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Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of the accompanying video from professor Peter St. Onge. Big Tech is slashing jobs—half a million and counting. And it’s blaming artificial intelligence. A new study by Layoffs.fyi reports that layoffs in the tech industry have exceeded 100,000 so far this year —and keep in mind that the year’s only half over. That’s on top of 212,000 tech layoffs last year. And 165,000 in 2022. Recent layoffs include Microsoft and Facebook, which each cut 10,000 jobs. Cisco dropped 4,000, Intuit 1,800. Even Amazon and Apple are laying off. Part of this is...

A single CrowdStrike bug sent the entire tech world into chaos last week — a snafu some companies are still recovering from. Third-party agents selling and supporting CrowdStrike software and the complicated repairs for customers have been a miserably busy bunch over the past week. CrowdStrike’s token of appreciation for those vendors: a $10 Uber Eats voucher. We’re not kidding. When reports of the voucher “gifts” first surfaced on Wednesday afternoon there were three main buckets of reactions: Yup, checks out... Now partners could risk losing their customers as a result of this mess, even though it was out of...

IT admins now have a quicker way to get machines up and running again after CrowdStrike’s faulty update. Microsoft has released a recovery tool that’s designed to help IT admins repair Windows machines that were impacted by CrowdStrike’s faulty update that crashed 8.5 million Windows devices on Friday. The tool creates a bootable USB drive that IT admins can use to help quickly recover impacted machines. While CrowdStrike has issued an update to fix its software that led to millions of Blue Screen of Death errors, not all machines are able to automatically receive that fix. Some IT admins have...

undreds of flights were cancelled at British airports yesterday due to the fault ... Travel disruption is continuing today as trains are hit in Crowdstrike outage with ticket machines and scanners going down at London stations. The meltdown chaos comes after the world's biggest IT disaster struck, with thousands of Brits stranded abroad. It happened on one of year's busiest travel days, with families now desperately queuing at Dover Port in an attempt to get home. After another 45 flights were cancelled today, 28,000 Brits are fighting to get a seat on a plane. Some passengers stuck overseas have been...

For the techies…. On Friday 19 July 2024, Microsoft reported that it suffered a major outage for many Azure services. This affected airlines, banks and media:… CrowdStrike have already published a patch for Falcon Sensor, and which affects all of CrowdStike’s customers: Restart Windows and boot into Troubleshooting mode 2. Open a command prompt 3. Go to C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike 4. Locate the file matching “C-00000291* sys”, and delete it. 5. Continue normal startup Overall, it looks like the Falcon Sensor bug caused Azure services to glitch, and which caused many systems around the world to fall-over.

American Airlines, United and Delta have asked the FAA for global ground stop on all flights, according to an alert from the FAA on Friday morning. The FAA is telling air traffic controllers to tell airborne pilots that airlines are currently experiencing communication issues. Meanwhile, flights in the air will stay in the air, but no American, United or Delta flights will take off....

Falcon Sensor putting hosts into deathloop - but there's a workaround icon Simon Sharwood Fri 19 Jul 2024 // 06:46 UTC UPDATED An update to a product from infosec vendor CrowdStrike is bricking computers running Windows. The Register has found numerous accounts of Windows 10 PCs crashing, displaying the Blue Screen of Death, then being unable to reboot. “We're seeing BSOD Org wide that are being caused by csagent.sys, and it's taking down critical services. I'll open a ticket, but this is a big deal,” wrote one user. Forums report that Crowdstrike has issued an advisory with a URL that...

July 19 (Reuters) - A global tech outage was disrupting operations across multiple industries on Friday, with airlines halting flights, some broadcasters off air and services from banking to healthcare hit by system problems. While major U.S. airlines - American Airlines (AAL.O), opens new tab, Delta Airlines (DAL.N), opens new tab and United Airlines (UAL.O), opens new tab - grounded flights, other carriers and airports around the world reported delays and disruptions early on Friday. Banks and financial services firms from Australia to India and Germany warned customers of disruptions. In Britain, booking systems used by doctors were offline, multiple...

I've long used Norton Anti-Virus (I think they used to be called Symantec). But I think it's a memory hog. Sometimes it seems to use all available CPU. When I do a video screen capture on a movie that I'm playing, the movie records all jittery, full of pauses. I Disable Norton's Auto-Protect, but that doesn't help. I wonder if Norton is obeying me?Norton foisted a VPN onto my computer. I tried it several times, but it never works, never makes a connection. Only tells me to try later.When I renewed last year, I checked a box to not renew...

I've been pointing out Windows security bugs since Windows for Workgroups showed up in 1992 and I showed how you could steal data from your coworker's spreadsheets using Object Linking and Embedding (OLE). You'd think Microsoft would have figured security out by now. But no. It's only gotten worse – much worse.In June 2023, Chinese hacking group Storm-0558 stole US government "secure" messages from Microsoft's Exchange Online. I was only surprised that the Feds managed to catch them – Microsoft certainly didn't figure it out.Former senior White House cyber policy director AJ Grotto said it best: he asserted it was...

The U.S. Department of Commerce banned Russian company Kaspersky from selling its anti-virus software and other cybersecurity products in the country after determining that the firm posed an “undue or unacceptable risk to national security.”“Kaspersky will generally no longer be able to, among other activities, sell its software within the United States or provide updates to software already in use,” the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) said in a June 20 press release.The prohibition is applicable to Kaspersky Lab, Inc., the U.S. subsidiary of Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab. The company’s operations were deemed to be risky to the...

ransomnote: Transcript below.Click to view the 1 minute video on X (watermarked @tsarnick)May 20, 2024 TRANSCRIPT BEGINS~~~~~~~~~~Satya Nadella (CEO of Microsoft): How do we introduce memory,right?Photographic memory into what you do on the PCAnd now we have it. So it's called Recall.It's not keyword search.It's semantic search over all your history.And it's not just about any document, we can recreate moments from the past essentially.WSJ’s Joanna Stern (interviewer, provides demonstration): Here's how it works.Windows constantly takes screen shots of what's on your screen, then uses a generative AI model right on the device along with the NPU to process all...

Microsoft will officially end support for its most popular operating system in October 2025. Here's what you should do with your Windows 10 PCs before that day arrives. In less than two years, Microsoft will draw the final curtain on Windows 10 after a successful 10-year run. That news shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. The end date is right there on the Microsoft Support document that lists "products retiring or reaching the end of support in 2025." The schedule is defined by Microsoft's Modern Lifecycle Policy: "Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. The...

These are the most popular computer operating systems from 1985 to 2024, based on market share. The latest numbers from 2003 on are readily available from Wikipedia and Statcounter. The first half of the video required a bit more research, which entailed finding and converting sales figures into market share. These numbers may be different based on what OSes are included in the stats, this is why different videos have slightly different numbers.

What just happened? It's not just China that is replacing Windows on government PCs. Germany's most northern state, Schleswig-Holstein, has begun moving from the popular OS to Linux while also switching from Microsoft Office to LibreOffice. The state's Minister-President Daniel Gunther said the move from proprietary to open-source software was being made to ensure independence, sustainability, and security. "In addition to improved IT security, cost-effectiveness, and data protection, the use of open-source software also enables seamless collaboration between different systems," officials said. "Alongside open-source software development, the goal is to release future development results of the country under free licenses."The...

The way Google has been stepping up its data collection game, it has prompted many people to opt for privacy-focused web browsers that respect their privacy by providing a secure browsing experience.Floorp is one such web browser that I recently came across that claims to be “the most Advanced and Fastest Firefox derivative” around.So, join me as I check out this browser.Floorp: Overview ⭐Being a fork of the popular Firefox browser, Floorp was built keeping privacy and user freedom in mind. It is a cross-platform web browser that prides itself in being completely open-source and not collecting any kind of...

Google will allow businesses to install an auto-updating version of the Chrome operating system to Windows devices, potentially preventing millions of PCs from hitting landfills after Microsoft (MSFT.O), opens new tab ends support for Windows 10 next year, parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab said on Wednesday. The company said ChromeOS Flex will continue receiving regular security updates and features like data encryption, allowing users to keep using their Windows 10 systems. Microsoft has said that its Windows 10 will reach the end of support on Oct. 14 2025, and will no longer provide regular security updates, bug fixes,...

Your PC without this CPU feature won’t boot Windows 11 24H2 KEY TAKEAWAYS Windows 11 24H2 update requires the POPCNT CPU feature, making it impossible to run on super-old PCs. Modern CPUs support POPCNT, so if you recently bought a new PC, you won't have any issues. PCs older than fifteen years will be affected by this change and won't be able to boot Windows 11 without POPCNT support. Windows 11 24H2 is the next big update that Microsoft will roll out later this year, and it might finally put an end to the practice of running Windows unofficially on...

Can a computer problem get any weirder? I'm running a fast Dell laptop with Win 11 Pro. If I play audio from YouTube while browsing with Brave (or Chrome), System sounds, test tones from Windows' troubleshooter, etc., play over a bluetooth speaker just fine, but the audio on the YouTube vid plays only over the tiny laptop speakers. (Nothing is connected to the headphone jack.) I've been all through Windows troubleshooting, and even a session with a MS tech support rep, to no avail, other than doing a Shift + Shutdown now results with (after booting back up and returning...

Windows 10 users worldwide report problems installing Microsoft's January Patch Tuesday updates, getting 0x80070643 errors when attempting to install the KB5034441 security update for BitLocker. Yesterday, as part of Microsoft's January 2024 Patch Tuesday, a security update (KB5034441) was released for CVE-2024-20666, a BitLocker encryption bypass that allows users to access encrypted data. However, when attempting to install this update, Windows 10 users are reporting getting 0x80070643 errors and the installation failing. When installing the KB5034441 security update, Microsoft is installing a new version of the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) that fixes the BitLocker vulnerability. Unfortunately, Windows 10 creates a...