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Microsoft has been granted a patent that would allow the company to make a chatbot using the personal information of deceased people. The patent describes creating a bot based on the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages”, and more personal information. “The specific person [who the chat bot represents] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc”, it goes on to say. “The specific person may also correspond to oneself (e.g., the user creating/training...

Sure. Create a two-tier society which allows freedom for some people, but not for others, and have it regulated by the very groups and figures that people suspicious of vaccines already have at the very top of their list. That's bound to go well. A coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport to allow businesses, airlines and countries to check if people have received the vaccine. The initiative, which includes members like Microsoft, Oracle and U.S. nonprofit Mayo Clinic, is using the work from member Commons Project’s international digital document that verifies...

A coalition of tech and health organizations including Oracle, Microsoft, and the Mayo Clinic, is reportedly working to develop a digital COVID-19 vaccination passport that would allow businesses, airlines, and governments to check if individuals have received the vaccine. The Hill reports that a coalition of health and technology organizations are working to develop a new digital COVID-19 vaccination passport that could be checked by businesses, airlines, and countries to confirm if an individual has received the vaccine. The coalition includes tech giants such as Microsoft and Oracle, along with the Mayo Clinic. On Thursday, the Vaccination Credential Initiative announced...

A coalition of big tech companies, including Microsoft is developing a COVID passport, with the expectation that a digital document linked to vaccination status will be required to travel and get access to basic services.The group is calling itself the Vaccination Credential Initiative (VCI), and includes Microsoft, Salesforce and Oracle.The US health provider Mayo Clinic is also involved in the project, which is being described as “the most significant vaccination effort in the history of the United States.”The idea is now a familiar one. Anyone who has been vaccinated will receive a QR code that can be stored on their...

An unpatched zero-day in Microsoft Windows 10 (and prior) allows attackers to corrupt an NTFS-formatted hard drive with a one-line command. In multiple tests by BleepingComputer, this one-liner can be delivered hidden inside a Windows shortcut file, a ZIP archive, batch files, or various other vectors to trigger hard drive errors that corrupt the filesystem index instantly. "Critically underestimated" NTFS vulnerability In August 2020, October 2020, and finally this week, infosec researcher Jonas L drew attention to an NTFS vulnerability impacting Windows 10 that has not been fixed. When exploited, this vulnerability can be triggered by a single-line command to...

One of my laptops running W10 that updated to ver 2004 tried to label the Brave browser download as "potentially harmful." Just a heads up, however this may be old news as I delay windows updates in general. Have not gone to 20H2. I am in IT by trade and also run Linux (especially on rpi4s) Folks that are unfamiliar or less savvy may be prevented from installing Brave because of it.

I used to use Bing as a search engine but haven't in years. I've been using DuckDuckGo, but recently saw something that makes me thing they may have been compromised. Anybody know whether Bing/Microsoft is part of the Deep Tech crap? I also downloaded Brave.com, which seems okay. Any other non-Google search engine suggestions?

The group behind the suspected Russian attack into U.S. government agencies and private companies was able to hack into Microsoft's internal systems and access some of the company's source code, the tech giant said in a blog post on Thursday. Microsoft had previously said it was among thousands of companies that discovered malware on its systems after downloading a routine software update from the company SolarWinds containing a possible "backdoor" for hackers to gain access to sensitive company data. But the admission on Thursday is the first time Microsoft acknowledged that the attackers had successfully broken into the company's systems...

Microsoft unleashes ‘Death Star’ on SolarWinds hackers in extraordinary response to breach https://www.geekwire.com/2020/microsoft-unleashes-death-star-solarwinds-hackers-extraordinary-response-breach/ DHS, DOJ And DOD Are All Customers Of SolarWinds Orion, The Source Of The Huge US Government Hack https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2020/12/14/dhs-doj-and-dod-are-all-customers-of-solarwinds-orion-the-source-of-the-huge-us-government-hack/ SolarWinds as a Constitutive Moment: A New Agenda for the International Law of Intelligence https://www.justsecurity.org/73989/solarwinds-as-a-constitutive-moment-a-new-agenda-for-the-international-law-of-intelligence/

Cracking Dominion’s Source Code – A National Security Threat Since 2003by George EliasonDecember 29, 2020110052SHARE6 Dominion ImageCast precinct count optical ballot scanner Image by Douglas W. JonesWith the Georgia runoff election in full swing, this article will show why the ballot results should be ash-canned even before the final tallies are in — both Georgia and Pennsylvania adhere to the federal standard for elections and because Dominion uses modems, the election provider itself is not certifiable. Pennsylvania state certification requires that voting systems be evaluated by a federally recognized independent testing authority, or voting system test laboratory (VSTL), and certified...

A devastating cyberattack on US government agencies has also hit targets worldwide, with the list of victims still growing, according to researchers, heightening fears over computer security and espionage.Microsoft said late Thursday that it had notified more than 40 customers hit by the malware, which security experts say came from hackers linked to the Russian government and which could allow attackers unfettered network access."While roughly 80 percent of these customers are located in the United States, this work so far has also identified victims in seven additional countries," Microsoft president Brad Smith said in a blog post.Smith said the victims...

Up until today, when using Microsoft Bing to search "Trump Twitter", the very first result was a direct link to the president's twitter feed. Now when you search the same words, his feed is nowhere to be found, and instead you get article after article of how the president is posting "election nonsense" to his feed nonstop. As an added bonus, there is also a news banner in the right frame from the "CyberSecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency" (cisa.gov/rumorcontrol) The CISA "responsible for monitoring and helping states with election security, addresses election misinformation and disinformation on this page." Can't image...

Should we be worried?The undead have telepathic powers if Microsoft's latest Windows 10 Insider emission is to be believed.Perhaps stung by cruel criticism that the last batch of bleeding-edge Dev Channel releases have been a little light on features, build 20270 arrived overnight and apparently imbued Microsoft's unloved assistant, Cortana, with mindreading abilities.Assuming one's PC has a mind of its own, of course (and judging by the shenanigans that seem to happen every Patch Tuesday, we're starting to wonder). "You can now use Cortana on your PCs to translate their thoughts into direct actions to open and find files and...

A combined team of security experts from Advanced Intelligence and Eclypsium has announced that the Trickbot trojan malware now has the ability to modify a computer's Unified Extensible Firmware Interface—the interface between the firmware on a computer motherboard and the computer's operating system—in this case, Microsoft Windows. Trickbot has been in the news of late due to its advanced capabilities. It has a modular design and is notable for its ability to gain administrative capabilities on infected computers. The entities behind the creation of the trojan are believed to be criminals in Russia and North Korea, and they have used...

Did someone mention multithreading?Microsoft has once again unleashed some iffy knitwear on the world with an MS Paint-themed sweater to ring in the festive season.The company previously flung Windows XP and 95 incarnations at its favoured fans (we note Vulture Central has remained jumper-free) but the MS Paint version is the first to be sold to the general public, replete with worldwide shipping.The new #WindowsUglySweater has arrived — and this year it’s supporting a fantastic cause! Get yours today (they disappear fast!) and you’ll be supporting @GirlsWhoCode when you do. Good deal, isn’t knit? 🧶 — Windows (@Windows) December 1,...

Technology giant Microsoft has filed a patent for a system to monitor employees' body language and facial expressions during work meetings and give the events a "quality score". A filing suggests it could be deployed in real-world meetings or online virtual get-togethers. It envisions rooms being packed with sensors to monitor the participants, which could raise privacy concerns. Microsoft is already under fire over a separate "productivity-score" tool. 'Employee-surveillance tool' That feature was introduced last year but came to prominence only after a public demo at a corporate event. It allows managers to keep track of individual workers' use of...

The PC revolution started off life 35 years ago this week. Microsoft launched its first version of Windows on November 20th, 1985, to succeed MS-DOS. It was a huge milestone that paved the way for the modern versions of Windows we use today. While Windows 10 doesn’t look anything like Windows 1.0, it still has many of its original fundamentals like scroll bars, drop-down menus, icons, dialog boxes, and apps like Notepad and MS paint. Windows 1.0 also set the stage for the mouse. If you used MS-DOS then you could only type in commands, but with Windows 1.0...

The first to call the presidential election for Joe Biden was AT&T. AT&T, through its subsidiary CNN, one of the largest conglomerates in the world with a market cap of over $200 billion, billions of which come from lucrative federal contracts, was the first to claim that Biden was the winner. Beyond government contracts, AT&T has a major stake in the 5G wars and has spent a lot of money investing in the Biden campaign. AT&T employees were the tenth largest source of contributions to the Biden campaign. Biden had attended fundraisers at the homes of two AT&T lobbyists, but...

Freeman’s full tweet reads: Exactly how much money do I need to give the Democratic Party for them to pull their shit together? Get angry. Get mean. Get low. We care about people. Awesome. That doesn’t mean we can’t occasionally slide a knife between some asshole’s ribs. Fellow Microsoft employees, including Program Manager Alex Dupler, appeared to endorse Freeman’s tweet, asking “where do I sign up?”

Starting next month, users trying to access certain websites will see IE refuse to load the URL and automatically open the site in Edge instead. This forced IE-to-Edge behavior is part of Microsoft's Internet Explorer deprecation plans. Microsoft has been gradually rolling out the feature for testing purposes for some Windows users since the release of Edge 84 this summer. However, with the release of Edge 87, scheduled for next month, Microsoft plans to enable the forced IE-to-Edge action for all IE users. At the core of this new feature is a new DLL file that Microsoft has been silently...