Software & Apps - Page 15

The CrowdStrike outage knocked out approximately 8.5 million Windows machines around the world, some of which were running critical infrastructure such as emergency services, hospitals, and airports.

The outage was caused by a faulty driver update that was rolled out to CrowdStrike's cybersecurity software. The update resulted in an estimated 8.5 million Windows machines being thrown into boot loops that called for physical intervention to be fixed. The fix, being relatively simple, was the cherry on top of the scenario as all an individual would need to do is boot the machine into Windows Recovery Mode / Safe Mode and delete some files from the CrowdStrike's install folder.

However, this was a nightmare for IT people responsible for thousands of machines. The outage cost Delta approximately $500 million, and the estimated 8.5 million Windows machines that were taken down is an estimation based on CrowdStrike customers that have opted into crash reports, which means it's at least 8.5 million, not total.

Microsoft introduced Paint 3D in 2017 as part of a creator-focused update to its Windows 10 operating system. Representing a modern take on the Microsoft Paint app that dates back to 1985, the inclusion of new 2D and 3D image editing and creation features built on the basic functionality of MS Paint by adding much-needed support for layers within a revamped UI.

When it comes to the original Paint app, whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. MS Paint has been around since Windows 1.0, receiving minor updates and new features. However, with the arrival of the generative AI boom and Paint getting AI-powered image generation features, alongside smart updates like one-click background removal, it seems that Microsoft no longer sees the need for Paint 3D to exist.

From November 4, 2024, users can no longer download the Paint 3D app from the Microsoft Store, and it will no longer be updated.

Ad blockers are some of the most-used software on the internet, and especially considering how easy it is to download an ad blocker Chrome extension; it's usually one of the first things people download when firing up a new system.

However, Google isn't a fan of these ad blockers, which is no surprise considering the owner of the world's largest search engine makes a large chunk of its money through advertising. Google Chrome is the world's most popular web browser, and a new update to the browser's policy is soon going to severe its connection with one of the most popular ad blockers, uBlock Origin.

According to reports, uBlock Origin has more than 30 million users on Chrome, and Google moving to Chrome's extension support to Manifest V3 will kill support for uBlock Origin. The creator of the popular ad blocker has rolled out a V3-compliant version of the tool uBlock Origin Lite, which features some ad blocking filters, but not as many as the original version.

Reddit is preparing to release new monetization methods for the millions of users on its platform, according to the company's CEO, Steven Huffman, who described many new changes coming to the social platform.

Huffman said during the earnings call that Reddit is working on a way users of the platform will be able to earn money, and that this method will be released later this year. More specifically, Huffman said that Reddit's new monetization method will "empower our users to create and earn money on the platform this year" and that more details will be released in the "coming quarters."

This wasn't the only change mentioned by Huffman, as the CEO said officials have been looking at revolutionizing Reddit search, as behind the scenes, they are testing "new search result pages powered by AI to summarize and recommend content, helping users dive deeper." Huffman was asked how Reddit plans on maintaining its unique online culture while also rolling out new features to the platform. Huffman said that in his experience as CEO, adding new ways of using Reddit won't destroy what makes Reddit a popular platform.

NVIDIA rolled out the beta for its NVIDIA App back in February, and since the company has been listening to the community feedback and working on a bunch of new features for GeForce owners to enjoy.

The Green Team has taken to its blog on its website to announce a new update for the Beta app that combines NVIDIA Control Panel and the GeForce Experience App into one, and according to NVIDIA the new update adds a new Display section that allows users to change the resolution, refresh rate and orientation of their connected display. Along with other customizable features such as G-Sync, Surround, custom resolutions, and more.

Additionally, there is a new Video section that adds RTX Video Enhancements and customization sliders for RTX Video HDR. For those that don't know, RTX Video HDR automatically converts any Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) video within a browser or compatible application into HDR videos through the use of AI. Furthermore, NVIDIA has added RTX Super Resolution, and ChatRTX, which enables users to personalize a GPT large language model with their own content.

Cybersecurity is paramount in a world that is only becoming more digitized, and one of the biggest cloud hosting players in the game, Amazon Web Services (AWS), has revealed how it keeps its services clean of malicious domains.

The hosting arm of Amazon took to its blog to detail its industry-leading security system called Mithra, which the company explains uses an internal neural network graph model that assigns a trustworthiness score to a domain. This score enables AWS to aggregate a list of high-quality domains and low-quality domains, which can then be provided to third parties. This system is capable of evaluating up to 200 trillion DNS requests in 24 hours, and detecting 182,000 malicious domains per day.

Very similar to the Iron Dome, which is an Israeli mobile all-weather air defense system designed to shoot down incoming missiles, Mithra's massive neural network is constantly updated with malicious domain names, preventing them from accessing the network. Additionally, Mithra can send its security information to third parties for further evaluation.

Microsoft is currently pushing as many Windows 10 users as it possibly can to Windows 11 ahead of the announced end-of-support date in October 2025.

Microsoft announced it was ending support for Windows 10, the world's most popular operating system, in October 2025, which means the popular operating system will no longer receive security updates and support from Redmond. The announcement has caused the slow migration of millions of Windows 10 users over to Windows 11, but Windows 11 adoption isn't happening as fast as previous operating system generations.

It was only in July that Statcounter reported Windows 10 still doubles the market share of Windows 11, with Windows 10 commanding 65% and Windows 11 taking up 29.75%. Now, Statcounter has published new numbers that show Windows 10 has decreased to 64.99%, and Windows 11 has, for the first time, broken the 30% mark with 30.83% market share.

Windows 11 could see Copilot coming to the Start menu in some form, if a clue spotted in preview builds of the operating system is anything to go on.

Windows Latest, the source of a good many leaks related to Windows 11, has been doing some digging in previews of the incoming 24H2 update, and uncovered some hidden code.

Specifically, the tech site found a 'CotextualCopilotActionsOnStartRecommended' string which suggests that, well, Copilot could be integrated in the Start menu in some way.

The CEO of Delta Air Lines, Ed Bastian has said during an interview on Wednesday the global CrowdStrike outage cost the company half a billion dollars in lost revenue, as the company was forced to cancel thousands of flights and put travelers up in hotels.

The global CrowdStrike catastrophe is still unfolding. We are just now hearing the first estimations of how much revenue was lost as a result of millions of Windows PCs being thrown into blue screen of death boot loops. For those who don't know, CrowdStrike, a cybersecurity company, pushed out a faulty update to its security software, which is downloaded on millions of Windows machines around the world.

The faulty driver update triggered an error within the kernel, or before the PC boots to the user mode of Windows, leading to infinite blue screens of death. It was only recently that a cloud monitoring and insurance company estimated the global loss of revenue as a result of the outage to be $15 billion. That same insurance company estimated an $830 million loss for airlines.

Microsoft has actually removed adverts from something in Windows 11, albeit it's likely an app you've forgotten about - namely Skype.

If you recall, when Windows 11 was released (in 2021), Skype was dropped as a default (pre-installed) app from the roster (replaced by Microsoft Teams instead). However, the Skype client is still available for Windows 11 (and is still happily chugging along on other platforms), you just have to download it from the Microsoft Store.

Wherever you use Skype, the good news is that with a new preview build for testers, all the adverts have been banished from the app.

Following the tragic CrowdStrike outage that converted approximately 8.5 million Windows machines into devices that continuously flash the notorious blue screen of death, Google has confirmed it was responsible for Chrome Password Manager temporarily breaking.

Between potentially millions of Intel CPUs being faulty, AMD's new CPUs having problems, CrowdStrike updates nuking millions of Windows machines around the globe that results in airports being held up, and billions of dollars in lost revenue, it really does feel the technology industry is breaking at the seams. And to throw more fuel on the bad news fire, Google has confirmed its responsible for Password Manager on the Chrome browser being faulty.

While password manager being disabled certainly isn't as critical as the CrowdStrike outage that brought down various infrastructures around the world, the user base that was affected was comparable, and perhaps comedically it was only Windows users that were affected. According to Google, the glitch happened last week and lasted 18 hours, which was the time it took engineers to officially sign off on the fix.

Windows 11 has a neat little feature hidden away that has just been discovered, and it's all about making it far easier to accomplish a semi-regular chore - namely dealing with a misbehaving app.

Tom's Hardware spotted that a new option is in Windows 11 - though it may have been introduced some time back - to force-close an unresponsive app just by right-clicking it in the taskbar.

Before now, having to deal with a frozen app involved heading to the Task Manager, hunting through the list of running processes, finding the offender, and then force-closing it here via the 'end task' option.

Microsoft has provided another update on the fallout of the CrowdStrike outage that knocked out an initially estimated 8.5 million Windows machines around the globe.

The outage affected numerous facets of infrastructure globally, as affected machines were mostly used by big businesses such as airlines, telecommunications companies, banks, stock exchanges, and more. The first revenue loss estimates of the outage approximated a $5.4 billion loss for affected companies in the Fortune 500.

Microsoft initially stated in a blog post that CrowdStrike's outage was caused by a faulty driver update for the company's cybersecurity Falcon Sensor software that triggered kernel errors, and that it estimated 8.5 million Windows machines were affected.

Windows 11 just saw the addition of another advert - or 'recommendation' as Microsoft likes to call them - in what will come as a surprise to pretty much no one.

The newest ad to join the growing collection of various nags and prods to use mostly Microsoft services is for OneDrive.

What's particularly annoying here is that it's a full-screen pop-up pushing the cloud storage service, which as Windows Latest reports, appeared after the tech site had installed a recent Windows 11 update.

Earlier this year Reddit announced it was making changes to its API that prohibited any scraping of its data without payment. The change resulted in an uproar on the social media platform and then total darkness as subreddits were abandoned to stand in solidarity with third-party app designers who could no longer access Reddit's data unless they paid for it.

Reddit took the same stance against third-party apps with search engines and any other company that was looking to acquire its wealth of data to improve proprietary products. Reports then surfaced about a $60 million annual deal being struck with Google for direct access to Reddit data, along with a similar deal being struck with OpenAI for Reddit posts to appear in responses by the company's chatbots such as ChatGPT.

But now the boot has finally come down as a new report from The Verge reveals Reddit has rolled out an update that prohibits all web crawling, or data gathering, on its website. The change has banned search engines such as Microsoft's Bing, DuckDuckGo, and others from crawling Reddit, meaning Reddit posts will no longer appear as search results within the now banned search engines.

A week ago, CrowdStrike rolled out an update that caused approximately 8.5 million Windows machines worldwide to enter infinite boot loops.

The global IT outage has been described as the largest in history and is being directly compared to the historic Y2K scare. The CrowdStrike outage was a result of a faulty kernel driver update being rolled out CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor security software, and, unfortunately, the faulty update caused a kernel-level malfunction that required physical intervention for remediation.

The outage affected numerous industries around the globe, such as airlines, supermarkets, telecommunications systems, point-of-sale systems, emergency services, and various other businesses. Now, we are starting to hear the first estimations of the amount of money lost due to Windows machines being down, with cloud monitoring and insurance company Parametrix estimating a fourth of the Fortune 500 companies were affected by the outage.

For quite some time now, some Windows 11 users have been vocal about the seemingly exponential push into "Suggestions" becoming embedded in different regions of the operating system.

Many of these Windows users, including myself for that matter, consider what Microsoft's is calling "Suggestions" as advertisements, and they are seemingly popping up in various places around the operating system. It was only earlier this month that Microsoft stuck with its decision to roll out a new advertisement for Xbox Game Pass within the Start Menu and Settings.

As for the Start Menu update, Microsoft added advertisement placements for Microsoft 365, Xbox Game Pass and OneDrive. These updates are being viewed by many as ways for Microsoft to sell its Windows users on its other products. Luckily, in most cases Redmond allows users to turn off these advertisements, but not always.

Windows has had a hell of a week as last Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike rolled out an update that caused approximately 8.5 million Windows machines to be thrown into infinite boot loops.

While the fault of the global outage that disrupted airlines, banks, telecommunications systems, supermarkets, and point of sale systems lies at the feet of CrowdStrike and not Microsoft, the Redmond company was lumped into the negative wave of press simply because it was their platform the disruption occurred on. Unfortunately, Microsoft has another negative press story that perhaps wouldn't even be discussed if the CrowdStrike meltdown didn't happen.

Microsoft has confirmed a security update for Windows 11 is sending PCs into recovery. The fault was spotted by BleepingComputer, which states the fault affects versions of Windows 10 and Windows 11. Microsoft confirmed this via an update on its Windows release health dashboard where it explained that users may see a "BitLocker recovery screen upon booting your device".

Last Friday, cybersecurity company CrowdStrike issued an update to its kernel-level software that caused approximately 8.5 million Windows PCs to be thrown into infinite blue screen of death boot loops.

The IT outage was global, impacting multiple facets of society, such as point-of-sale systems, hospital services, emergency services, airlines, and various businesses. Unfortunately, for the systems that downloaded the update, the only way to implement a fix was to boot it into Safe Mode and delete the faulty files. This means an individual must be physically present to boot the system into Safe Mode.

Grant Thornton Australia, the Australian arm of one of the world's leading assurance, tax and advisory firms, was hit by the CrowdStrike outage. No less than 100 servers were knocked out of service by the update, and facing an untold number of maintenance hours ahead of them, the IT staff there began work on bringing the servers back online. However, senior systems engineer Rob Woltz and infrastructure manager Ben Watson remembered the utility of barcode scanners.

Windows 11 might get more adverts soon (again), although they could appear in an area of the operating system that you're not too fussed about - or never even visit, perhaps.

Can you guess where this new vehicle for potential adverts - or suggestions, as Microsoft call them - might be? Score a point if you were thinking of the Microsoft Store, as this is where the software giant is making its latest move in the world of promotional activity within Windows 11.

Although we should note that the idea is still in testing - in the Beta channel for Windows Insiders to be precise - it involves suggestions popping up when you search for apps or games in the Microsoft Store.