No reader question today. Instead, I want to discuss Safe Mode, Windows’ stripped-down, minimum-driver environment. For years now, there’s been one quick way to enter Safe Mode—pressing F8. But that trick doesn’t work for all Windows 8 PCs.
And even in older versions, it’s not always the easiest form of entry.
Safe Mode gives you a low-resolution, visually ugly, feature-limited Windows environment useful for diagnostic and repair purposes. You wouldn’t want to create a PowerPoint demonstration there, but if things are misbehaving, it can be a fruitful place to visit. For instance, if a program’s uninstall routine keeps failing, it just might uninstall properly in Safe Mode.
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
Among the things that standard Safe Mode cannot do is networking. However, because network and Internet access are needed for some diagnostic chores—such as malware scanning and updating drivers—Windows also provides an alternative Safe Mode with Networking environment.
The conventional way of entering Safe Mode still works in Windows 7 and Vista, and in some Windows 8 PCs. Boot the computer and start pressing and releasing F8 repeatedly. Once the Advanced Boot Options menu pops up, you can select Safe Mode or Safe Mode with Networking.
If that doesn’t work, here’s something specific to Windows 8:
Hold down Shift while selecting the Restart option on the Shutdown menu. This works with the Settings charm and—in Windows 8.1—right-clicking the Start button.
On the resulting “Choose an option” screen, select Troubleshoot>Advanced options>Startup Settings>Restart.
When the Startup Settings menu appears, type 4 for Safe Mode or 5 for Safe Mode with Networking.
Here’s one more path to Safe Mode, and it works in Windows 7, 8, and Vista:
In the Start menu’s Search field or in the Windows 8 Search charm, type msconfig, and launch the resulting program.
Click the Boot tab.
Check the Safe boot option
Select an option below that. Safe boot brings you to the standard Safe Mode. With networking does exactly what you think it does.
Click OK, then Restart.
One problem with this method: When you’re done and you reboot Windows, it will take you back into Safe mode. So while you’re still in Safe Mode, launch msconfig and uncheck the Safe boot option.
Glennr4466 found a flaw in my advice about booting into Windows 8 Safe Mode. Because it requires a reboot, it doesn’t work if Windows refuses to boot at all.
If Windows 8 won’t boot normally, it probably won’t boot into Safe Mode, either. You can try the trick of repeatedly pressing and releasing F8 (described in my previous article), but it seldom works with Windows 8.
So what can you do? You have to fix the problem that’s keeping your PC from booting at all. Then, once Windows 8 can boot, you can reboot it into Safe Mode (if you still need to).
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
The trick is to create a recovery drive, and boot from that. It’s best to do this on your PC before you have a problem. A recovery drive created on another Windows 8 PC might work, but it might not.
Follow these instructions. You’ll need an empty flash drive, or at least one that contains nothing that you want to keep.
Insert the flash drive into one of your PC’s USB ports.
In Windows’ Search charm, type recovery, and select Create a recovery drive.
Follow the wizard. If you’re not using your own computer, or if your flash drive holds less than 8GB, do not check “Copy the recovery partition from the PC to the recovery drive.”
Try booting from the flash drive. You may need to go into your BIOS setup and tell it to try booting from the flash drive before it tries booting from the internal drive. Your computer almost certainly uses UEFI, which in most cases isn't a problem because it probably supports BIOS boots as well.
Once successfully booted, the recovery drive will ask you to select a keyboard layout. On the next page, titled “Choose an option,” select Troubleshoot.
On the Troubleshoot page, select Advanced options.
Once there, try Startup Repair. If that doesn’t work, try System Restore. Chances are that one of these will work, and when it does, you will probably not need to enter Safe Mode.
In the worst-case scenario, you’d have to use System Image Recovery or reinstall Windows. If you have to do one of these, Safe Mode wouldn’t have helped you anyway.
Microsoft continues its slow drip of Windows 10 details with some good news for audiophiles.
According to Joe Belfiore, Microsoft's Operating Systems Group vice president, Windows 10 for phones and small tablets will support FLAC, a popular lossless audio compression format. Belfiore said FLAC support will arrive on smaller Windows 10 devices a few months after the initial preview build, which is due in the next month or so.
Microsoft had already announced system-wide FLAC support for Windows 10 last year, showing a screenshot of FLAC files loaded in Windows Media Player. But Windows 10 will be somewhat different on screens less than 8 inches, lacking a desktop and support for Win32 applications. Those limitations won't have any effect on FLAC support, apparently.
FLAC is the format of choice for high-quality music vendors such as HDTracks, and is popular for sharing audience-recorded live music. Because no data is lost to compression, it can be repeatedly burned to and from CDs or converted to other lossless formats like WAV without any loss in audio quality.
It's worth noting that in response to Belfiore's tweet, several users asked about gapless playback, which eliminates the pauses between locally-stored audio tracks. This capability is notoriously absent from Windows Phone 8.1, but so far there's no word on whether it's coming to Windows 10.
Why this matters: FLAC support on mobile devices would have been of limited use a few years ago, when phones with 8 GB flash drives were more common than 64 GB ones, but it's starting to make more sense as capacity increases. And while it's certainly a niche feature, it could be a killer one for music lovers, especially when paired with the expanded music sync capabilities coming to OneDrive.
What is Microsoft’s “personal agent,” and what is Bill Gates doing working on it?
Gates took to the virtual pages of Reddit for his third “Ask Me Anything” session, answering the usual mix of serious and semi-serious questions. But in the middle of the session he seemingly dropped a bombshell.
“One project I am working on with Microsoft is the Personal Agent which will remember everything and help you go back and find things and help you pick what things to pay attention to,” Gates wrote. “The idea that you have to find applications and pick them and they each are trying to tell you what is new is just not the efficient model—the agent will help solve this. It will work across all your devices.”
Gates didn’t follow up with any additional information, although his comments were in response to a question about what technology might look like in 2045, 30 years down the road. “There will be more progress in the next 30 years than ever,” Gates wrote. “Even in the next 10 problems like vision and speech understanding and translation will be very good. Mechanical robot tasks like picking fruit or moving a hospital patient will be solved. Once computers/robots get to a level of capability where seeing and moving is easy for them then they will be used very extensively.”
So far, the only “personal agent” that Microsoft has publicly worked on—and shipped—has been Cortana, the digital assistant that’s built into Windows Phone and appears in a technical preview of Windows 10. But Cortana has also been exclusive to the Microsoft platform, and hasn’t yet migrated to iOS or Android. In concept, Gates' Personal Agent sounds something like LifeBits, a digital store of everything that Microsoft researchers talked about several years ago, but enhanced with Bing search functionality, possibly.
It's unclear whether Gates is referring to Cortana, an enhanced version, or something new. A Microsoft spokeswoman had no immediate comment.
Machines: our savior, our destroyer
Gates also appeared to say that he would focus on artificial intelligence if he could do it all over again. "I would probably be a researcher on AI," Gates wrote. "When I started Microsoft I was worried I would miss the chance to do basic work in that field."
What's interesting, though, is that Gates also warned against putting too much responsibility into the hands of machines. "I am in the camp that is concerned about super intelligence," he wrote. "First the machines will do a lot of jobs for us and not be super intelligent. That should be positive if we manage it well. A few decades after that though the intelligence is strong enough to be a concern. I agree with Elon Musk and some others on this and don't understand why some people are not concerned."
Why this matters: While it's certainly unclear what Gates is getting at with his discussion of personal agents, two things seem clear: One, your personal data still resides in various application silos that don't talk well to one another. And two, the data permissions those apps ask of you may one day be replaced by permissions one app asks of another. It's just that storing your entire life online may freak out more than a few people.
Microsoft's quarterly earnings call on Monday showed in stark, mathematical terms, the urgency of the changes Windows 10 promises for the company's flagship operating system.
Revenue in the business unit that includes Windows sales plunged. Even though two other key Microsoft products—Microsoft’s Surface and its Office 365 business—showed strong gains, profits fell by almost 11 percent.
Microsoft reported net income of $5.86 billion for the quarter, or 71 cents per share, down from $6.56 billion for the same quarter a year ago. Revenue climbed 8 percent to $26.47 billion. Analysts polled by Yahoo Finance expected Microsoft to report 71 cents per share on revenue of $26.33 billion.
But Microsoft’s revenue numbers are worse than they appear on the surface. On a business unit level (annoying abstract names are Microsoft's), the company’s growth was driven by its Commercial Other segment (Office 365 commercial, plus cloud products like Azure) as well as its Devices and Consumer Other (Bing, Xbox Live, and Office 365 for consumers). Microsoft also recorded $2.28 billion in sales of phone hardware, a business unit it did not have a year ago, and captured $314 million in revenue attributed to its Corporate business versus negative revenue of $55 million a year ago.
Meanwhile, revenue at the company’s Devices and Consumer Licensing unit, which includes Windows and OEM sales of Office suites, fell by 25 percent to $4.17 billion. Margins in that unit fell by 22 percent. Lower-priced licenses to academic customers caused Windows OEM Pro revenue to drop 13 percent, the company said. Lower license revenue pulled down non-Pro growth by 13 percent as well.
Nevertheless, executives focused on the positives: Devices and Consumer Other revenue, which includes the Surface tablet, grew by 30 percent to $2.44 billion, with sales of the Surface alone topping $1 billion for the first time. And sales in the Commercial Other cloud business more than doubled to $900 million.
Office 365 Home and Personal subscribers increased to over 9.2 million, up 30% sequentially over the prior quarter, Microsoft said, and search advertising revenue grew 23 percent, with Bing's U.S. market share at 19.7 percent. Xbox sales topped 6.6 million units.
“Microsoft is continuing to transform, executing against our strategic priorities and extending our cloud leadership,” said Satya Nadella, chief executive officer of Microsoft, in a statement “We are taking bold steps forward across our business, and specifically with Windows 10, to deliver new experiences, new categories, and new opportunities to our customers.”
Microsoft recently invited analysts and reporters to an event in Redmond to launch the latest technical preview of Windows 10. Microsoft is expected to launch the new operating system in the second half of 2015, following a steady rollout of preview builds that Microsoft has released for public evaluation.
Microsoft will hold a conference call to discuss its earnings with analysts later on Monday afternoon, where it will provide a revenue forecast for its business units.
Prognostications about Microsoft killing the desktop in Windows 10 are coming true—but only for the smallest of tablets.
New tablets with screens smaller than 8 inches will not ship with a classic desktop, and won’t be able to run legacy Win32 (read: desktop) applications according to Joe Belfiore, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s Operating Systems Group. These devices will instead run something very similar to the phone version of Windows 10 that Microsoft showed off last week.
If you already have a 7-inch Windows tablet like Toshiba’s Encore Mini, don’t panic; Belfiore clarified on Twitter that existing tablets will retain their desktop functionality. They’ll also support the new Continuum feature that switches to a mouse-and-keyboard interface when you dock the tablet with a desktop monitor.
Folks asking about updating 7" *existing* devices to Win10 -- you keep your desktop, you get continuum. Go try it yourself now! :)
— joebelfiore (@joebelfiore) January 27, 2015
With Windows 10, Microsoft is designing a single operating system to run across phones, “phablets,” small and large tablets, laptops, desktops and the Xbox One console. But smaller devices will still have their roots in Windows Phone, and what we’ve seen so far is not a major departure from the existing interface.
The story behind the story: The death of the Windows desktop has been a popular prediction among tech pundits for years. But after facing a backlash for the drastic redesign of Windows 8, Microsoft backed away from plans to make the desktop a less integral part of the operating system. Instead, it’s drawing a firm line—in this case, at 8 inches—on which devices should have full Windows functionality, and which should behave more like smartphones.
Dell's Venue 11 Pro is the first Atom-powered computer that I can picture as a replacement for my current laptop. With its two optional accessories, this 10.8-inch tablet can transform into either a small notebook or a diminutive all-in-one PC. The two-day battery life—with the optional keyboard dock—is amazing. But I do wish it had more memory and storage.
The model reviewed here is powered by an Intel Atom Z3770 processor (Bay Trail class) paired with 2GB of RAM and a 64GB SSD. Most of the tablets I’ve had my hands on recently are based on the Atom Z3740, and the bump up to the Z3770 seems to make a difference. This might be more perception than reality: The Venue 11 Pro’s WorldBench scores are only modestly higher than what Asus’s Z3740-powered Transformer Book T100 delivered. Still, with the Venue 11 Pro, I felt like I wasn't waiting as long for things to happen.
Image: Michael Homnick
The Venue 11 Pro is a big tablet, with a display that meaures a full 10.8 inches (diagonally).
Video-game performance isn’t counted as part of the WorldBench 9 score either, but I just had to see if the Venue 11 Pro could run Sims 3 (my guilty pleasure). Most Atom tablets will launch the game, but frame rates are frustratingly slow, and background calculations bog down the gameplay even more. To my delight (and the delay of finishing this review), the game ran smoothly at medium settings.
Don’t be alarmed by the Venue 11 Pro’s seemingly low WorldBench score. We use the same high-end notebook as a reference point for both laptops and tablets.
Atom-based tablets are typically saddled with lower-resolution screens (1280 by 800 being the most common). To its credit, Dell outfits the Venue 11 Pro with a full 1080p panel. Netflix movies look great on this device, and Windows 8's modern UI and apps scale nicely. The text in Chrome looked a little fuzzy, though.
The entry-level Venue 11 Pro is outfitted with just 2GB of DDR3/1066 memory and 64GB of storage. While the norm among cheaper tablets is just 32GB, 64GB still doesn't quite suffice if this were to be my only computer. You do have options, of course: You can supplement with a microSD card, store data in the cloud, or use something like SanDisk's clever Ultra Dual USB Drive. Two gigs of RAM, on the other hand, is a limitation that can’t be mitigated. Each time I ended a session of Sims 3, a notice on the desktop informed me I was running out of memory.
Our battery-life test is more demanding than most, but the Venue 11 Pro couldn’t outlast the Asus Transformer Tablet T100. (We didn’t empirically test the Dell’s battery life with its optional keyboard dock.)
Still, 11 inches is a lot of tablet. You’ll need both hands to hold it in tablet mode, but the improved readability of the large, high-res screen fully justifies the 1.57-pound weight, especially when you’re looking at it from a desktop or in your lap.
The touch screen is responsive for navigation, but it registered double taps with annoying frequency when I used its on-screen keyboard. The $160 keyboard is an essential accessory for writing longer emails and documents—in fact, that’s how I used the Venue 11 Pro most of the time.
Image: Michael Homnick
The Venue 11 Pro’s keyboard is an essential option if you plan to be productive.
The keyboard has its own battery, which drains first. I managed to watch several hours of videos, play a few hours of games, and surf for several more, draining only the keyboard’s battery. I worked the whole next day off the tablet’s battery without plugging it in overnight. The keyboard is comfortable, too, which makes the combo a pretty good laptop.
Things aren’t perfect, though. The pair is heavier than many 13-inch laptops: The keyboard weighs 28 ounces, which puts the total carry weight at 3.31 pounds (not including the power adapter). And the dock provides very little play to tilt the tablet backward, which can be problematic if you’re using the system in your lap. The keyboard’s trackpad, while small, is adequate. And you can always just reach up and touch the screen.
The tablet sits at a fixed angle in Dell’s Tablet Dock, and that worked well enough for me. This $140 accessory provides three USB 3.0 ports (two in the back, one in front), both HDMI and DisplayPort connectors for attaching a second (or third) display), 10/100 ethernet, and analog audio and video connectors. The dock charges the tablet when the two are paired, freeing up the tablet’s power adapter to charge the keyboard. Alternatively, you can charge both the keyboard and the tablet while the two are paired, but this takes a really long time.
Image: Michael Homnick
Users who spend most of their day behind a desk will appreciate Dell’s optional desktop dock. You can provide your own mouse, keyboard, and extra displays.
Dell’s Venue 11 Pro ups the ante in the hybrid arena, thanks to is versatile accessories. The hardware isn’t strong enough for hardcore games or producing the next great animated short, but its three combinations were more than adequate for my entertainment and routine computing needs.
Editor’s note: Dell offers two higher-priced models that we did not review: One has an Intel Core i3-4020Y processor, 4GB of memory, and a 128GB SSD. It’s priced at $800. The other has an Intel Core i5-4210Y processor, 4GB of memory, and 128GB of storage that goes for $850.
Windows Explorer (AKA File Explorer) offers a Navigation Bar on the left to help you select folders. Mary Hall asked how to customize it.
The Explorer Navigation Bar provides a map to the drives and folders on or accessible to your computer. Two of the sections, Favorites and Libraries, are easily configurable. The other sections are not configurable for a good reason. If you want to add a drive to the Navigation Bar, you need to add that drive from your PC (which adds it to the Navigation Bar automatically).
A quick note on the name: Microsoft has called its file manager Windows Explorer since Windows 95. With Windows 8, they renamed it File Explorer—a good change in my opinion. For this article, I’ll just call it Explorer.
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
The very name Favorites suggests that the top section of the Navigation Bar should be configurable. After all, you want your favorites, not Microsoft’s. Here’s how to change that:
To remove a folder from Favorites, right-click it in the Navigation Bar and select Remove. This doesn’t delete the folder; it just removes it from Favorites.
To add a folder to Favorites, drag the folder to the Favorites section.
To change the order of your Favorites, drag and drop.
Things get more complicated in the Libraries section. Libraries provide a way to group your data files into categories such as Documents and Pictures. Windows 7 users will find Libraries right below Favorites.
But if you’re using Windows 8, you won’t find it at all until you’ve changed a setting. In File Explorer, click the View tab. Click the Navigation pane pull-down menu at the left edge of the ribbon, and select Show libraries.
The Libraries section will appear between the This PC and Network sections.
To add other folders to an existing library, right-click the folder and select Include in library and your desired library. This won’t work for folders already in a library.
To remove a folder from a library, right-click the folder in the Library section of the navigation pane and select Remove location from library.
To create a library, click Libraries in the Navigation Bar. In Windows 7, click New library in the toolbar near the top of the window. In Windows 8, click the Home tab, then select New item>Library.
In either version, give the new library a name. You can then add folders as explained previously.
To delete a library, right-click it in the navigation pane and select Delete.
A new build of Windows 10 preview is available for download, Microsoft announced Friday morning. Now the world (those who've signed up for the preview, that is) can sample what analysts and journalists previewed on Wednesday.
The build will download automatically for Windows Insiders overnight, or you can get it now by going to PC Settings > Update and recovery > Preview builds and clicking the Check Now button. If you need to start from the very beginning—in other words, you’ve never installed Windows 10 at all—check out our tutorial on how to install Windows 10 from scratch. You can also obtain the ISO for a clean install or virtual machine download here.
In his blog post, Microsoft’s Gabriel Aul warned that not everything Microsoft talked about earlier this week would be available.
“Some of the new features that Joe demoed on Wednesday will be available for our Windows Insiders starting today with our newest build – 9926,” Aul wrote. “However, not everything you saw on Wednesday is included in this new build. Much is still in-progress and we’re getting it out to you as fast as we can – so you can try it out and give us feedback. Over the course of the next few builds, you will see us refine Windows 10 and continue to improve the experiences as well as quality and stability.”
What Microsoft showed off in Redmond was Build 9924, which we played with as part of our preview. In a nutshell, here’s what you should expect in the new 9926 build:
Cortana: Microsoft’s digital assistant has been ported over from Windows Phone, and makes an appearance in Windows 10. We think that Cortana should interact with your Windows Phone, sending reminders to your desktop and taking over as a general search interface, to boot.
Notifications: The Cortana reminders should show up in your Action Center, the little icon in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen. Expect to see a lot more information there now that Cortana has been enabled!
Continuum: The new build should offer to put your Surface in tablet mode when undocked (or any other 2-in-1 that has the preview installed).
Full-page Start menu: If you’d like, you can expand the new Start menu into a full-screen Start page that looks a lot like the way Windows 8 set things up (but with icons still on the lefthand bar)
New Windows Store app: “It includes a new visual design which will be common across PCs, tablets, phones and the web. It works well within a window and can be updated independently from the OS (this matters because it allows for more frequent updates),” Aul writes.
New Xbox App: The new app was demoed for us in Redmond. Basically, expect a lot more detail about the games you and your friends are playing.
New Photos and Maps apps: These are universal apps, and will be common to Windows Phone as well. We took at some of these last week, too.
Mark Hachman
Other updates include the much-requested support for Persian calendars, as well as a progress bar when downloading future builds, so you’ll know just how far you have to go.
We’re downloading it now—and you can too! Please use the comment section below to report your experiences. Thanks!
During Wednesday morning’s Windows 10 preview event in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft executives made their strongest pitch to date in favor of a somewhat different interpretation of cross-platform functionality than Windows 8 and 8.1 delivered.
But is the company’s vision for Windows 10 clear enough to be encapsulated in a single phrase or image that people can rally behind—a vision as clear as Apple successfully conjures for its products and platforms? That’s the essence of the question I put to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during a news conference following the public webcast session.
At least at first, Nadella’s answer suggested he believed Microsoft didn’t need to articulate such a message, especially now that the company plans to offer Windows 10 as an upgrade to Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 users free of charge for the first year.
“I think, for us, the fact that a billion-and-a-half users use Windows is incredible,” the CEO’s response began. “And we want to be able to serve that base and grow that base with the innovation. To me, the brand is a reflection of the innovation that people love. And that’s what I want us to be focused on.”
Nadella went on to say he didn’t want Microsoft to be aiming for targets set by competitors. Rather, he feels Microsoft can attain genuine love from its customers (“love” is a word he invoked several times Wednesday) by demonstrating a continued series of product innovations.
Manufacturers and producers in various markets arguably do not need to be loved to be successful. But products often do, and when they are—as was the case with the Volkswagen Beetle, Starbucks Coffee, and the Apple iPhone—they change their product categories, usually for the better.
While Nadella addressed the question of the public perception of Microsoft, including against Apple as a company, the question posed to him was actually one about Windows 10. Some products that offer a free charter year of service come to be appreciated for that fact, but not necessarily loved. And in a market increasingly defined by a product that is loved (what’s more, that runs a special version of Office for tablets), Windows 10 needs a value proposition for why customers should break their engagements.
Executive Vice President for Operating Systems Terry Myerson followed up Nadella’s comments by advancing a potential catch-phrase for Windows 10: “a more personal computer.” Among his company’s aims, Myerson said, was to make Windows more approachable and more natural to users.
“So we kind of know what we stand for; we know what we are pursuing,” said Myerson. “And we think it’s worthy of the dedication we put into it.”
During his earlier speech, Nadella cited one of Windows 10’s key “strategy points” as the concept of Windows-as-a-service. It’s a way of gently introducing the fact that customers who take Nadella up on his offer of free service to upgraders for one year, will officially be Windows subscribers after that year.
“It’s a pretty profound change,” said the CEO. “It’s not just simple mechanics, although there are big changes in terms of our development methodology, our deployment policy, our servicing. It’s much more fundamental than that. For us, it is about aligning our goals of successful Windows with customers and their experience and engagement with Windows. That’s what Windows-as-a-service means.”
Bob O’Donnell, chief analyst with Technalysis Research, said after the keynote session concluded that he was impressed with Microsoft’s ability to convey a convincing message in favor of the new operating system. O’Donnell believes there will be something in Wednesday’s message that speaks to users’ basic needs, the simple return of the Start Menu being the most obvious. But the inclusion of Cortana, the voice-driven personal assistant from Windows Phone, he feels will speak to people who have difficulty getting their Windows to do everyday tasks, like find certain groups of pictures from their media libraries.
“All those things together creates a much smarter experience for people,” said O’Donnell, “and I think it makes them rethink how they use their PC.”
The convergence of all these changes, O’Donnell predicts, presents a compelling enough value proposition for existing PC owners to upgrade from Windows 7, or perhaps even older systems. However, he added, “the challenge that remains—and I’m still concerned—is, I don’t think this changes the needle on mobile phones. But the PC and tablet story is very strong, and the fact that it’s all free, I think, is just going to encourage doing additional feature updates.”
Windows Phone is dead. Long live Windows 10. And right now, there’s not that much else to get excited about aside from new flagship phones, which Microsoft execs promised will debut this fall.
If Windows 10 is an iterative upgrade to Windows 8, then Windows 10 for phones feels even more so. I think the best way to view Windows 10’s direction, both in mobile devices as well as the desktop, is not so much straight ahead, but laterally: closer together, with each Windows device becoming a more cohesive part of the whole.
But that leaves what we’ve seen of Windows 10 a bit bland by comparison, if you’re looking for new features.
“As Terry [Myerson] mentioned, during the time that Windows 10 rolls out, we’re going to have a new category of devices, including new flagship devices,” Ifi Majid, head of experiences marketing for Microsoft’s Devices Group, said in a group interview. “So we’re really excited about that. Watch this space.”
Mark Hachman
The mobile version of Maps pulls in data from third-party sources, such as Yelp.
Why this matters: Microsoft faces a bit of a challenge here that it seems to be addressing head on. In the recent past, Microsoft embraced the limitations of individual platforms, designing apps optimized for each one. This seems to be a design strategy that Microsoft is discarding in favor of universal apps that simply reorient and “flow” into the different size constraints of various phones, tablets, and PCs.
Beyond the keynote—in which Joe Belfiore showed off a nicely organized array of Windows 10 live tiles—Microsoft demonstrated just a few of its new Windows 10 for phones features in a breakout session on Wednesday afternoon. And, really, Microsoft didn’t show off the OS itself, but what it was working towards in the individual Maps, Skype and messaging, Photos, and Outlook apps. At least the Insider program will be able to take advantage of the new Windows 10 OS for phones in February; a final release date is unknown.
Mark Hachman
The new universal Maps app takes the best of Windows 10’s Bing Maps and takes that into the mobile space.
Maps
Unity, for example, is the name of the game with the new Windows 10 Maps app, which will be the same for all Windows devices, according to Microsoft executives. Bing Maps will be plundered for its rich search results, Streetside views, and 3D imagery, and combined with navigation features. With a tap on a location, users can see the aerial view or the surrounding traffic. Rich search results are pre-populated with common search terms (e.g., “coffee”) and search results yield Yelp reviews and the ability to book reservations via OpenTable.
Mark Hachman
In the new Messages app, Skype and SMS are treated equally.
Messaging and Skype
Phone calls, SMS messages, Skype messages, and Skype calls all somewhat overlap. With Windows 10, Microsoft hopes to make a bit more sense out of the rats’ nest of these redundant communications.
While Microsoft showed a new dialing hub, messaging seems to be where the focus lies. Sure, the user interface is a bit different, but the point seems to be that SMS and Skype messages have the same weight, and appear in the same conversation. Users can also quickly exit a message thread and call the person for a more direct followup. (The related People app will allow you to save a preferred method of communication—email, text, WhatsApp, etc.—for each contact.) Although you can dictate messages via Cortana, you can’t send the short audio snippets that Apple touts so highly with iOS.
Mark Hachman
The new Windows 10 Photos app allows you to scrub through video.
Photos
Although we were briefed the night before on the new Lumia Camera app, Sami Niemi, the man overseeing Microsoft’s photography experience, had a new tidbit of news: all Windows 10 devices will receive then new Lumia Camera app.
Aside from that, the new Photos app will also traverse phones and PCs as a universal app, aggregating all the content it finds in new "Collections." One nice addition: The ability to scrub through a video clip, so you can see what part of a movie you’re in without having to guess, begin playing, recognize you’re in the wrong section of the movie, and try again.
Mark Hachman
The new Outlook app.
Outlook/Mail
It’s not certain, but it appears the dozen or so Outlook and Mail experiences on the Web and within apps will be unified. How, however, isn’t quite clear.
On phones, Outlook will also call Word—not overtly, with a splash screen, but behind the scenes—to render Word attachments that are included in emails. Interestingly, this was referred to as “universal Word,” an interesting name. Remember, we still haven’t really seen Microsoft launch a touch-based version of Office yet.
Email can be either deleted or flagged by swiping it left or right, respectively, executives said.
Again, the theme of the “phones” portion of the event on Wednesday seemed to be less about Windows 10 itself than universal apps. We’d expect to hear more at Microsoft’s BUILD conference this April.
Miguel owns a Windows 8 laptop, upgraded to 8.1. But "the touch screen…began to fail sometimes, until it failed completely."
First things first: If you haven't done so already, reboot. Yes, it's obvious, but so many people don't think about it, and it fixes so much.
But it doesn't fix everything. So if the problem remains, follow the suggestions below. I'm assuming your PC is running Windows 8 or 8.1.
[Have a tech question? Ask PCWorld Contributing Editor Lincoln Spector. Send your query to answer@pcworld.com.]
Grease and dirt can confuse or block the screen's sensors, so clean the screen.
If you're still having problems, use Windows 8's Calibration tool. Go to the Search Charm and type calibrate. Select Calibrate the screen for pen or touch input. If the Reset button isn't grayed out, click it. Otherwise, click Calibrate and see if the resulting program works.
Still having problems? Time to try reinstalling drivers. At the Search charm, type device manager and select Device Manager. Expand the Human Interface Devices section. Find the touchscreen; it's probably called HID-compliant touch screen. Right-click it.
If the pop-up menu says "Enable," there's your problem. Click it.
Otherwise, select Update Driver Software.
For the location, try C:\ for a full search of your hard drive, making sure Include subfolders is selected.
If that fails, try again. But this time, select Update Driver Software, then Search automatically for updated driver software.
And if that fails, right-click the touchscreen again, select Uninstall, and confirm. Then reboot. This will automatically reinstall the touchscreen driver that came with the computer.
Still no luck? Go to the manufacturer's website and see if there's an updated driver there. But make sure it's for your model.
It's possible that your driver is just fine, but another setting in Device Manager could be blocking your touchscreen. Back in Device Manager's Human Interface Device section, right-click USB Input Device. (If you find more than one of these, try each one.) Select Properties. Click the Power Management tab. Uncheck Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power.
That might solve your problem, but at a cost. Your computer will use more power, shortening battery life.
If none of these pan out, it's probably a hardware problem. Bring it into a shop to have it fixed.
Of late I’ve begun thinking of Windows 10 as an iterative improvement over Windows 8.1, and what I saw at Microsoft’s Windows 10 event—Cortana integration, notifications, and the Continuum interface—didn’t change my mind.
That’s not a knock on Microsoft’s new OS at all. What the company has included feels like a very natural integration of new features. But the unexpected addition, the Spartan browser, won’t appear in the Build 9924 that should arrive on our PCs in a week’s time, Microsoft said.
The bottom line? These new features simply make sense. And in the 15 minutes or so I spent with the new build at the event—hey, there was a lot to see!—I couldn’t really find any downside to the new additions, save one I’ve noted before.
Mark Hachman
Cortana is ready for business.
Why this matters: The most important statement of Microsoft’s two-hour presentation was spoken by chief executive Satya Nadella: “We are building services everywhere, but when it comes to Windows we are not building apps, we are harmonizing experiences,” he said. The cross-pollination of Office on iOS and Android helps convince users to build their businesses on Windows. But deploying Cortana across phones and PCs helps tie that hardware together as Windows devices.
Mark Hachman
The Cortana icon appears at the top of the search box.
Type or say what you want
Cortana, notifications, search: Those three items encompass the majority of the feature updates for the new build, but trying to separate them from one another doesn’t make sense—they go hand in hand.
Cortana, Microsoft’s digital assistant, appears as a small search box at the bottom of the Desktop screen (or as a small circle icon, in touch mode), replacing the search bar and icon that appeared in earlier builds. Tap it, and Microsoft’s digital assistant appears. But you don’t even have to do that: Active listening can be turned on, so you can simply say the trigger phrase “Hey Cortana!” and begin your query. (It also appears that Cortana is quite loyal: The assistant responded naturally to a Microsoft employee, but repeatedly failed to respond when I said the same phrase.)
Mark Hachman
Cortana can now search for a wide variety of different file types.
As expected in our preview story, Cortana is now the search interface for Windows 10 as well as a digital assistant. What this means is simple enough: Either type or say your query, and Cortana will respond appropriately. Search for “sales,” and Windows 10 will return your documents with “sales” in the title. Cortana appears to be able to search for a variety of files, from documents to settings to music, among others.
And, of course, Cortana can respond intelligently as well. Ask her for the answer to a fact, and she’ll respond. Request a joke, and she’ll tell you one. As I hoped, Cortana works across Windows Phone and Windows 10, so you can set reminders on your phone and they'll show up on your PC. I didn’t try some of Cortana’s map-related features, such as asking for the locations of nearby sushi restaurants. But you can set a reminder to call your mother when you get home.
Mark Hachman
Location-based reminders now roam across Windows and what used to be called Windows Phone.
All of those notifications pop up in the Action Center, at the right side of the screen. As on Windows Phone, Windows organizes them under different headings to make them easier to find.
About the only criticisms I can levy at Windows 10’s implementation of Cortana is that I find it doubtful that anyone’s going to talk to Cortana except in the privacy of their own home. (“Hey Cortana, how do I get rid of a wart?”) And the notification I saw might get lost way down in the right corner of a large display. Otherwise, however, I think you’ll be quite happy.
Mark Hachman
A long list of reminders now includes Cortana, in the Action Center.
Continuum
I’m going to need a bit of time to play around with Continuum, as what I saw wasn’t quite what I expected. The premise of Continuum is that you’re presented with a tablet-friendly environment when a tablet or two-in-one is undocked, and a Desktop environment otherwise.
This should happen automatically, but there’s also a small button at the bottom of the Action Center to put the screen into tablet mode. What happens then seems to be a combination of things: apps that feature larger touch-friendly icons, and a more easily accessible way to snap apps from one side of the screen to the other. One small feature that’s been added is to make apps windowed and swipeable. In other words, you can close the window with the 'X' in the corner, or swipe it away with a vertical swipe.
Still, what I expected was more like...
A full-page Start menu, er, screen, er, menu
Honestly, this feels like Microsoft is just trolling us. After eliminating the Start page in favor of a Start menu that combines a Windows 7 icon list with Windows 8-style live tiles, now you can blow that Start menu up to a full screen to become a Start...page? Menu? Oh, whatever. If you find it useful, terrific. Otherwise, it’s good for a giggle.
Mark Hachman
In our limited time we didn’t go searching through all the settings menus to see what was new, although some of the icons in the Control Panel appear slightly different, for example.
Build 9924 of Windows 10 mostly adds Cortana and notifications, and that’s plenty for an interim release. We look forward to trying it and telling you all about it.
A critical vulnerability in popular software development collaboration products by Atlassian allows attackers to compromise servers.
The vulnerability affects Atlassian Confluence, a wiki-like collaboration platform for software development teams; Bamboo, a software build and testing platform; FishEye, a code-tracking system for centralizing different repositories; and Crucible, a collaborative peer code review framework.
Attackers can exploit the vulnerability to execute arbitrary Java code on systems that use the affected frameworks, as long as they can access their Web interfaces, the company said in security advisories published Wednesday. To exploit Confluence, the attacker also needs to have access to an account on the platform.
The impact of the vulnerability depends on what data is stored on those systems and what the malicious Java code is designed to do.
Atlassian released patches for all of the affected products. Confluence users are advised to apply the webwork-2.1.5-atlassian-3.jar patch, Bamboo users should apply the freemarker-2.3.16-atlassian-34.jar patch, while FishEye and Crucible users should upgrade to the newly released 3.5.5 or 3.6.2 versions.
If the affected products are not directly accessible from the Internet or other untrusted networks, the risk of compromise is reduced because the attacker would first have to gain access to the same network as the servers hosting them. Companies whose installations need to be accessible from the Internet can block requests in their firewalls that match specific regular expressions released by Atlassian.
Atlassian has over 35,000 customers worldwide, including large Internet and software development companies like Facebook, Twitter, Hulu, eBay, LinkedIn, Twitter, Netflix, Adobe Systems, Microsoft and Cisco Systems.
“Cortana? Hey, Cortana? Remind me to...” Damn. She’s gone. And that’s basically the Cortana experience in Build 9926 of Windows 10. Microsoft’s digital assistant has migrated to the desktop, but she’s just not as reliable as her Windows Phone iteration.
After Microsoft made Build 9926 available to the public on Friday morning, I downloaded it using my existing Windows 10 preview build. The download was relatively quick, but if you grab it yourself, make sure you have your existing Windows build updated before you install the new build. If you don’t, you may receive a “this update failed to install” error.
We already tried out Build 9924 in Redmond, and we’ll have a more in-depth hands-on of 9926 a bit later. But for now we want to focus on Cortana, the flagship addition to Windows.
So far, she’s a bit flaky.
Mark Hachman
Cortana’s notebook is still present, with all of your interests and topics.
Initially, Cortana appears just as a search bar in the bottom left of the screen, alongside her circular icon. Tap it, and Cortana will ask you to enable her. (You’ll need to begin the process by tapping the search bar, then enabling Cortana. I first tried to turn Microsoft’s digital assistant on via the settings menu, but that doesn’t work.)
Cortana will want to access your calendar appointments, contacts, and location, among other things—pretty par for the course, especially if you’ve used Cortana on a Windows Phone. You can also tell Cortana what to call you, including your name, “Master,” “Khahleesi,” or anything else.
Mark Hachman
The Cortana settings.
Hello, Cortana? You seem distracted
Once enabled, you can control Cortana via the Windows 10 Settings menu. Make sure you do this, as this is the only way to turn on Cortana’s active listening feature.
With that turned on, you can say “Hey Cortana” to activate Microsoft’s digital assistant. Note that this feature will eventually arrive on Windows Phone as part of a feature that will accompany the Denim update. For now, however, it’s pretty much exclusive to the PC.
Unfortunately, Cortana’s a busy virtual woman—attracting her attention via spoken commands seems to work only intermittently. If you give Cortana a few moments, saying “Hey Cortana” usually prods her into action. But her attention will wander quickly, so if you don’t say what you want almost immediately, she’ll begin “thinking” about your request.
Lost in her thoughts, she won’t respond for a few seconds. Alternatively, she’ll simply ignore you. My natural instinct was to raise my voice and begin insistently saying “Hey Cortana” over and over again—just as my children do when they want my attention. But that also failed to provoke a response.
I had better luck tapping the microphone icon. When I did, I could begin asking Cortana to help me out. Even then, a lengthy query such as “Who will win, the New England Patriots or the Seattle Seahawks?” (a query that works fine on Windows Phone) failed to work. Cortana just gave up after about six words or so. Oddly, sometimes you’ll see your query appear as words in the text box, as you speak them. Other times, Cortana will quietly chew over your request without indicating that she’s processed it.
One other note: To launch another Cortana query, you have to shift focus away from Cortana by tapping another area of the screen or by doing something else.
Cortana really likes Bing
On Windows Phone, you can order Cortana to do a number of things:
Call or text a contact
Check your calendar or create a calendar entry
Set a time, place, or person-based reminder
Take a note
Set an alarm
Navigate to a place, or search an area for specific locations or places
Ask about the weather
Solve a math problem
Ask who win an NFL football game
Ask about the stock markets
Ask a general fact-based query, such as “What is the tallest building in the world?”
But on Windows 10, only a subset of these are enabled. Asking general fact-based queries worked fine: Cortana reported her answer in the Cortana box if she “knew” the answer, such as details on the tallest building in the world. PC Cortana can also set reminders as well as she can on Windows Phone; report the current stock market conditions; and tell you the weather, both at your current location and elsewhere around the world. (Reminders appear as popups in your Action Center notifications.)
Mark Hachman
An all-too common response, unfortunately.
However, for all of the other Cortana staples—note-taking, setting a calendar appointment, navigating to a location, and the rest—I got a pop-up error message stating, “I'm sorry, I can’t do this for you right now. Check back again after future updates.”
Cortana will also take requests and plug them in as Bing search queries. With math problems, that works just fine. But for navigation questions, you’ll be forced to manually bring up the new Maps application and perform the search yourself.
Mark Hachman
Note that search queries carry the Cortana icon, but they’re really only accessible by entering a search term in the search box. Here I searched for “sales.” But if I asked Cortana about this, the search wouldn’t work.
Note that Cortana also governs local search, but she can’t yet search for documents or files.
Windows Phone’s Cortana doesn’t talk to Windows 10’s Cortana
Unfortunately, like squabbling sisters, Windows 10 Cortana doesn’t talk to her counterpart on Windows Phone, even though I was signed in to the same Microsoft account. I tried setting reminders on a Lumia Icon with the latest Windows Phone 8.1 Update, and they wouldn’t pop up on my Windows 10 machine, and vice versa. Microsoft really needs one Cortana to talk to the other if it’s to knit its Windows ecosystems more closely together.
Mark Hachman
General fact-based queries work well with Windows 10’s Cortana.
For now, if you really want the full Cortana experience, stick to Windows Phone. It seems obvious (right?) that Cortana on Windows Phone and the PC will eventually have the same functionality, and exchange information back and forth. But while the new Build 9926 is stable enough in general, Cortana is like Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady: She’s going to need some refinement before she can enter polite society.
The artificial wall between Xbox players and PC gamers is coming down with Microsoft's upcoming Windows 10, which allows streaming of Xbox One games to PCs and even lets gamers on the two disparate platforms play together.
The announcement was one of several made by Microsoft to show the company's commitment to PC gamers.
"We will treat gaming on Windows 10 with as much passion and energy as we have on the Xbox One," said Xbox One and Microsoft Studios chief Phil Spencer.
In addition to streaming games long confined to the Xbox One, Spencer showed off DirectX 12 on Windows 10 and announced a new game DVR feature that will be built into the new OS.
DX12 to cut power
DirectX 12 has long been expected as part of the new OS, and Spencer showed off how effective the API will be by showing an upcoming Futuremark demo. The demo ran DirectX 11 on one side, eventually bogging down to zero frames per second. Meanwhile, the DirectX 12 demo kept on trucking, as more and more objects were added to the screen. The good news for gamers is most modern GPUs on the market already support DirectX 12.
One surprising bit of news about DirectX 12 is its apparent power savings. Spencer said a game running on DirectX 12 would cut power consumption in half over DirectX 11. Microsoft said the savings would help tablet and phone gaming, but such drastic power savings, if true, should also improve gaming on a laptop.
The new Windows 10 Xbox app.
Spencer's real surprise, however, is Microsoft's intention to allow PC gamers and Xbox One gamers to play together in certain games that support the feature. A few past cross-over attempts with PC and Xbox players never ended well, so here's hoping.
Spencer has actually long hinted at some cross-over potential. In an interview with Ausgamers.com in late 2013, he said Xbox and PC gamers in the same game "makes a lot of sense."
The first game to allow the cross-platform play will be Fable Legends later this year.
Dan Stapleton, a longtime games journalist and an executive editor at gaming web site IGN.com, said much of Microsoft's announcements concerning Xbox and PC gaming seemed to help the Xbox One more than PC gaming.
"Streaming games to your PC does make sense if you don't already have a capable gaming PC," explained Stapleton. "Much like the Wii U allows you to stream your games to your GamePad, or the PlayStation 4 allows you to stream games to your Vita while someone else uses the TV, Xbox One will now let you do that with a relatively low-powered PC, like a Surface," he said.
"It's not as useful as either of its competitors' options, though, since a PC is a much more expensive accessory than a $200 Vita or the included GamePad," Stapleton continued. "And again, it's more about adding functionality to your Xbox One than to your PC," he said.
As to the longtime rivalry between PC gamers and console gamers, Stapleton said Microsoft does have to tread carefully.
"Cross-platform gaming is actually a really good idea for the most part. It increases player communities and makes it easier to find a full game," he said. "The only real issue is that in certain games PC players have a huge advantage when using a mouse controller, but a game like Fable Legends shouldn't have that problem at all."
Stapleton did point out that Microsoft's previous attempt at unifying Xbox and PCs, called Games for Windows Live, went down in flames. He hoped this won't be a repeat of that.
Spencer also announced upcoming support for the streaming of Xbox One games to any Windows 10 PC or tablet.
Windows 10's other gaming features will also include a game DVR mode similar to Nvidia's ShadowPlay, which will allow a player to hit Windows-G and record the last 30 seconds of game play.
The game DVR mode is a nod toward the increasingly social aspect of gaming. Microsoft said you'll be able to take those 30-second moments of epic gaming and be able to share them using the included Xbox App that will be bundled into Windows 10 devices. The app will let you chat, post achievements, and start Skype calls between gamers.
The number of exploit kits on the Web dramatically decreased last year, but some have become more sophisticated and shifted their focus to software that is less frequently updated.
The end of 2013 was marked by the arrest in Russia of 12 suspected cybercriminals involved in the creation and distribution of Blackhole, the most widely used exploit kit at the time, including the attack tool’s main author who used the online alias Paunch.
Exploit kits are malicious Web applications that contain exploits for vulnerabilities in Web browsers and browser plug-ins, like Java, Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Silverlight. Users get redirected from compromised websites or malicious advertisements to exploit kit landing pages, which then check the version of their browser and plug-ins and launch the appropriate exploits. If successful, the exploits install malware on users’ computers.
No other exploit kit reached the prevalence of Blackhole after its demise, according to security researchers from Cisco Systems. In fact, the number of unique hits from exploit kits decreased by 88 percent between May and November 2014, they said in the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report released Tuesday.
“Since [the] takedown of Paunch and Blackhole, more exploit kit users appear to be taking care to invest in kits known to be technically sophisticated in terms of their ability to evade detection,” the Cisco researchers said.
One exploit kit called Angler is notable for advances in this area. Since September, the attack tool no longer drops executable files on compromised systems following successful exploitation. Instead, it injects malicious code directly into the browser process, making it harder for antivirus programs to detect the infection.
Another exploit kit-related trend is a decline in their targeting of Java vulnerabilities. Java exploits remain one of the top attack vectors on the Web, but their use has been on a steady decline for over a year, according to Cisco’s data. They are now almost on par with Flash Player exploits.
This decrease was likely caused by security improvements made by Oracle and browser vendors. Modern versions of Java do not execute unsigned code without user interaction and have automatic updates. Some browsers also automatically block vulnerable versions of Java.
“Online criminals have discovered easier targets and have turned their attention to non-Java vectors that deliver higher return on investment,” the Cisco researchers said. “For example, many users fail to update Adobe Flash and PDF readers or browsers regularly, providing criminals with a wider range of both old and new vulnerabilities to exploit.”
Another browser plug-in that many users apparently fail to patch is Microsoft Silverlight. The volume of attacks that exploit vulnerabilities in Silverlight has increased by almost 230 percent since December 2012.
“Silverlight attacks, while still very low in number compared to more established vectors, are on the rise—especially since August,” the Cisco researchers said.
A greater adoption of automatic updates—especially by organizations, which typically disable such features to prevent possible failures and incompatibility—would be a solution to the outdated software problem.
However, while some desktop software vendors offer automatic updates, manufacturers of specialized hardware appliances and embedded devices are lagging behind.
The critical Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL that was disclosed in April last year highlighted the difficulties that users have in deploying patches for non-PC software.
Many Web servers and browsers that rely on OpenSSL for secure encrypted communications were patched relatively quickly, but OpenSSL is also used by mobile phones, networking gear, hardware security appliances and a wide variety of other devices that are not easy to update.
“Cisco Security Research used scanning engines to examine devices connected to the Internet and using OpenSSL,” the Cisco researchers said in the report. “The team determined that 56 percent of devices surveyed used versions of OpenSSL that were more than 50 months old. This means that despite the publicity given to Heartbleed, the security flaw in the handling of Transport Layer Security (TLS) discovered in 2014, and the urgent need to upgrade to the latest version of OpenSSL software to avoid such vulnerabilities, organizations are failing to ensure that they are running the latest versions.”
Oracle released new security updates for Java to fix 19 vulnerabilities and disable default support for SSL 3.0, an outdated version of the secure communications protocol that is vulnerable to attacks.
The updates were part of Oracle’s quarterly Critical Patch Update, released Tuesday, which fixes 169 security issues across hundreds of products.
Fourteen of the 19 vulnerabilities fixed in Java affect client deployments and can be exploited from Web pages through malicious Java applets or Java Web Start applications. Four of them have the maximum severity score 10 in the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and two others come close, at 9.3, meaning they can lead to a full system compromise.
“The threats associated with sandbox bypass vulnerabilities in this CPU [Oracle Critical Patch Update] range from reading and writing local data to complete ‘operating system takeover including arbitrary code execution’,” said John Matthew Holt, the CTO of Java application security firm Waratek, via email. “Complete OS takeover vulnerabilities are the worst possible kind because attackers can use these vulnerabilities to not just steal sensitive or confidential data, but to install malware, steal passwords, assume a user’s identity, delete files, and use the compromised machine as a pivot point to launch deeper attacks to other lateral machines within the same local area network.”
The number of attacks that exploit Java vulnerabilities to install malware on computers has been on a steady decline over the past year, but Java exploits remain one of the top attack vectors against Web users, according to a report released Tuesday by Cisco Systems.
Another security-related change in the new Java updates is the deactivation of the SSL 3.0 protocol by default in response to the POODLE vulnerability discovered in October. The flaw allows man-in-the-middle attackers to decrypt sensitive information like authentication cookies from a connection encrypted with SSL 3.0.
What makes POODLE particularly dangerous is that even if a connection uses TLS 1.0, 1.1 or 1.2, an attacker can force a downgrade to SSL 3.0 if both the client and server support the aging protocol.
The change in Java comes as major browser vendors are taking similar actions in regard to support for SSL 3.0.
“If SSLv3 is absolutely required, the protocol can be reactivated by removing ‘SSLv3’ from the jdk.tls.disabledAlgorithms property in the java.security file or by dynamically setting this Security property to ‘true’ before JSSE is initialized,” Oracle said in the new Java release notes.
The newly patched Java versions are 5.0u81, 6u91, 7u75/7u76 and 8u31, but the Java 5 and 6 updates are only available to Oracle customers with long term support contracts.
This is also the last public security update for Java 7. Users who have the automatic update feature turned on will be migrated to Java 8. Only users with long term support contracts will be able to download future Java 7 security fixes.
Bill Gates 
Image: Michael Homnick 
Image: Michael Homnick 
Image: Michael Homnick 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Robert Cardin 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
Mark Hachman 
PCWorld 