What I learned playing prey to Windows scammers
Three months of phone calls prove Windows scammers are more skilled at social engineering than you think
Three months of phone calls prove Windows scammers are more skilled at social engineering than you think
One of the key parts of Satya Nadella's keynote address to attendees at Microsoft's Build developer conference Wednesday was a discussion of creating virtual assistants and intelligent chat bots to help users do everything from managing their calendars to booking hotel reservations.
Microsoft executives will take the stage at Moscone West in San Francisco on Wednesday for the first of two keynote addresses to the company's big Build developer conference. Here are five key things to expect from the next two days of Microsoft announcements.
The enterprise edition of Windows 10 may be available only a day after the consumer version, with some immediately useful improvements for business. But some of the most important security features in Windows 10 Enterprise will either be included in a major update (that you can think of much like a service pack) that will ship sometime this fall, or will rely on enterprises and online sites and services making some substantial changes to move away from passwords. That means that, as with most upgrades, getting the most from Windows 10 security improvements will require planning.
Sometime after July 29, Windows 10 is going to start showing up in your business as employees either bring new PCs to work or upgrade their existing machines. Microsoft says it has had millions of reservations for the free Windows 10 upgrade. But despite the launch date, that's not going to happen overnight.
Upgrading to a new client operating system is a massive headache for the CIOs of most organizations. That's because it's disruptive, it impacts hardware purchasing decisions, it drains IT budgets and it can take up hours of IT staff time.
The more consumers that Microsoft puts on its Office 365 subscription rolls, the less it makes from each customer, data the company disclosed Tuesday showed.
Millions of CIOs are set to miss the July 14 deadline to migrate away from Windows Server 2003, despite the huge risks to their companies.
Back in April, Microsoft somewhat quietly previewed what its Windows Server engineering teams had been working on for quite some time. While it would be easy to write it off as just another iteration in a long line of never-ending releases, Windows Nano Server has the potential to reinvent your data center.
Microsoft's upcoming Spartan browser is set to be the first big new release in the desktop browser market for quite some time, upsetting a tentative equilibrium that has existed for roughly the past two years.
Microsoft's strategic shift to creating apps and services for rival operating systems was born from the hard realization that Windows' share of the total device market was in the middle of a three-year slump, according to new forecasts Thursday by research firm Gartner.
This month's Black Tuesday crop of patches held <a href="http://www.infoworld.com/article/2834535/security/four-more-botched-black-tuesday-patches-kb-3000061-kb-2984972-kb-2949927-and-kb-2995388.html">more than a few surprises</a>. True to form, my choice for the "most likely to splat," the <a href="https://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3000061">KB 3000061</a> kernel mode driver patch, repeatedly fails to install on many machines. Although the Knowledge Base article hasn't been updated, Microsoft support engineer joscon confirmed a workaround for the problem on Thursday afternoon.
As I wrote for Computerworld, Windows 10 has a lot to answer for – and it sets itself up for answering these questions in a big way by skipping a version number and jumping straight to 10 from 8.
Yesterday Microsoft released <a href="https://support2.microsoft.com/kb/3005628">patch KB 3005628</a> for Windows 8, 8.1, Server 2012, and Server 2012 R2. It's a trivial, non-security patch. The fact that it wasn't kept and issued in the normal cadence (patches usually arrive on Update Tuesday, which is next Tuesday) points to either an accidental release to the Automatic Update chute -- which we've seen before -- or an unwelcome switch in Microsoft's patching strategy. Either possibility is troubling.
Microsoft's decision to stop patching older versions of Internet Explorer in 17 months may not be as big a show-stopper as many assume.