Microsoft last week confirmed that it has stopped letting business customers block the Windows Store in Windows 10 Pro, removing a feature that had been present in the operating system's initial summer 2015 release.Instead, the ability to turn off the Store -- Microsoft's distribution channel for not only apps but also games, music and movies, and about as consumer-grade as a Windows component gets -- has been restricted to Windows Enterprise, the top-tier SKU (stock-keeping unit) available only to large customers.IT administrators had been using Group Policy to block the Store within Windows 10 Pro, largely to keep workers from installing apps not on their company's approved software list. Some admins, however, had ditched the Store for other reasons, including bandwidth consumption as scores of apps frequently updated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today said that 300 million "active devices" are running Windows 10, a boost of 30 million, for an increase of 11%, in the last five weeks.The Redmond, Wash. company also warned customers that the Windows 10 free upgrade offer would end July 29, and urged them to grab the deal before it vanishes."Time is running out. The free upgrade offer will end on July 29 and we want to make sure you don't miss out," said Yusuf Mehdi, a senior executive in the Windows and devices group, in a post to a company blog Thursday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Enterprises should have an easier time migrating from Windows 7 to Windows 10 than they did the last go-round when they left behind Windows XP, an analyst said, citing lessons both Microsoft and corporations learned."Microsoft has provided the option to roll out [Windows 10] using most of the same processes you used with Windows 7," said Steve Kleynhans of research firm Gartner in an interview Tuesday. "For that, you get a new OS, but you don't get new capabilities. Later, you can make the decision to, say, turn on the tighter security of Windows 10, or change the way that applications are distributed by turning on the Store."The migrate-but-then-do-more-later plan is one many enterprises will adopt, Kleynhans said, which should make the transition smoother and faster than the one businesses struggled to complete in late 2013 and early 2014 as they purged XP.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Windows 10 is on pace to power 20% of all Windows desktop systems by the end of June, or around the time Microsoft issues its next major upgrade, according to data published this week.Data from U.S.-based analytics vendor Net Applications pegged Windows 10's user share -- a proxy for the percentage of personal computers worldwide that ran the OS -- at 15.3% in April, a 1.2-percentage point increase from the month prior. Net Applications tallied unique visitors to clients' websites to come up with its measurements.The new operating system's growth last month was smaller than in January and March of this year, but larger than February's.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft last week outlined the timetable it will use to drop browser support for sites that secure traffic with SHA-1 certificates, part of an Internet-wide plan to rid the Internet of the weaker encryption.With the delivery of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update -- slated to ship sometime this summer -- both Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge will stop displaying a lock icon for sites that reply on a SHA-1 certificate. That icon signals that the bits back and forth between browser and website are encrypted, and so not vulnerable to spying.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft last week outlined the timetable it will use to drop browser support for sites that secure traffic with SHA-1 certificates, part of an Internet-wide plan to rid the Internet of the weaker encryption.With the delivery of the Windows 10 Anniversary Update -- slated to ship sometime this summer -- both Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge will stop displaying a lock icon for sites that reply on a SHA-1 certificate. That icon signals that the bits back and forth between browser and website are encrypted, and so not vulnerable to spying.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) last month lost the No. 1 spot to Google's Chrome, marking a major milestone not only in IE's 21-year lifespan, but a dramatic changing of the desktop browser guard.According to U.S. analytics vendor Net Applications, IE and Edge -- which the firm tossed into a single bucket labeled "IE" -- fell 2 percentage points in April, the fifth straight month of a loss greater than a point, and the 16th of any size -- to end at 41.4% of the total global browser user share.Meanwhile, Chrome climbed 2.6 percentage points to take a narrow lead with 41.7%.Previously, Computerworld had forecast -- using long-term trends portrayed by Net Applications' data -- that Chrome would wrestle the No. 1 position from IE by the end of May.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
For the second quarter running, Apple executives this week talked up the growth of the company's Services category in an attempt to highlight the earnings potential of the devices now in customers' hands."The Services business is powered by our huge installed base of active devices, which crossed 1 billion units earlier this year," said CEO Tim Cook during the Tuesday earnings call with Wall Street. "Those 1 billion-plus active devices are a source of recurring revenue that is growing independent of the unit shipments we report every three months."Cook's comments were an abbreviated version of the argument that Apple's CFO, Luca Maestri, made in January during that month's call about the December 2015 quarter. At the time, Maestri spent significant time delving into Services -- a category that included revenue from iTunes, the App Store, AppleCare, iCloud, Apple Pay, licensing and others -- and trumpeting Apple's ability to earn money from current customers.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday said it sold 4 million Macs in the March quarter, a 12% decline from the same period the year before, and a larger contraction than for the personal computer business as a whole.The year-over-year downturn in Mac sales was the second straight down quarter, and excepting a brutal 22% drop at the end of 2012, the largest since Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007.Analysts at IDC and Gartner earlier this month pegged the continued contraction of the PC industry at 11.5% and 9.6%, respectively. Both also missed the actual Mac number for the quarter in their forecasts for Apple, overestimating by 11% to 13%: IDC had tapped shipments at 4.5 million, while Gartner said it was 4.6 million.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Later today, Apple will announce downbeat results from the first quarter of 2016, nearly three dozen financial analysts bet today.According to Philip Elmer-DeWitt, who formerly blogged about Apple for Fortune but left the magazine earlier this month to kick off his own Apple 3.0 subscription-based site, all 11 independent and 19 institutional analysts pegged rare year-over-year declines in Apple's revenue and a fall in unit sales of its iPhone and iPad lines. Most of the 30 analysts also bet that Mac sales would also slip from the same quarter of 2015.Elmer-DeWitt has been collecting and averaging financial analysts' forecasts for years, and continued the chore on his new site.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft's decision to radically change the distribution and maintenance of Windows 10 put a $1.6 billion temporary dent in its revenue, the company said Thursday.In a filing covering the March quarter, Microsoft pointed to the revenue deferral of Windows 10 -- a relatively new way of accounting for the Redmond, Wash. company -- as a reason for the 6% year-over-year decline in revenue."Revenue decreased $1.2 billion or 6%, primarily due to the impact of a net revenue deferral related to Windows 10 of $1.6 billion and an unfavorable foreign currency impact of approximately $838 million or 4%," Microsoft's 10-Q filing with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) stated.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple last week opposed the Department of Justice's renewed demand that it assist investigators in accessing a drug dealer's iPhone, arguing that the government has not proved the company's help is required."The government has utterly failed to satisfy its burden to demonstrate that Apple’s assistance in this case is necessary," lawyers for the Cupertino, Calif., company said in a brief filed with a federal court in New York on Friday. "The government has made no showing that it has exhausted alternative means for extracting data from the iPhone at issue here, either by making a serious attempt to obtain the passcode from the individual defendant who set it in the first place ... or by consulting other government agencies and third parties known to the government."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Google yesterday released Chrome 50, and as promised last year, dropped support for Windows XP and Vista, along with three older editions of Apple's OS X.The upgrade to Chrome 50 will not be recognized or downloaded by personal computers running Windows XP, Windows Vista, OS X Snow Leopard, OS X Lion or OS X Mountain Lion. Those operating systems debuted between 2001 (XP) and 2012 (Mountain Lion). Users of those OSes will be permanently stuck on Chrome 49, getting neither upgrades to new versions nor security patches for newly discovered vulnerabilities.Together, Windows XP and Vista powered 13.6% of all Windows PCs in March, or about one in seven systems. Meanwhile, Snow Leopard, Lion and Mountain Lion powered 10.7% of all Macs last month, according to data from U.S.-based analytics firm Net Applications.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla is trying to come up with a next-generation browser, but according to company executives, seems uncertain whether to retain the current Firefox technology or switch to something else, perhaps the same that powers Google's Chrome.
Last week, Mark Mayo, the head of Mozilla's cloud services engineering team, revealed that a new project, dubbed Tofino, is exploring options for a radical revision of Firefox.
"We're working on browser prototypes that look and feel almost nothing like the current Firefox," Mayo wrote in a long piece on Medium. "The premise for these experiments couldn't be simpler: what we need a browser to do for us -- both on PCs and mobile devices -- has changed a lot since Firefox 1.0."To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
PC shipments plummeted in the first quarter, dropping 11.5% compared to the year before, researcher IDC said Monday.The impressively dismal decline was a poor opening for a year that IDC once believed would see the bottom of the PC industry's years-old trough. But just a month ago, IDC revised its forecast, saying that shipments in 2016 would fall by 5.4% from 2015.Rival market research vendor Gartner, which also issued its Q1 shipment numbers this week, pegged the drop-off at 9.6%, with the difference largely attributed to how each company tallies shipments. Gartner, unlike IDC, counts tablets with detachable keyboards, like Microsoft's Surface Pro, as personal computers, and so usually comes up with larger shipment figures.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft last week promoted Windows 10's November 2015 upgrade to the Current Branch for Business release track, the first time since the operating system's debut it has approved a build for corporate customers."The Windows 10 version 1511 feature update (build 10586), released in November 2015, has been officially declared as Current Branch for Business (CBB), ready for organizations to begin deploying broadly," said Michael Niehaus, a director of product marketing, in a post to a company blog Friday.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft made a mistake at its recent developers conference when it didn't use the opportunity to push customers to buy new hardware, an analyst said today."On behalf of the Windows 10 team, we're happy to welcome all of these customers to Windows 10, whether they have a new PC, a five-year-old PC, or a Mac [emphasis added]," said Terry Myerson, the executive who leads the company's devices and operating systems group, after touting a new number of active Windows 10 users.Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, picked up on Myerson's "five-year-old PC," and didn't like what she heard.INSIDER Review: Enterprise guide to Windows 10
"While Microsoft stated it is fine with some of those users having five-year-old PCs, a clear response to Phil Schiller's recent comment on the topic during Apple's last launch event, we strongly believe Microsoft should actually be concerned about the issue," Milanesi wrote in an analysis published on Creative Strategies' website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple last week asked a federal magistrate in New York to extend a court filing deadline until after the government decides whether it can unlock a different iPhone in a similar case, documents revealed.The New York case involved an iPhone used by a convicted drug dealer. Last year, the the Department of Justice (DOJ) requested a court order compelling Apple to help authorities crack that phone's security so that investigators could access its data. When Apple contested the motion in October it gave the first hint that it had drawn a line in the sand on assisting authorities.Magistrate Judge James Orenstein refused the government's demand, but the DOJ has appealed.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
An outside contractor with established ties to the FBI has most likely shown investigators how to circumvent the iPhone's security measures by copying the contents of the device's flash storage, a forensics expert said today.Called "NAND mirroring," the technique relies on using numerous copies of the iPhone storage to input possible passcodes until the correct one is found."The other ideas, I've kind of ruled out," said Jonathan Zdziarski in an interview. Zdziarski is a noted iPhone forensics and security expert. "None of them seemed to fit."+ MORE Let's hope the FBI can really crack the iPhone +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday updated OS X El Capitan, patching a slew of security vulnerabilities, fixing other non-security bugs, and adding capabilities to some first-party apps.The Cupertino, Calif. company also issued less sweeping updates -- composed only of vulnerability fixes -- to OS X Yosemite and OS X Mavericks, the 2014 and 2013 editions, respectively.OS X 10.11.4, the fourth update to El Capitan since its September debut, addressed 56 vulnerabilities. Twenty-three applied to OS X Yosemite and 22 to Mavericks.+ MORE APPLE: Apple's latest announcements +To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Gregg Keizer