Microsoft
Microsoft patches serious security flaws in Azure
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Tuesday 4th of February 2020 11:13:44 AM Filed under
Security researchers at Check Point have identified two major security flaws in Microsoft Azure that could be exploited by hackers to gain access to sensitive information stored on machines running Azure or to take over Azure servers.
The first security flaw was discovered in Azure Stack and if exploited, it would enable a hacker to gain access to screenshots and other sensitive information from machines running Azure.
Azure stack is a cloud computing software solution that was developed by Microsoft to allow enterprises to deliver Azure services from their own data centers. The software giant created Azure Stack as a means of helping organizations embrace hybrid cloud computing on their own terms while still being able to address business and technical considerations.
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Opposition grows to Microsoft's make-Chrome-use-Bing plan for Office 365 customers
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 1st of February 2020 06:57:08 AM Filed under


Resistance has mounted over the last several days to Microsoft's decision to change the default search engine of Google's Chrome to Bing on personal computers running Office 365 ProPlus.
Microsoft quietly announced the move Jan. 21 on its Microsoft 365 Roadmap page, then on Jan. 22 published support documents with additional information and a blog post that stated the company's rationale.
Commentary on Microsoft's blog, the support document and elsewhere — including an Office 365 website dedicated to user requests — was almost universally negative.
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"You Don't Own What You Buy" and Openwashed Microsoft Entrapment
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 29th of January 2020 04:47:29 AM Filed under
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You Don't Own What You Buy: The Tetris Edition
In the convoluted realm that has become copyright, licensing agreements, and SaaS-style everything, we've had something of a running series of posts that focus on the bewildering concept that we no longer own what we buy. Between movies simply being disappeared, features on gaming consoles being obliterated via firmware update, and entire eBook platforms simply ceasing to work, the benefits of handing over very real dollars have never been more fleeting.
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The Surface Duo SDK is now available for macOS and Linux
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Microsoft releases open source source code analyzer
Looking to aid developers who rely on external software components, Microsoft has introduced a source code analyzer, Microsoft Application Inspector, to help surface features and other characteristics of source code.
Downloadable from GitHub, the cross-platform command-line tool is designed for scanning components prior to use to assist in determining what the software is or what it does. The data it provides can be useful in reducing the time needed to determine what software components do by examining the source code directly rather than relying on documentation.
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Internet Wars: Microsoft EEE Against Mozilla's Rust, Moving From Chrome to Mozilla Firefox, Cake PR and Microsoft Still Playing Dirty
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Sunday 26th of January 2020 07:37:57 PM Filed under



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Developers love Rust programming language: Here's why
In fact, Rust has been voted the most-loved language for the past four years in Stack Overflow's annual developer surveys, even though 97% of respondents haven't used it. So how has it become the most-loved programming language?
"The short answer is that Rust solves pain points present in many other languages, providing a solid step forward with a limited number of downsides," explains Jake Goulding on Stack Overflow's blog.
[...]
Mozilla Research describes Rust as a "systems programming language that focuses on speed, memory safety, and parallelism".
It's often seen as an alternative to systems programming languages like C and C++ that developers use to create game engines, operating systems, file systems, browser components, and VR simulation engines. Mozilla, which continues to sponsor the project, says programmers can use Rust to make software that's less prone to bugs and attacks.
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I finally switched from Chrome to Mozilla Firefox — and you should too
I have been in an on-and-off relationship with Mozilla Firefox for the past five years. Every time I’d get ecstatic over a major new Firefox update — hoping to, at long last, break free from the hegemony of Google Chrome — my hopes would be crushed as soon as I began browsing the web like I normally do.
Firefox’s performance would fall noticeably short and struggle to keep up with my workflow, sending me scurrying back to Google Chrome after a few minutes of poking around. No matter how compelling the rest of Mozilla’s offerings were, they could never convince me to hit that “Yes” button whenever Firefox asked whether I’d like to set it as my default browser. Catching up to Chrome almost started to seem like a far-fetched goal for Firefox — until recently.
[...]
Today, in addition to being fast, Firefox is resource-efficient, unlike most of its peers. I don’t have to think twice before firing up yet another tab. It’s rare that I’m forced to close an existing tab to make room for a new one. On Firefox, my 2015 MacBook Pro’s fans don’t blast past my noise-canceling headphones, which happened fairly regularly on Chrome as it pushed my laptop’s fans to their helicopter-like limits to keep things running.
This rare balance of efficiency and performance is the result of the countless under-the-hood upgrades Firefox has rolled out in the last couple of years. One of the recent major performance updates arrived in May when Mozilla natively integrated a handful of clever optimizations for which users previously had to rely on third-party extensions.
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Passive aggressive baking at its finest
Cakes are a long standing weapon in the browser wars. Whenever a major browser hits a new milestone or makes an important release, cakes are rapidly exchanged.
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Microsoft will never win the search engine wars by forcing people to use Bing
Bing is known as the default search engine for Windows, and not much else. Microsoft’s solution? To forcibly install a Bing search extension in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus users.
The company says that this is designed for enterprise and business users to find relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar, but we all know Microsoft is desperate to get more people using its search engine. It sounds harmless, but here’s why forcing people to use Bing won’t help Microsoft in the long run.
[...]
Fast forward to today, Bing still has a few problems that need to be addressed, and where Microsoft should put some extra attention towards, instead of forcing Bing down people’s throats. These include both search relevance and design — the two core areas of any search engine.
First of all, there is a search relevance. In our testing, searching for Digital Trends on Google and Bing provide two different results. On Bing, we get a look at some older Digital Trends articles, which at the time of this writing, were older stories from 4, 6, and 3 hours ago. Compared that to Google, and articles are more relevant pulled from a most recent time frame.
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Death of Vista 7 as Opportunity for GNU/Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 24th of January 2020 05:54:37 PM Filed under


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Free Software Foundation suggests Microsoft 'upcycles' Windows 7... as open source
More than 10 years on from its campaign to persuade users to dump Windows 7 for a non-proprietary alternative, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off a petition to urge Microsoft to open-source the recently snuffed software.
On the face of it, the logic seems pretty simple. On 14 January Windows 7 reached its end of life as Microsoft turned off the free security update taps with a final fix (which seemed to bork desktop wallpapers for some users).
"Its life doesn't have to end," cried the foundation. "We call on Microsoft to upcycle it instead."
Unfortunately, the FSF couldn't resist a final dig, saying the killing of the OS had brought to an end "its updates as well as its 10 years of poisoning education, invading privacy, and threatening user security."
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Windows 7 Alternatives
Lets go over all the alternatives you can switch to if you are stuck on Windows 7 still. This will go over upgrading to Windows 10, Linux, or Other...
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A new glimmer of hope for Linux
Linux desktop operating system struggle after it won the title of the best server system “undisputedly”, so the GNU Linux developers began making plans to bring in more users, but it was not as effective as expected (in another article, we will take a look at these plans and the reasons for their lack of effectiveness).
On January 14, 2020, and in light of repeated disappointments, a new glimmer of hope appeared, as Microsoft announced the end of support for Windows 7, which has a market share of more than 28%, which is a percentage that it cannot be taken lightly, as if the GNU Linux developers succeed in attracting Windows 7 refugees, it will be the linux century deal that will attract investors and major software companies (Adobe and others) and the painful blow to Microsoft that will make the company think many times before any step.
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Microsoft Disasters, Dirty (Maybe Illegal) Tricks and Lies
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 23rd of January 2020 02:28:37 PM Filed under
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WindiLeaks: 250 million Microsoft customer support records dating back to 2005 exposed to open internet
Five identical Elasticsearch databases containing 250 million records of Microsoft customer support incidents were exposed on the internet for all to see for at least two days right at the end of 2019.
On 28 December 2019, these databases were found by BinaryEdge, which crawls the internet looking for exposed data. This was then picked up by security researcher Bob Diachenko, who reported the problem to Microsoft.
Microsoft secured the databases over 30-31 December, winning praise from Diachenko for "quick turnaround on this despite [it being] New Year's Eve".
That is cold comfort for customers whose data was exposed. What has been picked up by security researchers may well also have been found by criminals.
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Microsoft to Force Bing Search in Chrome for Office 365 ProPlus Users
Microsoft has announced that they will install a new Google Chrome extension for some Office 365 ProPlus customers that will force the browser to use Bing as the default search engine "to access relevant workplace information directly from the browser address bar."
The Microsoft Search in Bing extension will be added to all new Office 365 ProPlus installations and when updating to newer releases. The only customers that won't have this Chrome extension installed automatically are those that already have set Bing as their default Chrome search engine.
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Top 7 Predictions for Linux and Open Source In 2020 {Ed: This repeats the lie that GitHub is "Open Source" when in fact it was all along a proprietary software trap]
When it comes to prediction for Linux and open source in 2020, there are already a lot to take in to consider that 2020 will be a very eventful year in the open source community. 2020 already looks like a year with so much to offer already, so, I will quickly run through what the predictions are for the year.
[...]
This is something that looks almost certain to hope that you could ask if I was really predicting or reporting. In 2020, expect there will be more smartphones running on Linux not androids and there will be Linux applications running on it, not android applications.
It was earlier announced that, there will be bulk shipping of Purism's Librem 5 in 2020. We also expect that Pine64's Pine phone to start shipping in 2020 as well. With these two Linux-powered smart phones leading the way, you can expect there'll be more to come in 2020.
Not just smartphones now, I expect to see laptops running Linux fast underway, especially from companies like Dell, Entroware, Slimbook, and Tuxedo. So, we might also get to see a Linux laptop not based on the combo of Intel/NVidia.
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Entrapment by Microsoft GitHub or Censorship by Microsoft
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 21st of January 2020 10:27:23 AM Filed under
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Docker, Perl and GitHub
There are many reasons to use Docker Images, from setting up a development environment to pushing your code to production. The primary/first reason which pushes me to start using some Docker Images is "Continuous Integration".
When maintaining a Perl package used by multiple users/companies (or not), you absolutely want to know how your code behaves on different versions of Perl. Even if you could have multiple versions of Perl installed on your development environment, most of the time, the development is only performed using a single version of Perl.
Continuous Integration system like Travis CI or GitHub Workflows allows you to run your test suite on every push, pull request... without the need of testing manually on all Perl Versions.
When testing your code on a container (or Virtual Machine) you do not want to install or compile a fresh version of Perl each time... This is a slow operation, that ideally, should be done once.
This is where Docker Images come to the rescue. They are "snapshots" of a pre-set linux environment.
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Week notes - 2020 w03 - worklog - Murphy
Also GitHub decided to revive our anonymous bugs, around 39,000 bugs are back. We haven't yet reactivated our anonymous reporting.
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Regula adds another element of control to cloud infrastructure as code
Regula is protected under the GNU Affero General Public License, and, even though it is heavily referenced in the documentation, supposed to work independently from other, commercial Fugue projects.
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Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Monday 20th of January 2020 02:41:44 PM Filed under
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Microsoft's Rust-Based Project Verona Reaches Open Source on GitHub [Ed: Microsoft is openwashing things in its proprietary software platform, GitHub]
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webcompat.com: Project belt-on.
So last week, on Friday (Japanese time), I woke up with a website being half disabled and then completely disabled. We had been banned by GitHub because of illegal content we failed to flag early enough. And GitHub did what they should do.
Oh… and last but not least… mike asked me what Belt-on meant. I guess so let's make it more explicit.
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The open source licence debate: what we need to know [Ed: ComputerWeekly should know that GitHub is proprietary software and does not speak for “Open Source”, it's entrapping it]
Chief operating officer (COO) for GitHub Erica Brescia noted that, from her perspective, she is seeing an “increasing tension” between open source projects and those that are building services on top of open source, such as cloud vendors with their database services.
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How to Upgrade From Windows 7 to Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 17th of January 2020 08:29:17 PM Filed under


If you’re still using Windows 7 because you just don’t like Windows 10, that’s understandable. But there’s an alternative upgrade path: You can install Linux on your PC for free, and you’ll have a supported operating system that’s still getting updates.
This is easier than you might think. You can try Linux on your PC before installing it, and you can even install it alongside Windows 7 when you make the leap. Here’s what you need to know.
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The Easiest Way to Switch from Windows 7 to Linux
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Tuesday 14th of January 2020 09:07:42 PM Filed under


Welcome to the last day of Windows 7—the last day Microsoft is giving out security updates for the antiquated operating system, that is. While you have plenty of options for upgrading Windows 7, and even a hack that might be able to extend your updates for years, one of the best things you can do if you don’t want to make the jump to Windows 10 is to take a 90-degree turn toward Linux.
Yes, Linux. Don’t be scared. While your first thought is probably, “that’s too complicated for me,” hear me out. There are a number of Linux distributions that look and feel like the Windows you’re already familiar with. You won’t find yourself sitting in front of a command prompt, wondering what to do next, unless that’s the kind of experience you want. Otherwise, Linux isn’t terrifying in the slightest.
If you’re sticking with Windows 7 because of a specific reason—apps that only work on that version of the OS and nothing else—we even have a workaround for that, too: virtualizing Windows 7 so you can still access it in a safe, as-you-need-it fashion (assuming your system can handle it).
Stick with us, and we’ll show you just how easy it is to switch to Linux and all the great apps that couldn’t be any easier to download and install in the OS. (We do love package managers.)
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