Windows 8, I want to love you, but your annoying quirks keep bringing me down.
After spending more than a year conquering the operating system's overhauled (and nonintuitive) interface in its various prerelease iterations, I've now entered a second stage of frustration: I find myself cursing at Windows 8's major changes less and less, but shaking my fist and swearing like a sailor at its little irritations more and more.
Windows 8's most obvious—and most divisive—new feature is its user interface. However, it would be a mistake to think that the user interface is the only thing that's new in Windows 8: there's a lot that's changed behind the scenes, too.
Windows is about to get a lot less fun to hack.
That's one upshot of a talk given by security professionals Chris Valasek and Tarjei Mandt at this week's Black Hat USA Briefings in Las Vegas. Valasek and Mandt are white-hat hackers -- security professionals who probe for vulnerabilities in Windows components, such as the Windows kernel or the Windows heap.
Microsoft has urged Windows Vista and Windows 7 users to disable desktop accessories in the operating systems as a security measure.
The software giant said in a security advisory that the insecure Gadgets feature in the systems can execute arbitrary code as well as access user data.
Users logged on as administrator, guest or power user could unwittingly allow rogue Gadgets to run any code it wants at that security level, and take complete control over the system, according to Microsoft.
A new Web-based social engineering attack that relies on malicious Java applets attempts to install backdoors on Windows, Linux and Mac computers, according to security researchers from antivirus vendors F-Secure and Kaspersky Lab.
The attack was detected on a compromised website in Colombia, F-Secure senior analyst Karmina Aquino, said in a blog post on Monday. When users visit the site, they are prompted to run a Java applet that hasn't been signed by a trusted certificate authority.
She's stunning, sexy and sultry. But you can't live with her.
Hackers are actively exploiting a critical vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system that allows them to remotely execute malicious code when victims visit a booby-trapped website.
"These attacks are being distributed both via malicious web pages intended for Internet Explorer users and through Office documents," Andrew Lyons, a Google security engineer, wrote in a blog post published Tuesday. "Users running Windows XP up to and including Windows 7 are known to be vulnerable."
The Windows 8 Release Preview arrived ahead of schedule, and I've spent the past week pounding on it. For those of you accustomed to the earlier Consumer Preview, many of the changes hardly rate a yawn. But some show that Microsoft's not down for the count just yet.
All Windows 8 licensed hardware will be shipping with secure boot enabled by default in their replacement for the BIOS, Unfied Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). So far, so good, who doesn’t want more security? The fly in the soup is that by default only Windows 8 will run on these systems, so no Linux, no BSD, heck, no Windows XP for that matter. Fedora Linux, Red Hat’s community distribution, has found a way: sign up with Microsoft, via Verisign to make their own Windows 8 system compatible UEFI secure boot key. A lot of Linux people hate this compromise.
When Microsoft delivered the near-final Release Candidate (RC) of Windows Server 2012 on May 31, company officials told me there were no new features introduced to the product since the beta hit in late February.
So does that mean Windows Server 2012 is, for all intents and purposes, “done” — as opposed to Windows 8 client, which is still being modified considerably even though the Softies are calling it “feature-complete”? In a word, yes.
