Gregg Keizer, Author at NetworkingNexus.net

Gregg Keizer

Author Archives: Gregg Keizer

Microsoft lets Windows 11 loose on the world

PCs running Windows 10 that meet Microsoft's hardware requirements are immediately eligible for the free Windows 11 download. And new devices with Windows 11 factory installed are now on sale.

China pays for Windows XP addiction as ‘WannaCry’ hits

The WannaCry ransomware has wormed its way into tens of thousands of Windows PCs in China, where Windows XP runs one in five systems, local reports said Monday.More than 23,000 IP addresses in the People's Republic of China (PRC) show signs of infection, the country's National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center (CNCERT) told Xinhua, the state-run news agency, on Monday.[ Further reading: Fighting ransomware: A fresh look at Windows Server approaches ] "Intranets in many industries and enterprises involving banking, education, electricity, energy, healthcare and transportation have been affected in different extents," CNCERT said.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

China pays for Windows XP addiction as ‘WannaCry’ hits

Microsoft posts PowerShell script that spawns pseudo security bulletins

A Microsoft manager this week offered IT administrators a way to replicate -- in a fashion -- the security bulletins the company discarded last month."If you want a report summarizing today's #MSRC security bulletins, here's a script that uses the MSRC Portal API," John Lambert, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, said in a Tuesday message on Twitter.Lambert's tweet linked to code depository GitHub, where he posted a PowerShell script that polled data using a new API (application programming interface). Microsoft made the API available in November when it first announced that it planned to axe the security bulletins it had issued since at least 1998.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft posts PowerShell script that spawns pseudo security bulletins

Microsoft now claims half a billion Windows 10 devices

Microsoft's chief executive yesterday touted a new number for Windows 10, saying the operating system now powers 500 million devices -- half way toward a goal the company once gave itself but since discarded.During a keynote address that opened Microsoft's Build developers conference in Seattle Wednesday, CEO Satya Nadella updated the Windows 10 installed base as he pitched the OS to programmers.[ Related: Windows 10 Redstone: A guide to the builds ] "Think about the 500 million Windows 10 devices that you can now reach through the Windows Store," Nadella said. "That reach is what's going to drive our ecosystem going forward. It's going to give each one of you more of an audience, more users, more engagement in a secure way."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Windows 10 S: It’s for enterprise, too

Microsoft may have stuck to its script Tuesday when it unveiled a Windows 10 spin-off aimed at the K-12 educational market, but the new operating system will be enticing to businesses as well, analysts said today."They were very focused on Windows 10 S as an education play, but no question, this will also appeal to enterprises," said Carolina Milanesi of Creative Strategies.Microsoft yesterday announced Windows 10 S -- the "S" isn't a placeholder for something specific, the company maintained -- for school settings. The operating system is Windows 10, but comes with important restrictions, the most notable that users can only install and run apps from Microsoft's Windows Store. This summer, Microsoft will begin testing a version of its Office suite that will be available from the store in September.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to cut update ties between Edge and Windows 10

Microsoft will sever the update ties between Windows 10 and its default browser, Edge, to give company developers a way to refresh the browser more often than twice a year, according to an online report."Users will finally be able to get updates to the Edge browser via the Windows Store, which will allow Microsoft to add new features more frequently," wrote Rich Woods of Neowin Monday, citing unnamed sources within Microsoft.Since the mid-2015 launch of Windows 10, Edge feature updates have been limited to the times when the operating system itself was upgraded. There have been four iterations of Edge thus far: The original of July 2015, dubbed version 12; then November 2015's version 13; August 2016's version 14; and April 2017's version 15.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft’s enterprise phone strategy flops as revenue evaporates

Microsoft last week quietly acknowledged that a year-old plan to focus phone sales on the enterprise market is dead."We had no material Phone revenue this quarter," said Amy Hood, the company's CFO, during an earnings call with Wall Street on Thursday.In fact, phone revenue amounted to just $5 million for the three-month stretch, representing a massive decline of 99% from the same period of the prior year. Assuming each Windows smartphone brought $500 to Microsoft, that was a sluggish pace of just five phones sold per hour. Worldwide.It's not as if the demise of Microsoft's phone business was a surprise. The division, which was based on the 2014 acquisition of Nokia, has been in trouble with a capital "T" since 2015, when Microsoft wrote off $7.6 billion, nearly the full price it paid for the Finnish company's mobile phone assets and a collection of associated patents.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

FAQ: How to skip a Windows 10 upgrade

Enterprises that try to slow down Microsoft's upgrade train by skipping one of the twice-yearly Windows 10 refreshes will have to hustle to stay in support, according to the company's latest scheduling disclosures.Corporate users of Windows 10 may have as little as two months to deploy a feature upgrade after passing on the one prior. Only if IT administrators are willing to roll out a consumer-quality version -- one that Microsoft has not yet given the approved-for-business green light -- will they have up to six months to upgrade employees' PCs.Those limitations come from Microsoft's latest pledge to support any given Windows 10 feature upgrade for 18 months, and the company's long-standing timeline on how it moves each upgrade from development to release, first to consumers and then to commercial customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft adds another layer to the Windows 10 patching onion

Microsoft yesterday added another update cycle to Windows 10's monthly patching, saying that the new collection of non-security-only fixes would give corporate customers the "increased flexibility" they had demanded.On Monday, Michael Niehaus, director of Windows 10 product marketing, announced the new monthly update, saying that the company would initially issue it only to customers running 1703, the upgrade also known as Creators Update, which launched earlier this month."We will routinely offer one (or sometimes more than one) additional update each month," Niehaus wrote in a post to a company blog. "These additional cumulative updates will contain only new non-security updates" [emphasis added].To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft to slash cloud-connection rights for stand-alone Office

Microsoft last week announced sweeping changes to Office's support rules, which will push more corporate customers to the Office 365 subscription model.The support policies introduced Thursday will cut in half the time that non-subscription versions of Office -- usually labeled "perpetual" as a nod to the licenses which, once purchased, let customers run the software as long as they want -- can connect to Microsoft cloud-based services. These include Microsoft-hosted Exchange email, the OneDrive for Business storage service and Skype for Business, the corporate edition of Microsoft's video-calling service.[ Further reading: Microsoft starts clock ticking on Office 2016's first upgrade ] Under the new rules, owners of perpetual-license versions of Office will be able to use those services only during the first half of their 10-year support lifecycle, the portion Microsoft dubs "mainstream." Currently, those customers may connect to cloud services such as Exchange mailboxes for the full decade of Microsoft's combined mainstream and "extended" support.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Customers roast Microsoft over security bulletins’ demise

When Microsoft asked customers last week for feedback on the portal that just replaced the decades-long practice of delivering detailed security bulletins, it got an earful from unhappy users."Hate hate hate the new security bulletin format. HATE," emphasized Janelle 322 in a support forum where Microsoft urged customers to post thoughts on the change. "I now have to manually transcribe this information to my spreadsheet to disseminate to my customers. You have just added 8 hours to my workload. Thanks for nothing."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Customers roast Microsoft over security bulletins’ demise

Experts contend Microsoft canceled Feb. updates to patch NSA exploits

Microsoft delayed its February security update slate to finish patching critical flaws in Windows that a hacker gang tried to sell, several security experts have argued."Looks like Microsoft had been informed by 'someone,' and purposely delayed [February's] Patch Tuesday to successfully deliver MS17-010," tweeted Matt Suiche, founder of Dubai-based security firm Comae Technologies.MS17-010, one of several security bulletins Microsoft issued in March, was just one of several cited Friday by the Redmond, Wash. developer when it said it had already patched most of the vulnerabilities exploited by just-leaked hacking tools.Those tools -- 12 different Windows exploits -- had been included in a large data dump made April 14 by a hacker group dubbed Shadow Brokers, which is believed to have ties to Russia. The exploits, as well as a trove of documents, had been stolen from the National Security Agency (NSA), Shadow Brokers claimed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Experts contend Microsoft canceled Feb. updates to patch NSA exploits

Microsoft begins denying updates to some Windows 7 users

Microsoft this week began blocking Windows 7 and 8.1 PCs equipped with the very newest processors from receiving security updates, making good on a policy it announced but did not implement last year.But the company also refused to provide security fixes to Windows 7 systems that were powered by AMD's "Carrizo" CPUs, an architecture that was supposed to continue receiving patches.The decree that led to the update bans, whether allowable or not under Microsoft's new policy, was revealed in January 2016, when the company said making Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 run on the latest processors was "challenging." Microsoft then ruled that Windows 10 would be the only supported edition on seventh-generation and later CPUs and simultaneously dictated a substantial shortening of support of both editions.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Microsoft begins denying updates to some Windows 7 users

Microsoft sets May 9 as original Windows 10’s retirement date

As expected, Microsoft named May 9 as the date it will issue the final updates for the debut edition of Windows 10 that launched in 2015.Two months ago, Microsoft had extended support for Windows 10 version 1507 -- Microsoft labels feature upgrades by year and month -- from March to May, but did not specify the date in the latter month. Computerworld anticipated May 9 as the end-of-support because that is the date for the month's Patch Tuesday.[ Further reading: Support family and friends with Windows 10’s new Quick Assist app ] The May 9 retirement was quietly announced on several support documents, including the "Windows lifecycle fact sheet," which lists several kinds of deadlines for various versions of the operating system.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Apple breaks with secrecy to rebut negative narrative

In a very unusual move, Apple this week renounced its usual secrecy about future products to counter questions about its commitment to the Mac, analysts said today.At an invite-only meeting with a handful of Apple bloggers and reporters, two of Apple's top executives -- marketing head Philip Schiller and Craig Federighi, who leads software engineering -- acknowledged that the firm's strategy for the Mac Pro, the company's top-of-the-line desktop, had been a mistake. While a refreshed Mac Pro will not ship this year, Schiller and Federighi promised that one is in the pipeline.[ Further reading: 15-in. MacBook Pro delivers on speed and design – for a price ] Along with talk of the Mac Pro -- a niche item in Apple's Mac line, which in turn has been dwarfed by the iPhone -- the executives stressed that the company was committed to the professional part of its customer base. Apple will ship new iMacs this year, they said, some configured for the "pro" users at the advanced end of the spectrum.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

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