Microsoft

Here's a summary of the four "critical" patches this month; the top one is super critical or, if you will, Heartbleed critical:

Microsoft is offering a bumper crop of security patches next week as part of its traditional Patch Tuesday fix fiesta.

A total of 16 patches are on the way this month, five of which are labelled 'Critical'. All five affect Windows and one also involves Internet Explorer.

Underscoring just how broken the widely used MD5 hashing algorithm is, a software engineer racked up just 65 cents in computing fees to replicate the type of attack a powerful nation-state used in 2012 to hijack Microsoft's Windows Update mechanism.

 The conflict between snooping governments seeking to defeat encryption and users demanding ever more robust privacy tools has turned into an arms race—and it’s time for arms control talks, Microsoft’s general counsel said on Tuesday.

Resolving that conflict requires a new consensus on how to balance public safety and personal privacy, Brad Smith said in a forum at Harvard Law School. “Ultimately there are only two ways to better protect peoples privacy: stronger technology or better laws,” he said.

Microsoft has released a Fix It to disable the feature which was the subject of the POODLE attack. The Fix It, a program which implements changes in the registry, makes the process simpler than the alternatives.

POODLE is the name given to a vulnerability in SSL version 3.0 found earlier this month by a Google researcher. SSL was supplanted by TLS and the current version is 1.2, but systems may fall back to older versions if the server does not support the newer ones.

Skype for Windows desktop has shed the beta tag in its latest version and is now available for download.

Earlier in the month, Microsoft made a preview version of Skype for Windows and Mac OS X available, which introduced a new user interface similar to that seen on Skype's mobile apps, closely following Microsoft's modern design language while making it look a bit like MSN/Windows Live Messenger.

The cuts of approximately 3,000 employees today are believed to be largely support staff in human resources, finance, sales and marketing and IT. They are part of the 18,000 employees Microsoft officials said back in July that they'd be laying off over the course of a year.

Many of Windows 10′s best features showed up in Mac OS X years ago, including virtual desktops, Expose-like window management, and a notification center. Mac OS X 10.10 Yosemite has some other ideas Microsoft should copy for version 10 of its own operating system, too.

All operating systems copy from each other, and that’s a good thing. This isn’t about who invented what first — it’s about improving the operating systems billions of people use every day.

The Russian gang behind the obscure Qbot botnet have quietly built an impressive empire of 500,000 infected PCs by exploiting unpatched flaws in mainly US-based Windows XP and Windows 7 computers, researchers at security firm Proofpoint have discovered.

A year or two ago, what the Qbot (aka Qakbot) campaign has achieved in the roughly half dozen years the actors behind it have been operating would have been seen as a major concern. Recently, standards have gone up a notch.

Microsoft released upon the world a technical preview of Windows 10 and even though Cortana does not work in this version, there are still assets related to the feature in the build. Because of this, you can crack open these files and take a look at what is coming down the pipe for the platform.

While we now know that package tracking is coming, another new feature will be geo-fenced Wi-Fi activation. Like the last bit of information, this information comes from a resource file pertaining to Cortana, bootstraprules.xml.