Users of old Windows systems can now download a patch to protect them from this week’s massive ransomware attack. In a rare step, Microsoft published a patch for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and Windows 8 — all of them operating systems for which it no longer provides mainstream support. Users can download and find…
Friday’s unprecedented ransomware attack may have stopped spreading to new machines — at least briefly — thanks to a “kill switch” that a security researcher has activated. The ransomware, called Wana Decryptor or WannaCry, has been found infecting machines across the globe. It works by exploiting a Windows vulnerability that the U.S. National Security Agency…
Microsoft’s Surface Laptop is aimed at supplanting the MacBook Air as a college-student favorite. The svelte, stylish clamshell also fills a middle ground between its cousins, the Surface Pro 4 tablet and Surface Book powerhouse 2-in-1, providing a third option that could appeal to many regular consumers. We went hands-on with the Surface Laptop last week and plan to…
In the next year or two, Hewlett Packard Enterprise will add support for Intel Optane memory and storage to its latest Unix servers. Optane is a new form of storage and memory that could replace today’s SSDs and DRAM. It is significantly faster and denser than both. One new system that can be configured with…
Consumers with HP laptops that have been accidentally recording their keystrokes can easily address the problem with a patch from the PC maker. More than two dozen HP laptop models, including the EliteBook, ProBook and ZBook, have an bug in the audio driver that will act as a keylogger, a Swiss security firm said Thursday.…
If there’s one thing we hate about our non-Pixel Android phones, it’s the lack of regular and speedy updates. Whenever a new version of Android comes out, even just a small one, it takes LG, Samsung, Sony, HTC, and everyone else months to push out an update to their latest phones. And if you don’t…
In response to recent attacks where hackers abused Google’s OAuth services to gain access to Gmail accounts, the company will review new web applications that request Google users’ data. To better enforce its policy regarding access to user data through its APIs (application programming interfaces), which states that apps should not mislead users when presenting…
A Microsoft manager this week offered IT administrators a way to replicate — in a fashion — the security bulletins the company discarded last month. “If you want a report summarizing today’s #MSRC security bulletins, here’s a script that uses the MSRC Portal API,” John Lambert, general manager of the Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center, said…
At Microsoft’s Build conference this week, Microsoft set up what it calls a “shared immersive experience”: a group of HoloLens users perched high up in a virtual sky, directing another group of mixed-reality users on the “ground” through a short maze. It’s easy to see this as a metaphor to describe the relationship between the…
Street View is finally ready for its closeup. Earlier this week, Google announced a new certification program for 360-degree cameras, letting anyone shoot and upload their interactive experiences right to Maps. And now, Google is looking to use those images and videos to help get you from point A to point B. The next time…