Microsoft on Wednesday began letting antsy customers download Creators Update, the latest Windows 10 feature upgrade.Last week, the company had said it would make Creators Update available for manual download on April 5, about a week before it will pull the Windows Update trigger and start pushing the upgrade to most users.[ See Computerworld’s Review of Windows 10 Creators Update. ]To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Opera Software today boasted that the number of new U.S. users of its namesake browser more than doubled days after Congress voted to repeal restrictions on broadband providers eager to sell customers' surfing history.Opera debuted a VPN -- virtual private network -- a year ago, and finalized the feature in September. A VPN disguises the actual IP address of the user, effectively anonymizing the browsing, and encrypts the data transmitted to and from sites, creating a secure "tunnel" to the destination.By using a VPN, U.S. users block their Internet service providers (ISPs) from recording their online activity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Opera Software today boasted that the number of new U.S. users of its namesake browser more than doubled days after Congress voted to repeal restrictions on broadband providers eager to sell customers' surfing history.Opera debuted a VPN -- virtual private network -- a year ago, and finalized the feature in September. A VPN disguises the actual IP address of the user, effectively anonymizing the browsing, and encrypts the data transmitted to and from sites, creating a secure "tunnel" to the destination.By using a VPN, U.S. users block their Internet service providers (ISPs) from recording their online activity.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft Windows 10 powered about 9% of all business personal computers a year and a half after its launch, a just-released study of corporate deployments said.According to Austin, Texas-based Spiceworks, an online community and resource for IT professionals and the vendors trying to reach them, the proportion of company-deployed PCs running Windows 10 was almost double that of its predecessor, Windows 8, which powered 5% of all enterprise desktop and laptop systems.[ Related: Fix Windows 10 problems with these free Microsoft tools ]
That Spiceworks' number was just a fraction of the global user share of Windows 10 -- on Saturday, analytics vendor Net Applications pegged 10's share as 25% of the world's PCs -- was no surprise. Most of the users who have adopted Windows 10 were consumers, not commercial customers: The latter are traditionally much slower to migrate machines to a new OS.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft Windows 7 may not go quietly into the night, according to data published Saturday.March's Windows 7 user share -- an estimate of the percentage of the world's personal computers powered by the 2009 operating system -- was 49%, said analytics vendor Net Applications. However, Windows 7 ran 54% of all Windows machines: The difference between the user share of all PCs and only those running Windows stemmed from Windows powering 92% of the globe's personal computers, not 100%.More importantly, Windows 7's share has barely moved in the last 12 months. Since this time in 2016, it's dropped just 2.5 percentage points, representing a meager 5% decline. As a portion of just Windows personal computers, Windows 7 has been even more obstinate, remaining steady over the past year at 54%.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today said that Windows 10 users eager for the next feature upgrade may download it manually starting Wednesday, April 5, nearly a week before the refresh begins reaching PCs via Windows Update.Windows 10 Creators Update -- Microsoft's name for the first of two upgrades in 2017 -- will launch on April 11, when the installation file will be staged on Windows Update and offered to a select group of users. To jump the Windows Update line, people will need to run the Upgrade Assistant, an app that will be available before April 5 on Microsoft's website.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
President Donald Trump now uses an iPhone to broadcast his famous early-morning tweets, according to the White House.Trump's turn to the iPhone was contrary to a pledge he made more than a year ago, when he blasted Apple for refusing to help federal authorities crack the passcode on a device belonging to one of the San Bernardino shooters."@POTUS @realDonaldTrump has been using his new iPhone for the past couple of weeks here on Twitter," tweeted Dan Scavino Jr. today. Scavino is director of social media for the Trump administration, as well as a senior advisor to the president.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday patched a bug in the iOS version of Safari that had been used by criminals to spook users into paying $125 or more because they assumed the browser was broken.The flaw, fixed in Monday's iOS 10.3 update, had been reported to Apple a month ago by researchers at San Francisco-based mobile security firm Lookout."One of our users alerted us to this campaign, and said he had lost control of Safari on his iPhone," Andrew Blaich, a Lookout security researcher, said in a Tuesday interview. "He said, 'I can't use my browser anymore.'"The criminal campaign, Blaich and two colleagues reported in a Monday post to Lookout's blog, exploited a bug in how Safari displayed JavaScript pop-ups. When the browser reached a malicious site implanted with the attack code, the browser went into an endless loop of dialogs that refused to close no matter who many times "OK" was tapped. The result: Safari was unusable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Apple yesterday patched a bug in the iOS version of Safari that had been used by criminals to spook users into paying $125 or more because they assumed the browser was broken.The flaw, fixed in Monday's iOS 10.3 update, had been reported to Apple a month ago by researchers at San Francisco-based mobile security firm Lookout."One of our users alerted us to this campaign, and said he had lost control of Safari on his iPhone," Andrew Blaich, a Lookout security researcher, said in a Tuesday interview. "He said, 'I can't use my browser anymore.'"The criminal campaign, Blaich and two colleagues reported in a Monday post to Lookout's blog, exploited a bug in how Safari displayed JavaScript pop-ups. When the browser reached a malicious site implanted with the attack code, the browser went into an endless loop of dialogs that refused to close no matter who many times "OK" was tapped. The result: Safari was unusable.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
If Microsoft orchestrates next month's Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade as it did 2016's mid-year Anniversary Update refresh, it will take about three months for the latest version to reach most eligible devices.According to advertising network AdDuplex, 60 days after the Aug. 2, 2016, introduction of Windows 10 1607 -- aka Anniversary Update -- just 35% of measured Windows 10 PCs were running the upgrade. By the 90-day mark, however, that number had soared to 80%, showing that Microsoft, after a purposefully slow start, had stomped on the update accelerator.[ Related: Windows 10 Redstone: A guide to the builds ]
There has been no sign from Microsoft that Creators Update, the company's label for April's feature upgrade, will be deployed any differently.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Three people from Illinois last week sued Microsoft, claiming that the free Windows 10 upgrade they had installed on their PCs caused "data loss and damage to their computers."Lawyers for the trio asked a Chicago federal court Thursday to grant the case class-action status, which would allow other Americans to join the litigation."Many consumers have had their hard drives fail because of the Windows 10 installation," alleged the complaint. "Many consumers have had their existing software and data rendered inoperable by the Windows 10 installation."All three of the plaintiffs asserted that after accepting the free Windows 10 upgrade -- a one-year deal that ran from 2015 to 2016 -- some data on their Windows PCs had been destroyed. One said that she had had to purchase a new personal computer after the one upgraded to Windows 10 was crippled.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hackers claiming to have hundreds of millions of iCloud credentials have threatened to wipe date from iPhones, iPads and Macs if Apple does not fork over $150,000 within two weeks."This group is known for getting accounts and credentials, they have gotten credentials in the past," said Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development at Tripwire, of the purported hackers. "But whether they have that many ... who knows?"There's another reason for not panicking, Bailey said: People can quickly make their accounts more secure, assuming the criminals have only collected, not actually compromised the iCloud accounts by changing millions of passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Hackers claiming to have hundreds of millions of iCloud credentials have threatened to wipe date from iPhones, iPads and Macs if Apple does not fork over $150,000 within two weeks."This group is known for getting accounts and credentials, they have gotten credentials in the past," said Lamar Bailey, director of security research and development at Tripwire, of the purported hackers. "But whether they have that many ... who knows?"There's another reason for not panicking, Bailey said: People can quickly make their accounts more secure, assuming the criminals have only collected, not actually compromised the iCloud accounts by changing millions of passwords.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft has wrapped up work on a version of Windows 10 for China's government and state-owned businesses, and is ready to begin selling the software, a state-run newspaper said today."We have worked extensively to make it secure and controllable. We are now ready to serve the market," Alain Crozier, the CEO of Microsoft's Greater China operation, told China Daily.The modified Windows 10 was the result of a December 2015 deal with China Electronics Technology Group (CETC), a state-backed defense contractor. Microsoft and CETC formed a joint venture, C&M Information Technologies, to license the operating system to government agencies and some state-owned enterprises, including ones that control energy, telecommunications and transportation.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla last week patched a Firefox vulnerability just a day after it was revealed during Pwn2Own, the first vendor to fix a flaw disclosed at the hacking contest."Congrats to #Mozilla for being the first vendor to patch vuln[erability] disclosed during #Pwn2Own," tweeted the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Monday. ZDI, the bug brokerage run by Trend Micro, sponsored Pwn2Own.[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]
Mozilla released Firefox 52.0.1 on Friday, March 17, with a patch for the integer overflow bug that Chaitin Security Research Lab leveraged in an exploit at Pwn2Own on Thursday, March 16. The Beijing-based group was awarded $30,000 by ZDI for the exploit, which combined the Firefox bug with one in the Windows kernel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Mozilla last week patched a Firefox vulnerability just a day after it was revealed during Pwn2Own, the first vendor to fix a flaw disclosed at the hacking contest."Congrats to #Mozilla for being the first vendor to patch vuln[erability] disclosed during #Pwn2Own," tweeted the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Monday. ZDI, the bug brokerage run by Trend Micro, sponsored Pwn2Own.[ To comment on this story, visit Computerworld's Facebook page. ]
Mozilla released Firefox 52.0.1 on Friday, March 17, with a patch for the integer overflow bug that Chaitin Security Research Lab leveraged in an exploit at Pwn2Own on Thursday, March 16. The Beijing-based group was awarded $30,000 by ZDI for the exploit, which combined the Firefox bug with one in the Windows kernel.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Bill Gates, co-founder and former CEO of Microsoft, was the world's richest person in 2016, the fourth year in a row he has headed the list, Forbes said today.But Gates' fortune did not rely on the Microsoft shares he held, filings with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) showed.Forbes pegged Gates' total worth at $86.8 billion, more than $9 billion more than the next-richest person on the planet, Warren Buffet. However, in a February filing with the SEC, Gates said that he owned 174,992,934 Microsoft shares. At Monday's opening price, that portfolio would be worth approximately $11.4 billion.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
A German auction house that hopes to rap the gavel on an antique Apple-1 personal computer in May has pegged its likely sales price at between $190,000 and $320,000.(networkworld.com)To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Some users have reported that one of this week's Windows 10 updates crippled their PCs, according to a thread on Reddit.They fingered the KB4013418 update as the most likely culprit. That update was marked simply as "Update for Windows 10 Version 1607" in Windows Update, and in the accompanying support document, tagged as a "servicing stack update."[ Related: Fix Windows 10 problems with these free Microsoft tools ]
In Microsoft's parlance, a servicing stack consists of the executable file and associated libraries needed to install Windows and its updates.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Microsoft today postponed the retirement of the security bulletins that for nearly two decades have described in detail the month's slate of vulnerabilities and accompanying patches.The bulletins' last stand was originally scheduled for January, with a replacement process ready to step in Feb. 14. Rather than a set of bulletins, Microsoft was to provide a searchable database of support documents dubbed the "Security Updates Guide" or SUG.But just hours before February's security updates were to be released, Microsoft announced that it was postponing the entire collection to March 14, citing "a last-minute issue" that might impact some customers. The Redmond, Wash. company never spelled out exactly what led it to decide on the unprecedented delay.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here
Gregg Keizer