Microsoft

Windows Insiders eager to get their hands on next year's Microsoft OS were reminded last night that living on the bleeding edge can have its downsides, as the update consumed RAM at a prodigious rate for some before falling over.

It all began so well. Build 18237 was emitted with the usual degree of fanfare. Now given a disappointingly logical codename of 19H1 rather than the whimsy of Redstone, the code is available to Insiders who have opted to "skip ahead" past the impending October 2018 Update, and will eventually ship next year.

Felix Rieseberg, a software engineer at Slack has released Windows 95 as an app for Windows, Mac or Linux. It's a 100MB Electron app that you can install and run on Windows, Mac or even Linux computers.

In a GitHub post, developer Felix Rieseberg explains that you'll get the full Windows 95 experience after installing and running the new Electron app. The size of the Windows 95 Electron app is around 100MB and it actually works well on Windows 10 devices.

In a sign that US security experts and officials this election season are on high alert for potential Russian hacking and meddling during the midterms, Microsoft today revealed that it has taken over six potentially malicious Internet domains set up by the nation-state hacking team Fancy Bear, aka APT 28, Pawn Storm, and Strontium.

Windows is an old operating system and several core components of the operating system make it impossible for the platform to adapt to newer devices. Microsoft is aware of these issues and the software maker is working on a new and modular version of Windows 10 which would be far more flexible and lightweight.

Microsoft is building a new Windows 10 sandboxing feature that will let users run untrusted software in a virtualized environment that's discarded when the program finishes running.

Oh, how things change!

Windows and Linux used to mix well as oil and water. In recent years, Microsoft has embraced Linux. That's especially true for servers and clouds. Now, believe it or not, you can install and run PowerShell, the Windows shell language, on Linux as an Ubuntu snap.

Microsoft has posted the results of the fourth quarter of its 2018 financial year, running up until June 30, 2018. Revenue was $30.1 billion (up 17 percent year-on-year), operating income was $10.4 billion (up 35 percent), net income was $8.8 billion (a rise of 10 percent), and earnings per share were $1.14 (an increase of 11 percent).

A new Microsoft bug bounty program asks researchers to hunt down vulnerabilities affecting its identity services in exchange for rewards ranging from $500 to $100,000.

Microsoft has been building its portfolio of identity services for both consumer (Microsoft Account) and enterprise (Azure Active Directory) accounts. Researchers who participate in the Identity Bounty Program will submit flaws they discover in Microsoft's identity solutions and certified implementations of select OpenID standards, the company states.

The cumulative updates for Windows 10 are released every month with both security and non-security improvements in just one package. Microsoft uses three different types of updates, which are either full updates, express updates, or delta updates to make it easier for IT admins to stay up to date and secure.

One of the most active forms of ransomware has been updated with a new means of encrypting data as the gang behind the malware look to ensure it remains as damaging as possible.

GandCrab ransomware first emerged in January this year and quickly rose to become one of the most popular forms of the file-locking malware. It's sold cheaply on the dark web as 'malware-as-a-service' and has regularly received updates from its developers.