This month's Black Tuesday — Sept. 10, 2013 — enters the record books as Microsoft's most patch-botching month in history. That's quite an accomplishment, frankly. Having followed Microsoft's bungled patch efforts since long before the ascendancy of Patch Tuesday, I think there's a better — if rather unorthodox — way to manage patching. The release dilemma is quite straightforward: Microsoft has to test the...
Microsoft is intensifying its efforts asking users to scrap Windows XP, the 12-year-old operating system for which the software giant is ending support next April. Tim Rains, director of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing, authored a blog post last week reminding customers of the perils that could await them should they continue running XP, which debuted in 2001, once Redmond stops patching the platform. Users should...
I know a lot of folks are eager to find out when they will be able to get Windows 8.1. I am excited to share that starting at 12:00am on October 18th in New Zealand (that’s 4:00am October 17th in Redmond), Windows 8.1 will begin rolling out worldwide as a free update for consumers on Windows 8 through the Windows Store. Windows 8.1 will...
Bill Gates is currently (as of this news post) doing his first ever Ask Me Anything on Reddit. He has already posted his verification image and even a video of a few of the common and popular questions he has received which you can see below. Gates message currently reads as follows: Hi, I’m Bill Gates, co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation....
Software giant Microsoft has sold 60 million licences and upgrades for its new Windows 8 operating system in the 10 weeks since its launch. Tami Reller, chief financial officer of the Windows division, said at the Consumer Electronics Show that Windows 8 sales are growing in line with those of Windows 7, Microsoft’s last operating system, launched in 2009. According to the Sydney Morning...
Microsoft said it will patch at least 14 vulnerabilities next week, including four in Internet Explorer (IE), making it three months in a row that the company has plugged holes in its browser. Of the nine updates set for Aug. 14, five will be labeled "critical," the most serious of the four ratings Microsoft uses. The other four will be pegged "important," the next-lower...
Microsoft isn't exactly known for its underground hacker culture, but a recent effort to give its employees more slack is generating some wild experiments. In 2009, Microsoft came up with a concept called "The Garage." It's essentially Microsoft's answer to Google's famous "20% time" — the longstanding Google initiative that lets its employees work on projects unrelated to their primary jobs in their spare...
Here's a deal that would have made many minds explode back in the 1990s: Microsoft is buying Netscape. Or at least, most of the important parts of the company that used to be synonymous with "Internet". That's a side component of the $1 billion patent sale that AOL and Microsoft announced this morning. As part of the transaction, AOL announced that it was selling...
Decrease in Critical Issues and Bulletins As far as individual issues, Critical-class CVEs accounted for less than a third of the issues we addressed in bulletin releases for the first time since we began our monthly bulletin-release cadence in 2004. And in absolute numbers, Critical-class CVEs are at their lowest levels since 2005. The fact that we’re seeing lower percentages of Critical issues and...
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit has shut down a botnet that was investigated for hosting the MacDefender scareware that preyed on Mac OS X users. The botnet, known as Kelihos or "Waledac 2.0," has been linked to spam messages, ID-theft attacks, pump-and-dump stock scams and websites promoting the sexual exploitation of children, according to Microsoft senior attorney Richard Domingues Boscovich. The botnet contained about 41,000...
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