Andy Patrizio
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Andy Patrizio
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How Microsoft keeps the bad guys out of Azure
Microsoft has published its latest Security Intelligence Report (SIR), which it does twice a year, covering security issues for the prior six months. This latest edition covers the second half of 2015, analyzing the threat landscape of exploits, vulnerabilities and malware using data from Internet services and over 600 million computers worldwide.It is a massive effort, with dozens of Microsoft staff from different groups contributing. For the first time, they looked at not only PC malware but threats to its Azure cloud service as well, which the company says "reveals how we are leveraging an intelligent security graph to inform how we protect endpoints, better detect attacks and accelerate our response, to help protect our customers."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Windows 10 reaches 300 million devices mark
Microsoft announced that Windows 10 surpassed the 300 million devices mark, and that momentum continues despite what some have perceived as a slowdown in installations.Writing on the Microsoft corporate blog, Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of the Windows and Devices Group, said Windows has become “one of the largest online services in less than a year,” an interesting choice of words for an operating system.“We’re seeing people at home, at schools, at small businesses, at large companies and other organizations adopt Windows 10 faster than ever, and use Windows 10 more than ever before,” he wrote.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Surface Phone is expected in 2017
Microsoft's rumored Surface Phone, the replacement for its disastrous Windows Phone line, is rumored to be one year away. The April 2017 launch is expected to coincide with Redstone 2, the second major upgrade to Windows 10 for PC and mobile.The source of the rumors is Windows Central, which has been quite tenacious in pursuing this story. It notes a big gap between the quality of the Surface tablet and Lunia 950 phones, both launched last year, with glowing reviews for the tablet and thumbs-down for Lumia. The result has been dismal sales, just 23 million phones sold in FY 2016.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft Flow allows apps to all work together
Microsoft has tried in the past to make apps communicate, like with Object Linking and Embedding (OLE) in the 1990s. It worked, but in a limited fashion, allowing for linking data between Word and Excel. But if you wanted to share data from non-Microsoft apps, you were out of luck.Now, however, Microsoft has come out with a service (it's not right to call it an app) called Flow, which brings the If This Then That (IFTTT) functionality of the Web to desktop apps. IFTTT is a feature for Web services that generates actions based on conditions. It's how Twitter informs you when someone follows you, likes your tweet or responds to your tweet, for example.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Yammer adds external groups feature
Microsoft’s message board/social network for business, Yammer, now allows administrators to invite people from outside of the Yammer network into groups for discussions and other messaging. The company made the announcement in the Yammer blog last week.Yammer is a high-powered message board Microsoft acquired in 2012 for $1.2 billion. It lets groups stay in regular contact while working on projects and has become a major component of Office 365. However, it operates in any environment, including stand-alone, to serve as an internal messaging platform the way Notes and cc:Mail tried to do years ago.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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AMD finally experiences some good fortune
More than a few pundits have been ready to draw a sheet over AMD, as the company has steadily lost money and share of both the CPU and GPU market. Well, don’t call it a comeback just yet, but fortune is starting to favor Silicon Valley’s biggest underdog. AMD just announced a new joint venture with Tianjin Haiguang Advanced Technology Investment Co., Ltd (THATIC) to build custom system on chips (SoCs) for the Chinese server market. AMD expects the total value of the deal to be approximately $293 million, with $52 million in revenue earned over the course of this year. This is not a chip or product deal. CEO Lisa Su said this is a technology licensing deal. It’s a combination of x86 technology along with server fabrics, technology AMD probably acquired when it purchased microserver vendor SeaMicro.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Has public Wi-Fi outlived its usefulness?
Over the last few years, public restaurants, coffee shops and other places people gather have added the luxury feature of free Wi-Fi. This has turned many a Starbucks into an unofficial office for workers and college students alike who might otherwise not have Internet access. These days, though, that luxury is becoming more and more useless. Many access points installed in a Starbucks, Subway, McDonald's or perhaps public library haven't been updated and are still offering 802.11g performance. Put a dozen users on them and you're back in the days of a 1200 baud modem, if you get anything at all. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft outlines new features coming in Windows 10 Anniversary Update
Microsoft has posted what it calls “a major build” of Windows 10, with significant new features scheduled for the Anniversary Update due this summer. The news has been detailed by Gabe Aul, vice president of the engineering systems team in the Windows group.Microsoft posted Windows 10 Insider Preview Build 14328 for both PC and Mobile to the Windows Insiders Fast ring, which gets more rapid updates than Insider, and thus isn’t for everyone. You’re getting builds hot off the compiler, so to speak, which means they are liable to be buggier. This is for true testers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Sites that prevent ad blockers lose readers
It’s no secret that publishers despise ad blocker add-ons in web browsers. It is, after all, costing them revenue, and they have a right to make money. But there are different ways to skin a cat, so to speak, and one method isn’t working out very well.Some sites, such as our sister site Computerworld.com, will pop up a window politely asking you to disable the ad blocker and then let you continue on to the content. Others, however, flat out lock you out of the content until the ad blocker is disabled. And those sites are losing traffic. The question is how much of that loss can be attributed to the ad blocker blockade.The U.K. tech news site The Stack has looked at several sites that shut you out if an ad blocker is enabled, and it found virtually all of them are losing readers at a steady rate. It looked at both U.S. and European publishers, such as German publisher Axel Springer, publisher of the popular Bild newspaper and website, City AM financial news, Forbes and Wired. All of those sites denied users access to content until they whitelisted the site or disabled their Continue reading
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Microsoft releases Skype TX 4 for professional broadcasters
You may have seen Skype used for interviews on cable or local news channels. I see it used regularly on the small One America News Network (OANN) for live interviews, with the "SKYPE" logo plastered large on the screen.While the interview subject may be using the version you have installed on your PC, OANN and other cable news outlets use something very different, something called Skype TX. Skype TX is a "studio-grade" version of the software made for broadcasters to host guests and is integrated with their cable television infrastructure.Microsoft launched Skype TX two years ago and is now up to version 4. Microsoft said it got feedback from broadcasters in nearly 100 markets around the world, and it based the new version on their feedback. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Homeland Security issues warning about QuickTime for Windows
Because Apple no longer supports QuickTime for Windows, users are being encouraged to uninstall the program immediately. The warning from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) comes on the heels of a warning from antivirus vendor Trend Micro that the video playback software is vulnerable to a pair of zero-day exploits.Apple has not updated the Windows version of QuickTime 7 since January and it would seem does not plan to release any more security patches to fix the exploits. Trend Micro notes that even Apple recommends Windows users uninstall the player. QuickTime for Mac is unaffected and remains supported by Apple.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Brave Software’s browser is illegal, newspapers claim
The number of websites barring access to users of Adblock Plus has been growing as of late. The latest that I found is Listverse, an interesting site full of top 10 lists similar to Cracked.com but without the snark. It’s become the latest site I frequent that no longer displays its content if you have an ad blocker enabled. But at least it’s safer than Forbes.Still, denying you content is one thing, but threatening legal action is another. The Financial Times reports 17 members of the Newspaper Association of America (NAA) have sent a cease and desist letter to Brave Software and its founder, former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich, over the company’s self-titled ad-blocking browser.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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How compliance can be an excuse to shun the cloud
Every company has its reason for embracing or not embracing the cloud. In the case of companies in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, regulatory compliance is a convenient excuse for luddites to shun the cloud and its potential benefits. And consultants who serve those markets say that while CIOs and other IT managers cite compliance as the reason for not embracing cloud services and applications, it's really an excuse by managers who just don't want to move to the cloud for whatever reason. "There's a perception that has existed that the cloud is less secure," said Tom Crawford, CIO strategic advisor and president of the consultancy AVOA. "Part of that stems from the basis, wrongfully so, that I cannot secure something unless it's inside my own data center. For the most part that no longer holds water. Internal systems are often less secure." To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft will add QR codes to Windows 10 crashes
Windows 10 is an ultra-modern piece of software, an operating system written for the cloud generation, right? Well, not so fast. A new form of error reporting uses a mobile technology that’s been declared dead.Windows has never been particularly helpful in saying why your computer crashed. Even the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) in Windows 10 doesn’t tell you much. And the large sad face emoticon doesn’t exactly help, does it?It’s almost comical that they tell you the error code, like “KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR” or “HAL_INITIALIZATION_FAILED” and then tell you to look it up after you reboot. And good luck finding any useful information.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10 So, what is Microsoft’s solution? A QR code. Yes, a QR code, that dead technology from mobile phones. It was supposed to be a way to rapidly look up info on items in retail outlets or get info from other sources, but it never got any traction. For some time now, QR codes have long been considered dead in the water.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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Microsoft offers insight into upcoming Windows 10 features
The new features for Windows 10 keep on coming, and it can be hard to keep track of them all, especially for enterprises that want to decide whether to allow the update that installs these new features on their PCs.Credit Microsoft for keeping people well-informed as to what is coming because between all the preview builds of Windows 10 and individual feature additions, it can get really confusing. So, the company has published a roadmap of upcoming features for Windows 10.The list is broken down by Recently Available, In Public Preview and In Development. Recently Available and In Public Preview are features that users have access to through the Production ring or the Insider Program, respectively.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing
For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA (SATA). With the advent of the solid state drive (SSD), new interfaces have come into play designed to speed up throughput, because the SATA interface has rapidly become the bottleneck in drive speed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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SSD shootout: PCI Express blows away SATA and M.2 in throughput testing
For the better part of a decade now, the traditional interface for hard drives has been Serial ATA (SATA). With the advent of the solid state drive (SSD), new interfaces have come into play designed to speed up throughput, because the SATA interface has rapidly become the bottleneck in drive speed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here(Insider Story)
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New Windows 10 build loaded with changes
Microsoft promised a lot of nifty new features for Windows 10 at the Build conference, and one week later it has delivered a new build—number 14316—to the Fast Ring of its Windows Insiders who get the first crack at new builds for testing.At the Build show, Microsoft announced an “Anniversary update” slated for June, which was when a big update codenamed Redstone was thought to arrive. It now looks like the two are one in the same.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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What’s happening with the Intel executive turnover?
As a company, Intel has been as notoriously stable as its chips. You didn't hear about much turnover there. Many staff, especially executives, followed in the career path of former CEO Paul Otellini – join the company right out of school and retire from it decades later. That's because Intel was good about promoting people, and they didn't have to jump around the Silicon Valley to get a promotion or a raise.That, however, is changing, as one of the most insular company's in the Valley is seeing some real turnover in its executive suite. The latest shakeup involves the departures of Kirk Skaugen, the head of the Client Computing Group, and Doug Davis, who ran the IoT group, said they would leave the company to pursue new opportunities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
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What’s happening with the Intel executive turnover?
As a company, Intel has been as notoriously stable as its chips. You didn't hear about much turnover there. Many staff, especially executives, followed in the career path of former CEO Paul Otellini – join the company right out of school and retire from it decades later. That's because Intel was good about promoting people, and they didn't have to jump around the Silicon Valley to get a promotion or a raise.That, however, is changing, as one of the most insular company's in the Valley is seeing some real turnover in its executive suite. The latest shakeup involves the departures of Kirk Skaugen, the head of the Client Computing Group, and Doug Davis, who ran the IoT group, said they would leave the company to pursue new opportunities.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here