris and SPARC?
When Oracle purchased Sun Microsystems in 2010, the company inherited a venerable Unix solution that was already in decline. The Solaris operating system on Sun’s SPARC hardware was losing ground to x86 running Linux (or Windows Server) already, and IBM was cleaning its clock by stealing away SPARC customers to its Power series of servers. Larry Ellison promised to stop the bleeding. He promised investment in the line, and by and large has kept his promise, especially on the chip side. The SPARC line has seen considerable investment and some impressive new releases. Unfortunately, that didn’t seem to turn things around. Solaris on Sparc continued to lose ground to competitors and Oracle’s own hardware, the x86-based Exadata and Exalogic. One thing Oracle would never own up to was SPARC sales to new customers vs. existing customers replacing aging hardware. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft awarded patent for multiple folding phone
There have been several efforts on the part of handset makers to create a folding device, so the large chocolate bar design of the phone will fit more easily in the pocket. Well, Microsoft has one-upped them with a patent for a mobile device that can be unfolded not once, but twice—turning it into a tablet-style device.The company initially filed the patent application Oct. 16, 2014, and was awarded the patent (US 9,541,962 B2) by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) on Jan. 10, 2017. The news was first spotted by MSPoweruser. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here