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[Edit 12/18/2015 - Added additional detail describing support for Windows 7 and Windows 8] Continuing with the ongoing tradition of holiday gifts to the PowerShell community, we are excited to announce the release of Windows Management Framework 5.0 RTM. WMF 5.0 RTM brings new management technologies such as Just Enough Admin (JEA), PowerShell Classes, PackageManagement, PowerShellGet, etc. and improvement to existing technologies such as Desired State Configuration (DSC), PowerShell Script Debugging, Software Inventory Logging (SIL) etc. to downlevel systems. WMF 5.0 RTM replaces WMF 5.0 Production Preview, and is the fully-supported version many of you have been waiting for. You...

Dollars are increasingly flowing from traditional ads to digital, as strong growth in mobile, video, and social spending continue to change the face of the US media market. Over the next five years, marketers will especially embrace mobile. Mobile will drive up spending on video, search, display, and social, and propel the migration of ad dollars away from traditional media, including newspapers and magazines. In this new report, BI Intelligence forecasts spending trends for the major digital ad formats -- including search, display, and video -- and mobile versus desktop. We also examine trajectories for social ad spending and programmatic...

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The consumer electronics industry has always fascinated me. I spent my first ten years as an analyst covering the telecom industry, which historically has had very good margins. But, when I started covering the consumer electronics industry, I was struck by the fact the vast majority of players in that market make razor-thin margins, if they’re profitable at all. Even more striking is Apple, which might be described accurately, if incompletely, as a player in the consumer electronics market, makes telecom-like margins while competing with those barely profitable vendors. And just as interesting is the fact that, as players that...

The end of the year does not seem to bode well for Apple, as the tech giant's shares continued to drop 0.3 percent in early Tuesday trading. The company's stocks have now dipped below $110 for the first time since October, pushing the company to new financial lows, according to USA Today. The drop in Apple's shares continued from Monday, when the company fell by as much as 3 percent, to $109.79 in early Monday trading. Though the stock recovered for a time, it nevertheless closed down 0.6 percent, to $112.48 by the day's end. With the company's high of...

Goldman Sachs has published a 22-page research note looking at Microsoft's business and its opportunities. The research, titled "Righting a Wrong," upgrades Microsoft stock from a Sell rating to Neutral. The research note goes into detail, analysing all of Microsoft's core businesses, including Office, Windows, and Azure. It notes that, while the company is in a state of transition, there is light at the end of the tunnel. The transition of users from offline Office, which customers acquired and kept for five to seven years, to Office 365, which has a yearly subscription, is bearing fruit. Goldman highlights the work...

Full Title: Microsoft partners with Chinese state-owned defense conglomerate to promote, sell Windows 10 to governmentCreates joint venture with China Electronics Technology Group Corp. to license, support Windows 10 in government agencies and some state-run enterprises Microsoft yesterday expanded its partnership with one of China's largest defense and technology conglomerates as it announced a joint venture to get Windows 10 on government PCs in the People's Republic. The U.S. company will partner with China Electronics Technology Group (CETC) to create C&M Information Technologies -- the name is provisional and the move will require Chinese regulatory approval -- to license Windows...

... After publishing details about the availability of new kernel packages for the Ubuntu 15.10, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS computer operating systems, Canonical now reports that the Linux kernel for Raspberry Pi 2 was updated for Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf). According to the Ubuntu Security Notice USN-2843-3, four kernel vulnerabilities discovered by various developers in the upstream Linux kernel 4.2 branch, which is now officially maintained by Canonical's Ubuntu Kernel Team, as we reported a couple of days ago, were patched for the Raspberry Pi 2 port of Ubuntu 15.10. The first security flaw was...

Urges customers to patch Netscreen devices immediately. Network equipment vendor Juniper has issued an urgent security alert for its Netscreen range of enterprise firewalls, after discovering "unauthorised code" in the device operating system that allows them to be fully compromised. According to Juniper chief information officer Bob Worrall, the code was discovered during an internal review of the ScreenOS operating system for the Netscreen firewalls. One vulnerability could be triggered to permit an attacker to log in via Secure Shell or telnet connections, and gain administrative privileges on Netscreen firewalls.

Juniper, a major manufacturer of networking equipment, said on Thursday it found spying code planted in certain models of its firewalls, an alarming discovery that echoes of state-sponsored tampering.

Is nothing sacred? Risky mobile apps steal data and spy on users Cybercriminals are increasingly targeting mobile users with free mobile apps in order to steal data -- and nothing is sacred. Like a social media account with a large following, popular mobile apps give scammers a low-cost way to cast a very wide net. Free apps mimicking popular games, for example, are often 'risk ware' that can steal user information, track browsing, access contacts and calendar, and make unauthorized calls: a steep price to pay for a 'free' app. Yet cybercriminals are being inadvertently assisted in their efforts...

Fear and Loathing in Redmond: Microsoft Sorry for Surface Bugs December 17th, 2015 As most of you know, whenever Apple has a problem with hardware or software, it can make huge headlines. I said huge! One telling incident occurred last year, when the iOS 8.0.1 update essentially bricked any model from the iPhone 6 series. Apple had it up for maybe an hour or so before it was pulled, but that was quite enough to cause a furor, as if no other tech company had ever issued a flawed update. More to the point, the small number of iPhones that...

Pressing the backspace key 28 times can bypass the Grub2 bootloader's password protection and allow a hacker to install malware on a locked-down Linux system. GRUB, which stands for the Grand Unified Bootloader, is used by most Linux distributions to initialize the operating system when the computer starts. It has a password feature that can restrict access to boot entries, for example on computers with multiple operating systems installed. This protection is particularly important within organizations, where it is also common to disable CD-ROM, USB and network boot options and to set a password for the BIOS/UEFI firmware in order...

Free services must pay higher royalties. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of MacIn news which could well be good for Apple Music, but bad for rival free streaming music services, the federal Copyright Royalty Board has ruled that ad-supported internet radio companies such as Pandora must pay higher royalty rates to artists and record labels. Starting next year, Pandora, iHeartMedia and others will pay 17 cents for every 100 plays of a song on their free tiers. This fee will increase over the following four years in line with inflation. Currently, Pandora pays whichever is greater out of 25 percent of revenue...

LizardSquad copycats are trying to ruin Christmas for gamers Last year, the LizardSquad hacking group managed to ink its name into the history of Internet after taking down the Xbox Live and PlayStation networks during Christmas. With this year's holiday just around the corner, a new group, unoriginally named Phantom Squad, is now threatening to carry out similar attacks as well. If we believe their Twitter timeline, the hackers seem to have launched a DDoS attack against Reddit yesterday, even if nobody noticed its effects. Of course, a behemoth like Reddit is hard to take down in its entirety, but...

GRUB password protection can be bypassed According to Canonical'a latest Ubuntu Security Notice, it would appear that there's a zero-day security vulnerability in the GRUB2 (GNU GRand Unified Bootloader) packages, affecting all GNU/Linux distributions running 2.02 Beta. The security flaw was discovered by developers Ismael Ripoll and Hector Marco in the upstream GRUB2 packages, which did not correctly handled the backspace key when the bootloader was configured to use password-protected authentication, thus allowing a local attacker to bypass GRUB's password protection.

Only select customers to receive uncapped OneDrive. Microsoft has abandoned plans to offer unlimited cloud storage to all OneDrive for Business users, with only customers of a certain scale and on certain plans now set to receive the upgrade. Unlimited OneDrive storage for all business customers was promised by Microsoft in October 2014, and scheduled to arrive this year. But following through with the promise has proved difficult for Microsoft. Users of the OneDrive consumer service had the option removed in November this year alongside reductions in the storage amounts offered with free plans, after Microsoft complained that subscribers were...

Fire up any computer running Windows 7 or 8 and you'll be used to a message or three inviting you to upgrade to Windows 10. But the latest pop-up screen doesn't even give you a choice. The large pop-up screen, which first appeared over the weekend, gives users the option of upgrading straight away or ... that evening. Users can still opt out by clicking on the red 'X' in the top right corner of the window, but less savvy computer users (part of Redmond's core market segments) might not figure that out. This is not a new idea; it's...

Just a few minutes ago, I turned on my computer. Nothing seemed to be wrong, but as I clicked on my user name, got the strange message of something regarding my desktop (formatting or updating). When the page finally loaded, I knew something was very wrong. The tab bar was in the wrong place, and when I clicked on it, all of my files, all of my webpages, everything was GONE. It was like this was a brand new computer, with nothing in it. I'm in a panic as to what to do to recover my files and the like...

Mac security software suite MacKeeper is recovering after a hack leaked millions of users' personal information. Kromtech, the software developer, confirmed that it had received notice of the hack yesterday, discovering a hole in its security which was exposing customer usernames, email addresses and other personal data for as much as 13 million users. According to Kromtech, the hole was patched within a matter of hours after security researcher Chris Vickery had published details of the error on Reddit over the weekend. The German developer assured customers that there was no evidence that the data had been accessed by malicious...