It is my belief that the eerie glow of the blue screen of Albright facial pallor is totally unrelated to this story, but I'm willing to examine evidence to the contrary.
Posted on 04/26/2020 11:16:15 AM PDT by dayglored
... The April 14 Patch Tuesday updates included fixes for a total of 133 vulnerabilities, including seven critical security flaws in Windows 10. I have always said that users need to take the fixing of security vulnerabilities very seriously indeed. When new research suggests that the average Windows 10 PC has no less than 14 weaponized vulnerabilities, that is ones with known exploits in case you were wondering, that seriousness is reinforced...
...First things first, given the sheer number of Windows 10 users out there, the number of people complaining of these issues, in the hundreds, is relatively small. This doesn't make it any better if you are one of them, but it does need to be put into some perspective. The problems those users are reporting to the Microsoft support forums and on social media have included the installation failing and looping back to restart again, the dreaded Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) following a "successful" update and computers that simply refuse to boot again afterward. Among the more common issues, in terms of complaints after a Windows 10 update, were Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity related ones. But there were have also been users complaining that after a restart, all files from the C drive had been deleted...
[Many embedded links at the Forbes article]
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Most windows people keep their stuff on the C drive. It’s not best practice but they do.
Mac’s aren’t invulnerable to this crap either. Catalina has been a disaster. Apple has really struggled with software, firmware, and hardware issues over the past couple of years.
Win7 had the option of updating the Defender without messing with your operating system without your permission. Win10 took that away. Which wouldn’t be a problem if they tested the updates before they released them. They need to start firing folks from the top down until they find someone competent to fix the problems in that business unit.
You have to understand the current Microsoft business plan. They want all your data on their servers. If they destroy your local storage enough times, you'll get with the program.
Since you’ve mentioned Windows 10, I have a couple of SD cards in my game cameras. BTW, I don’t hunt.
I have had my cameras for a while. But now, after the latest Windows update, my SD cards are write protected.
It’s like, I don’t have control over my own SD cards. Microsoft is telling me that I can’t delete, rename, etc. because they want to control my SD cards.
I have spent 3 days trying to get the write protection on of my own damn cards that I have owned since last year.
Total BS!
Not as good as XP, but better than anything else before or after. I'll keep running it until this hard drive melts.
p
The same guy that wants to rush through and beta test a COVID vaccine on the entire world’s population.
It will be the Harbor Freight of vaccines!
The worst part of Win10, of course, is that home users can’t turn off updates.
Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
My home box will try to do an automatic update ( that takes > 30 min) & then I get the message that they can’t complete the update & then spend 30 min destalling the new updates
I guess I’m in a loop
“Starting with Release XYZ there is no longer support for 32-bit code, so update your old 32-bit apps to 64-bit versions before you upgrade your OS to this release”...they mean it. Every major OS has done it, Windows, MacOS, Linux. It’s not rocket science — modern computers now need more than 4GB of RAM and 32-bit OSes are limited (modulo arcane tweaks).
The warnings have been coming out for many years. But do users listen to warnings? Some do, most don’t, so they get caught out, and that fuels the “Catalina is trouble” reports. And because there are more MacOS users than ever, the noise is louder.
But other than the 64/32 issue, Catalina hasn’t been significantly more or less trouble than any other MacOS release.
I hope it’s alright for you now.
No more hair pulling!
They all want your data on their servers — Microsoft is not even the most egregious (that would be Google).
The notion of “The Cloud” is one of the most pernicious concepts to come along in a long time. “The Cloud” isn’t a cloud — IT’S JUST A HARD DRIVE IN SOME OTHER GUY’S DATACENTER. There’s no freakin’ magic about it. And you pay for the privilege of him looking at all your data, whether it’s direct fee or the fact that he sells your data for marketing intel.
The only major company I’m aware of that truly protects their users’ data completely is Apple — the company cannot decrypt it because the user is the only holder of the encrypt/decrypt keys. The downside is that the user is responsible for not losing/forgetting those keys, but that’s still a better deal than letting the company have the ability to decrypt your data.
I play modern games that aren’t hard on hardware. Win XP can’t run them though.
Would like to see sources for that, please? Microsoft numbers over 200K employees. Over half of those employees are US-based. Please don't spread FUD if you can't back it up.
That fellow takes a long time to say very little, but of course he’s basically right — you can run Win7, or Vista, or XP, or 2K, or 98, or 95 forever, but what you can do with them decreases as time goes on, and their security suffers more and more.
Win7’s desktop interface (GUI) is still my favorite. But I no longer allow my Win7 hosts to connect the Internet. Why should they? There are no security or application updates out there for Win7. But I have a few old Windows-only programs that I still need to run, and either I prefer to run them on Win7, or in a couple cases they won’t run on Win10.
My Win7 systems are “air-gapped”, meaning they have no connection to any of my other computers. When necessary I exchange files using a USB Flash drive which gets malware-scanned daily. So it’s possible to keep using Win7 with some degree of safety, with strict limits on what it does.
But after Jan 2020 I will never again use Win7 as my platform for websurfing or any other internet-connected application.
This is crypto 101, dayglo. If you manage your own keys, this isn't a problem, regardless of whose cloud you use.
Invest in a YubiKey, encrypt ALL of your disks (BitLocker works just fine), and it doesn't matter if your data is on your computer, a local NAS, on a floppy disk in a drawer, or on a DVD in a safe, if you own the key, they can't see your data. Period.
I was working on a cybersecurity incident with a customer. They're not PubSec, but their data is valuable. About half of their datacenter was airgapped, and they said the same, "we only use known-safe media, scan it daily, etc." Somehow a nasty bit of code was rampaging through their supposedly safe network, deleting random files, corrupting backups, the works!
Turns out their primary scanning utility doesn't do much more than a simple heuristics check against data being put on these trusted thumb drives, and someone neglected follow "clean source" principles, downloading what they thought was a driver for new hardware that turned out to be malicious code. Had they checksummed the driver data (there wasn't one), they would've known better.
Moral of the story: don't trust "scanners." Their heuristics scanner couldn't tell that the "driver" was really malicious code.
Most malicious data these days don't trip "malware" or "antivirus" scanners. Malware and antivirus are 20+ year old infection vectors. People still have a false sense of security from scanners like Norton, McAfee, AVG. They're functionally useless nowadays, and most of them are bloatware or worse.
Well, yes of course, :-). That’s why I’ve had PGP/GnuPG encryption on all my own computers since the 1996 or so. My personal data is encrypted everywhere, on the working disks, in the backups, etc. I take reasonable care to avoid writing unencrypted temp files while editing, all that stuff. Somebody would have to put an agent on my machine that can read live RAM to get at the unencrypted data. Meanwhile, the only thing that’s changed over the years are the length of the keys (now at 4096) and the passphrases.
But you and I both know that that route isn’t a viable option for the vast majority of today’s computer/device users. So they rely on Apple to do the right thing.
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