Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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Microsoft employees say monitoring disturbing content traumatized them
There is a very dark underbelly to the web that is not for the weak of stomach. You may be thinking of 4chan, but that place is just the starting point. Unfortunately, it falls to some people to monitor this garbage for law enforcement, and in the case of two Microsoft employees, it drove them over the edge. In a lawsuit filed against Microsoft, Henry Soto and Greg Blauert claim they were forced daily for months to view some of the most disturbing photos and videos you can find on the internet and that Microsoft did nothing as the constant viewing took its toll on them. They now claim to suffer Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The two were part of Microsoft’s Online Safety Team, a group formed to investigate content being stored on Microsoft sites, like OneDrive, that should be taken down or reported to police. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Best Buy responds to Geek Squad snooping case
Best Buy offered its response to claims its Geek Squad repair technicians snoop through PCs brought in for repair, making a claim that is fairly obvious, given its situation. It stems from my last blog post, "Why you shouldn't trust Geek Squad ever again," which in turn was inspired by an Orange County Weekly article that claimed the FBI was paying Geek Squad staffers a $500 reward for any incriminating evidence they find in a device brought in for repair.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Best Buy responds to Geek Squad snooping case
Best Buy offered its response to claims its Geek Squad repair technicians snoop through PCs brought in for repair, making a claim that is fairly obvious, given its situation. It stems from my last blog post, "Why you shouldn't trust Geek Squad ever again," which in turn was inspired by an Orange County Weekly article that claimed the FBI was paying Geek Squad staffers a $500 reward for any incriminating evidence they find in a device brought in for repair.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Why you shouldn’t trust Geek Squad ever again
Best Buy has quite a support service in Geek Squad. It's the only national tech service center, and it makes house calls. I had a tech come to calibrate my HDTV set, and the difference was night and day. In 2014, Geek Squad brought in $1.8 billion in revenue, which was a drop from the previous year, but still accounted for 5 percent of Best Buy revenue. So, it's not insignificant. And it seems the geeks are making a few extra bucks. The Orange County Weekly reports that the company's repair technicians routinely search devices brought in for repair for files that could earn them $500 reward as FBI informants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Why you shouldn’t trust Geek Squad ever again
Best Buy has quite a support service in Geek Squad. It's the only national tech service center, and it makes house calls. I had a tech come to calibrate my HDTV set, and the difference was night and day. In 2014, Geek Squad brought in $1.8 billion in revenue, which was a drop from the previous year, but still accounted for 5 percent of Best Buy revenue. So, it's not insignificant. And it seems the geeks are making a few extra bucks. The Orange County Weekly reports that the company's repair technicians routinely search devices brought in for repair for files that could earn them $500 reward as FBI informants. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft fires back on reports of CMD prompt’s demise
Last month there were several articles about the news that Microsoft was making PowerShell the default command line in Windows 10, and also claiming that this would be the end of the venerable cmd.exe, also known as the Command Prompt. Like Mark Twain said, a lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on. The articles spawned reactions all over the web, such as one lengthy thread on Reddit. This led to protests from IT professionals who still need to use that command prompt we've known since 1981. Microsoft must have gotten an earful and then some. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Intel’s new Kaby Lake processors: No performance gains
Intel recently released its newest generation of processors, the "Kaby Lake" generation, and performance tests are coming up wanting. It seems there is little to no gain at all from Kaby Lake over the prior generation, known as Skylake. I first heard of this a month ago, when the Chinese hobbyist site Expreview published a series of tests of Kaby Lake vs. Skylake. Kaby Lake runs at a higher clock speed than Skylake, but in one test they altered the clock so the two CPUs both ran at the same clock speed. At their stock settings, the Core i7-7700K (Kaby Lake) is up to 7.40 percent faster on average in single-threaded and up to 8.88 percent faster on average in multi-threaded performance compared to the Core i7-6700K (Skylake) when run at the stock settings. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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When anti-malware vendors get into a slap fight, users lose
All is quiet on the Microsoft front, but there are other technology issues to address, which I will be doing in the next few blogs. The first is about a battle between two anti-malware vendors: PC Pitstop and Malwarebytes. --------------------------------------------------------Most software markets tend to consolidate around a handful or even one or two vendors. How many competitors are there for Photoshop, after all? But there are two markets that thrive and have a large number of players: gaming and anti-virus/anti-malware. It started about a month ago. On Dec. 7, PC Pitstop, maker of the PC Matic repair software and those obnoxious TV commercials, posted a ransomware test performed by AV Comparatives that included its PC Matic product and its many competitors, including Malwarebytes, the latter included for the first time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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When anti-malware vendors get into a slap fight, users lose
All is quiet on the Microsoft front, but there are other technology issues to address, which I will be doing in the next few blogs. The first is about a battle between two anti-malware vendors: PC Pitstop and Malwarebytes. --------------------------------------------------------Most software markets tend to consolidate around a handful or even one or two vendors. How many competitors are there for Photoshop, after all? But there are two markets that thrive and have a large number of players: gaming and anti-virus/anti-malware. It started about a month ago. On Dec. 7, PC Pitstop, maker of the PC Matic repair software and those obnoxious TV commercials, posted a ransomware test performed by AV Comparatives that included its PC Matic product and its many competitors, including Malwarebytes, the latter included for the first time. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The downside of buying used gear via Glyde and Gazelle
Growing up in Rhode Island, the way to buy and sell used stuff was in the local newspaper, the Providence Journal. We had something in the classifieds called The Yankee Trader, where you could sell stuff in tiny, one- or two-line ads. You clipped out a form from the paper, filled it out and sent in $1 for the ad to run a few days later. You would contact the seller and meet to make the exchange. These days, those types of ads are dead in the water. I mean, it took 2-4 days just for your ad to run. Now there's eBay, Craigslist and a host of electronics resellers to buy and sell stuff immediately. Unfortunately, when buying from strangers all over the country, there are potential pitfalls—as I keep falling into. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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The downside of buying used gear via Glyde
Growing up in Rhode Island, the way to buy and sell used stuff was in the local newspaper, the Providence Journal. We had something in the classifieds called The Yankee Trader, where you could sell stuff in tiny, one- or two-line ads. You clipped out a form from the paper, filled it out and sent in $1 for the ad to run a few days later. You would contact the seller and meet to make the exchange. These days, those types of ads are dead in the water. I mean, it took 2-4 days just for your ad to run. Now there's eBay, Craigslist and a host of electronics resellers to buy and sell stuff immediately. Unfortunately, when buying from strangers all over the country, there are potential pitfalls—as I keep falling into. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SoftBank invests $1.2 billion in the OneWeb satellite network
We now know at least one recipient of Masayoshi Son's massive $50 billion investment for the U.S. He ponied up $1.2 billion for OneWeb, the global satellite project for worldwide internet coverage. OneWeb is a project from English entrepreneur Richard Branson. The goal is to put as many as 2,400 small satellites in low orbit to provide complete global coverage for broadband internet access in many places where it's not available. According to SpaceNews, that number has been reduced to 900. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Why are browsers so bad after 26 years?
We all live in a browser if we use the internet. You're in one right now if you're reading this. And it's not a new piece of software. Sir Tim Berners-Lee first introduced us to the Mosaic browser in 1990. And despite 26 years of development, the browser remains the worst piece of software we use on a daily basis.Broke. Buggy. Bloated. Hogging memory. Crash-prone. Susceptible to malware. Lousy HTML rendering. I could go on and on with a litany of poorly constructed sentences describing the current state of browsers, but you get the idea. + Also on Network World: Windows 10 browser beatdown: Who’s got the edge? + Browsers aren't just for watching YouTube videos or visiting news sites, either. With the on-demand world of SaaS, browsers are the portal into important line-of-business software, even if the high priest of SaaS, Marc Benioff, hates that word. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Apple is dedicated to the Mac desktop. And it’s not.
Several weeks ago, we ran a feature story by yours truly questioning Apple's dedication to its Mac hardware line. At the time, Mac desktops and MacBook notebooks were falling years out of date. Since then, Apple has introduced some new MacBooks, but desktops such as iMac, Mac Pro and Mac Mini remain woefully out of date. This led to more questions and doubt, and it forced the normally recalcitrant Tim Cook to post on an employee message board a letter assuring the staff that the company remains committed to the desktop line. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft launches a Windows error code troubleshooting site
If you have used Windows for any length of time, you've undoubtedly been hit with an error code during an Update that told you absolutely nothing. "Error code: 0x80070422?" What the hell does that mean? If you were industrious, you could Google the code and maybe find a post on a Microsoft forum or elsewhere that offered some kind of clue as to what the error was and perhaps a solution. Now Microsoft has given us something a little more official. It’s a web page on the company’s support site called Fix Windows Update Errors that aims to help Windows users resolve update-related errors.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft announces multiple location-based services deals
Microsoft announced a series of partnerships with location-based services in the hopes of creating what it calls a "world graph," covering all kinds of locations and objects and how they work together. The first was a multi-year deal to use HERE mapping data across a number of its own services, such as Cortana and Bing Maps. Audi, BMW and Daimler purchased HERE from Nokia last year for €2.8 billion and use it in their GPS systems. Microsoft also announced a partnership with a number of mapping technology leaders, including HERE, TomTom and EsriI, to create what it describes as a "world graph" that details "a new data index of physical places, objects and devices and their interconnectivity." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Are OEMs already jumping on the Windows-on-ARM bandwagon?
No more than a week after the news that Microsoft had successfully gotten x86 Windows 10 to run on an ARM-based processor through emulation, a report out of Asia indicates OEMs are already interested in the offering and looking to make products. Microsoft made the announcement at the WinHEC show in China last week. It showed a native x86 version of Windows 10 running on Qualcomm Snapdragon processors with full x86 compatibility. The emulation was done on a new Snapdragon, the 835, that's not on the market and supports only 32-bit apps—but that's not a big deal, since most apps are 32-bit anyway. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft’s year in review: The highs and lows of 2016
After the turmoil and chaos of the Ballmer years, the Nadella Era of Microsoft is almost boring. The company is executing well with a few misfires—nobody's perfect or flawless—controversy is minimal and employees seem content for the first time in ages. CEO Satya Nadella enjoys a 95 percent approval rating, according to Glassdoor. That doesn't mean 2016 was an uneventful year, just quieter than in the past with no major blowups. But let's look back at the year that was in Microsoft highs and lows. High: Microsoft introduced its real-time translation technology for Skype, creating the sort-of equivalent to the Star Trek universal translator where voice conversations would be translated in real time. We learned why the Skype translator came out. Nadella saw it still running as a lab project and lit a fire under the researchers to productize it. He wanted to see more of an effort to make commercial projects out of research experiments, and the translator was one of them. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft adds Skype translation to landline calls
One would think the addition of a feature like this would have Microsoft screaming from the rooftops, but very quietly Microsoft added a new feature to Skype that supports its real-time translation technology in calls to landlines and mobile phones. The new feature was added to its preview build of the Skype Windows Store app late last week. The new version of Skype Preview can now perform real-time spoken-word translations via Skype Translator when calling landlines and mobile phones, and the person on the other end does not need Skype on their phone to receive translations or be translated.Of course, it's not for everyone. To use this new version of Skype Preview, you need to be run the latest build of Windows 10 Insider preview from the fast ring. That tends to be reserved for dedicated testers and developers, since fast ring releases aren't as stable as normal builds and are geared for debugging. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft extends the lifecycle of Windows Server and SQL Server
In recent years, Microsoft has made enormous efforts to get people to migrate off products that had reached their end of life. In 2014, it was Windows XP. In 2015, it was Windows Server 2003. This year it was SQL Server 2005. So, knowing what the company went through to make people migrate makes this latest bit of news somewhat baffling. Microsoft has quietly announced the addition of a third tier to its product lifecycle, expanding the lifespan of both Windows Server and SQL Server by an additional six years. Microsoft usually offers two tiers of lifecycle support covering a 10-year lifespan. The first five years, known as Mainstream support, include new features as well as security and non-security updates. The last five years, covering Extended support, has security and non-security updates, but no new features are added to the product. After that, all support ceases. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here