I didn’t know this was a thing, but apparently Microsoft offers a Windows tune-up application in the vein of things like CCleaner and similar tools. One of the things it does is protect users from applications that try and change default settings, and it seems the application takes this matter very seriously.

Microsoft may be taking a bit of liberty with that last bit. It looks like the PC Manager feels your PC is broken and needs repair if you changed your default search engine from Bing.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

Setting aside just how defeatist it feels that the creator of Windows needs to make an application to keep Windows from falling over, I find it almost endearing just how hard Microsoft is trying to get users to choose Bing.

If you’ve ever seen the Swedish film Fucking Åmål, it’s also very likely you remember the gut-wrenching, maximally cringe-inducing birthday party for main character Agnes where nobody shows up, while her mother, oblivious to just how deeply disliked Agnes is by her classmates, tries desperately to assure her daughter that people will show up. Director Lukas Moodysson takes no prisoners and drags out the scene to really maximise just how uncomfortably sad the whole thing is.

It’s incredibly hard to watch.

Well, Agnes is Bing, Microsoft is its mother, and nobody shows up to Bing’s birthday party either.

Source: www.darkreading.com – Author: Elizabeth Montalbano, Contributing Writer Source: Alex Brylov via Shutterstock Following a recently documented Black Basta ransomware vishing campaign, Microsoft Threat Intelligence acknowledged May 15 that a financially motivated threat actor tracked as Storm-1811 since mid-April has been following the playbook. The threat group is using a socially engineered campaign to trick […]

La entrada Windows Quick Assist Anchors Black Basta Ransomware Gambit – Source: www.darkreading.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: www.darkreading.com – Author: Tara Seals, Managing Editor, News, Dark Reading Source: Wim Wiskerke via Alamy Stock Photo A trio of zero-days headline Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday update, which offers a modest spring bouquet of 59 CVEs in total (just a third of last month’s downpour of patches for admins to deal with). But at […]

La entrada Microsoft Windows DWM Zero-Day Poised for Mass Exploit – Source: www.darkreading.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

Source: securelist.com – Author: Boris Larin, Mert Degirmenci Software Software 14 May 2024 minute read In early April 2024, we decided to take a closer look at the Windows DWM Core Library Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability CVE-2023-36033, which was previously discovered as a zero-day exploited in the wild. While searching for samples related to this […]

La entrada QakBot attacks with Windows zero-day (CVE-2024-30051) – Source: securelist.com se publicó primero en CISO2CISO.COM & CYBER SECURITY GROUP.

As Nintendo Switch unlocks and homebrew software develops, people are inclined to explore the possibilities and whether or not they actually provide a good experience. Our new prime example seems to be a full install of Windows 11 Arm on the Switch. As noted by @PatRyk on Twitter, who actually set this up, the experience is pretty grueling! The initial installation took three hours, and even basic system tasks were unresponsive.

↫ Christopher Harper at Tom’s Hardware

Silly, sure, but efforts like these all contribute to emulation efforts, which will eventually be important once Nintendo drops support for this machine and they become increasingly harder to get. Give it a decade or so and we’ll need the Switch emulators to keep playing Switch games.

The grabber in Windows 3.1 was improved to save and restore the index register as well, but it does not attempt to restore the flip-flop state, which is significant. The problem with the VGA emulation was that it erroneously applied the flip-flop state to reads from port 3C0h, and Windows 3.1 would save the wrong index register value… but only the second time through, because the flip-flop state was different at that point. That is to say, the Windows 3.1 standard mode grabber read from port 3C0h to query the attribute controller index register state, but the emulation returned the currently selected data register contents instead.

And then, when restoring the attribute controller index register the next time around, the register would be restored to the wrong value which didn’t have bit 5 set, causing the screen to go blank.

↫ Michal Necasek

It’s not every day that you learn how an aspect of the workings of VGA causes a blank screen under very specific circumstances when running Windows 3.1 in Standard mode under emulation, and that this specific aspect of the workings of VGA was implemented to maintain backwards compatibility with EGA.

Absolutely bonkers.

Windows 11 supports a variety of ARM processors from Qualcomm. According to the official documentation, you need a computer with the Snapdragon 850 processor inside or newer to run the current operating system officially. However, customers with PCs powered by the Snapdragon 835, the original Windows on ARM chip from 2016, can bypass hardware requirements and install Windows 11 at their own risk. Sadly, those days will be ending soon.

Starting with Windows 11 version 24H2, Microsoft’s operating system requires ARM v8.1 to run. An attempt to boot it from a device with an ARM v8.0-based processor results in system crashes. For reference, the Snapdragon 835 from 2016 is a chip with Kryo 280 cores, which are derivative of ARM’s Cortex-A73 cores.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

I’m sure all three Windows on ARM users are devastated.

That’s right: it’s PowerPC, the most unloved of the architectures CE ever ran on — in fact, this is the first PowerPC Windows CE device I’ve ever found, and I’m the self-described biggest pro-PowerPC bigot in the world. Here’s an unusual form factor Windows CE device, running on the operating system’s least used CPU, from a storied computer company near the end of its run, intended for medical applications, produced in very small numbers and cancelled within months.

What are we going to do with it? Well, what do you think we’re gonna do with it? We’re going to program it, so that we can finally have some software! And, of course, since this wacky thing was there at the bitter end, we’ll talk more about the last days of Data General and what happened next.

↫ Cameron Kaiser

I knew Windows CE supported PowerPC, but I never knew any PowerPC-based Windows CE devices ever actually shipped and made it to market. Only Windows CE 2.0 seems to have supported the architecture, and it seems to have been eliminated in 3.0 and 4.0, so it’s not surprising there weren’t many PowerPC Windows CE devices out there. The device that’s the subject of this article, too, only lasted on the market for a few months, so it’s definitely a rarity.

To support Zero Trust deployments trying to lock down devices to only access approved network destinations, we are announcing the development of Zero Trust DNS (ZTDNS) in a future version of Windows. ZTDNS was designed to be interoperable by using network protocols from open standards to satisfy Zero Trust requirements such as those found in OMB M-22-09 and NIST SP 800-207. ZTDNS will be helpful to any administrator trying to use domain names as a strong identifier of network traffic.

ZTDNS integrates the Windows DNS client and the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) to enable this domain-name-based lockdown. First, Windows is provisioned with a set of DoH or DoT capable Protective DNS servers; these are expected to only resolve allowed domain names. This provisioning may also contain a list of IP address subnets that should always be allowed (for endpoints without domain names), expected Protective DNS server certificate identities to properly validate the connection is to the expected server, or certificates to be used for client authentication.

↫ Tommy Jensen on the Microsoft blog

If you think I know nothing about programming – wait until you hear me talk about networking. I consider it to basically be arcane magic, and my knowledge doesn’t extend much beyond “plug in cable to make light blinky” and “unplug from power to fix light no blinky”. Network administrators are the real heroes in my eyes.

Anyway, what I do get from painfully reading this announcement over and over again until my eyes started bleeding is that ZTDNS will give network administrators more finegrained control over which DNS servers and domains are accessible, and perhaps more importantly, it will encrypt traffic between clients and the DNS server. I have no idea if this is unique, or if it even makes any sense to do so, but it seems like a good idea, especially for corporate and government networks.

I’m struggling here, y’all. Please help me out.

Enlarge (credit: Getty Images)

Translating human-readable domain names into numerical IP addresses has long been fraught with gaping security risks. After all, lookups are rarely end-to-end encrypted. The servers providing domain name lookups provide translations for virtually any IP address—even when they’re known to be malicious. And many end-user devices can easily be configured to stop using authorized lookup servers and instead use malicious ones.

Microsoft on Friday provided a peek at a comprehensive framework that aims to sort out the Domain Name System (DNS) mess so that it’s better locked down inside Windows networks. It’s called ZTDNS (zero trust DNS). Its two main features are (1) encrypted and cryptographically authenticated connections between end-user clients and DNS servers and (2) the ability for administrators to tightly restrict the domains these servers will resolve.

Clearing the minefield

One of the reasons DNS has been such a security minefield is that these two features can be mutually exclusive. Adding cryptographic authentication and encryption to DNS often obscures the visibility admins need to prevent user devices from connecting to malicious domains or detect anomalous behavior inside a network. As a result, DNS traffic is either sent in clear text or it's encrypted in a way that allows admins to decrypt it in transit through what is essentially an adversary-in-the-middle attack.

Read 12 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Well, this was a wild goose chase of a read. J. B. Crawford dove into the history of something I’ve never heard of – Microsoft At Work – and came away with a story that’ while clearer thanks to his research, is still frustratingly nebulous. I’m still not entirely sure what Microsoft At Work really was, but I think it had the goal of running Windows on communications devices like faxes, to make it easier to share and work on documents across various devices. Crawford did a lot of digging, and eventually settles on what he thinks might be a description of what MAW really consisted of.

I am being a bit dismissive for effect. MAW was more ambitious than just installing Windows on a grape. The effort included a unified communications protocol for the control of office machines, including printers, for which a whole Microsoft stack was envisioned. This built on top of the Windows Printing System, a difficult-to-search-for project that apparently predated MAW by a short time, enough so that Windows Printing System products were actually on the market when MAW was announced—MAW products were, we will learn, very much not.

[…]

MAW devices like the Ricoh IFS77 ran 16-bit Windows 3.1 with a new GUI intended to appear more modern while reducing resource requirements. Some reporters at the time noted that Microsoft was cagey about the supported architectures, I suspect they were waiting on ports to be completed. The fax machine was probably x86, though, as there’s little evidence MAW actually ran on anything else.

↫ J. B. Crawford

The ’90s were a wild time, especially as Microsoft, and this MAW project seems to have ’90s written all over it, but I’d still love to learn a lot more about this. I hope this article will bring out some former Microsoft execs or employees who can give us more details, and possibly even some code. I want to know how this works and what it did.

Microsoft is about to go even more hog-wild with “AI” in Windows, as it intends to start recording everything you do on your Windows computer so “AI” features can find stuff for you.

According to my sources, AI Explorer will run in the background and capture everything you do on your computer. It will document and triage everything it sees, no matter what apps or interfaces you’re looking at, and turn them into memories that you can recall at a later point.

For example, you can have a conversation with a friend in the WhatsApp app for Windows, and AI Explorer will record and remember the content that was on-screen and process it with AI for you to recall later. AI Explorer can also summarize conversations, emails, web pages, and general UI surfaces just by asking for it during or after the fact. 

I’m told that much of this experience is rendered on-device and does not reach out to the cloud to process information. This is important for privacy reasons, but also for performance reasons. To reduce latency, AI Explorer will rely on NPU silicon to process content that has been recorded. I also understand that users will be able to filter out specific apps from being recorded by the AI Explorer process, or disable AI Explorer entirely.

↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central

Is this really something people wan to devote constant resources and thus battery life to?Setting aside the privacy implications of something like this, do people really want to have a permanent record of everything they’ve done on their machine? Maybe I’m just the odd one out here, but nothing about this appeals to me in any way, shape, or form. In fact, it’s quite the opposite – something like this would make make me run for the hills, looking for an alternative to the operating system I’m using.

And the weasel words “much of this experience is rendered on-device” definitely did not go by unnoticed. This wording makes it very clear at least some data will be sent to Microsoft for processing, and over time, that amount will only increase. No data company has ever reduced the amount of data it captures, after all.

CISA warns organizations of a two-year-old Windows Print Spooler vulnerability being exploited in the wild.

The post CISA Warns of Windows Print Spooler Flaw After Microsoft Sees Russian Exploitation appeared first on SecurityWeek.

The maker of Tiny11, a third-party project that aims to make Windows 11 less bloated with unnecessary parts, released a new version of Tiny11 Builder, a special tool that lets you create a custom Windows 11 image tailored to your needs and preferences. The latest release makes it much easier to create a lightweight Windows 11 ISO without worrying about installing a system modified by unknown third parties.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

Perhaps you can make Windows 11 slightly more bearable with this. If there’s any interest from y’all, I could build my own debloated Windows 11 install and see if I can make this platform bearable for myself? Let me know in the comments.

Microsoft is on a roll with updating its app store on Windows 10 and 11. Following the recent release of performance upgrades and improved algorithms, the company announced big changes in how the web version of the Microsoft Store works. Now, every user can download app executables directly from the website using new “installers for web.”

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

Neat.

Microsoft is not done adding more odd stuff into its operating system. Following the not-so-great reception of new Start menu ads in one of the recent Beta builds, Microsoft is bringing even more ads, which, besides being slightly annoying, come at the cost of existing features. In build 22635.3500, the Sign Out button is now hidden behind a menu with a Microsoft 365 ad.

Microsoft calls the new thing “Account Manager.” In a nutshell, it is a flyout with your existing subscriptions, a Microsoft 365 upsell, and a few account-related notifications, like a prompt to add a backup phone number or enable OneDrive backups. There is now also a link to your Microsoft Account settings.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

The beatings will continue until moral improves.

In this week’s Windows 10 Build 19045.4353 announcement blog post, there was this little gem in the changelog.

This update starts the rolls out of account-related notifications for Microsoft accounts in Settings > Home. A Microsoft account connects Windows to your Microsoft apps. The account also backs up all your data and helps you to manage your subscriptions. You can also add extra security steps to keep you from being locked out of your account.

↫ Windows Insider Program Team

It’s worded a bit cryptically, but this means there will be banners in the Windows settings application pushing you to switch from using a local account to using an online Microsoft account. The latter aren’t exactly preferred by quite a few people – many of you belong to that group, I would presume – and Microsoft is doing whatever it can to get people to stop using local accounts.

Luckily, this banner ad is easily removable – if you close it, it won’t come back, and you can disable it by going to Privacy > General and toggling “Show me suggested content in the Settings app”. For now, of course – knowing how Microsoft is treating Windows users these days, these nag-ups will surely increase in both frequency and persistence as time goes on.

You’ve been warned.

Do you administer Windows Server machines, and were you surprised to find a Windows Copilot application on your servers, that neither you nor your users installed? Well, it turns out that Microsoft installed this application alongside an update to the Edge browser – but the company claims this is in error, and the application will be removed in a future update.

Updates to Edge browser version 123.0.2420.65, released on March 28, 2024 and later, might incorrectly install a new package (MSIX) called ‘Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows’ on Windows devices. Resulting from this, the Microsoft Copilot app might appear in the Installed apps in Settings menu.

It is important to note that the Microsoft chat provider for Copilot in Windows does not execute any code or process, and does not acquire, analyze, or transmit device or environment data in any capacity.

↫ Windows 11 known issues and notifications

The company claims this was an enablement package to prepare some Windows devices for the arrival of Copilot, and that it was unintentionally installed on devices. While it doesn’t mean Copilot was actually installed on your PC or server, it’s still a chilling reminder of who really controls your PC or server.

During my daily web crawl I encountered a very interesting gif that I haven’t seen in a long time. It was a hack of an unspecified version of Windows 95, which showed how to bypass the login screen with the help of the menu and printing dialog. However, after a brief check, I found a fair amount of people stating that “just hitting the cancel” button would do the same. Sharp-eyed viewers would notice that it was the very first action taken in the picture. In order to find out if the hack is real at all, I decided to reproduce it and document it for the good of the internet.

↫ David Polakovic

So this hack is actually a lot more involved than I thought it was going to be, and yet, it still feels utterly insane that operating systems were this easy to get into, passwords were this easy to decrypt, and security settings were this trivial to disable. Anyway, the gif is sort-of real, in that yes, you can ‘hack’ Windows 95’s login security through the printing and help subsystems.

Things were different back then, man. I vaguely remember that my high school used to lock us out of the desktop, File Explorer, the Control Panel, and so on, making it impossible for us to access DOS or the games built into Windows 9x. I don’t remember the exact things we used to do, but most of us were aware and used several different methods of bypassing the school lockdowns just to mess around. We never did anything malicious – this is pre-internet, and we just wanted to play some Solitaire or Pinball – but anybody with malicious intent surely could’ve.

Building on top of recent improvements like grouping recently installed apps and showing your frequently used apps, we are now trying out recommendations to help you discover great apps from the Microsoft Store under Recommended on the Start menu. This will appear only for Windows Insiders in the Beta Channel in the U.S. and will not apply to commercial devices (devices managed by organizations). This can be turned off by going to Settings > Personalization > Start and turning off the toggle for “Show recommendations for tips, app promotions, and more”. As a reminder, we regularly try out new experiences and concepts that may never get released with Windows Insiders to get feedback. Should you see this experience on the Start menu, let us know what you think. We are beginning to roll this out to a small set of Insiders in the Beta Channel at first.

↫ Amanda Langowski and Brandon LeBlanc

The Start menu, August 24, 1995 – April 12, 2024. You made it almost 30 years, buddy.

We are about 18 months away from the end of mainstream Windows 10 support, but Microsoft thinks it is time to start nagging warning Windows 10 users about the inevitable. Users on Reddit report spotting a new full-screen ad with a notification that Windows 10 is about to reach its end of life in October 2025, even though it is still getting new features (there are even rumors about Microsoft re-opening the Windows Insider Program for Windows 10).

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

I mean, I have a long history of crying foul over Windows being adware now, but I don’t think warning users that their operating system is losing support and that they should upgrade to a new version really constitutes an ad. Sure, technically it does, but I think we can all agree that such a warning is useful and informative.

The classic Win32 ListView supports incremental search: You can start typing the name of an item to search for it. But it’s a bit more complicated than that.

↫ Raymond Chen

Gather ’round, children, Mr Chen is telling a story.

Microsoft recently held a streaming event in which it detailed a lot of the new features and changes coming in Windows server 2025, and has now followed that up with a blog post, as well. There’s a lot to go over here, and I’m anything but a Windows Server specialist, so I’ll highlight some of the thing I’m certain will be welcomed by Windows Server administrators.

First and foremost, the biggest improvement: hot-patching. Security updates can be installed without having to reboot, because Server 2025 will modify code in memory without restarting the processes in question. Quarterly updates, however, will still require reboots. Hot-patching will be free on all versions of Server 2025.

Microsoft also promises a massive performance boost for NVMe drives – the company claims a 70% improvement going from Server 2022 to Server 2025. Microsoft’s other file system, ReFS, is also seeing improvements, and Storage Replica’s compression will be available in all editions of Windows Server 2025. A major improvement in Hyper-V is the ability to partition GPUs, so you can use one GPU to power multiple virtual machines.

As far as licensing goes, the most important news here is that you’ll still be able to buy a normal, regular, run-of-the-mill perpetual license for Windows Server 2025, so even though there’s various more ‘modern’ options, you can also just opt for the way it’s always been.

The company is seemingly contemplating on whether to add a new “Recommended” button on the Taskbar. Interestingly, it is unfinished at the moment, or perhaps Microsoft is just not sure if it should proceed with this button at all.

↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin

The beatings will continue until morale improves.

Well, this is something I never knew. Over on the retrocomputing section of StackExchange, someone asked why the second phase of the Windows 98 installation looked decidedly different from the third phase, even though they’re both graphical phases (the first phase is textual). The answer turns out to be both surprising, and entirely predictable.

The first phase is a DOS program called DOSSETUP.BIN, which is the infamous blue part of the installation. The second part, however, is what we’re interested in here, and if the first phase is DOS, and the third phase is Windows 98 itself… What do you think the second phase is running? Yeah, exactly.

Basically, because it is running under Windows 3.1 at that point.

The second uses this minimal Windows 3.1 to run a Windows 3 program, W98SETUP.BIN (specified as the “shell” in SYSTEM.INI).

This starts by copying more files to support all the information-gathering during setup, and various other niceties including the 3D look shown in your screenshot (the contents of the PRECOPY CABs); it ends by copying most of Windows 98, setting the system up so that it will boot Windows 98 from the target drive, and rebooting.

↫ Stephen Kitt

So, in order to install Windows 98, you first run DOS, followed by Windows 3.1, ending in Windows 98. I have no idea why this is so funny to me, especially since it fits entirely within expectations of how Microsoft does things.

Exactly ten years ago, on April 8, 2014, Microsoft released the final security patch for Windows XP. The day marked the end of the road for one of the most iconic Windows versions ever released.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

I never liked Windows XP. Compared to the operating systems I was using at the time – BeOS, Mandrake Linux 8.x – Windows XP felt kind of like a bad joke I wasn’t in on. It looked ridiculous, didn’t seem to offer anything substantial, and it didn’t take long for major security incidents related to Windows XP to start dominating the news. It wasn’t until several service packs had been released that Windows XP came into its own, but by that point, I had already found a much better alternative for my Windows needs at the time. I’m of course talking about Windows Server 2003, the better Windows than Windows XP.

Today though, I do have an odd fondness for Windows XP, as I grow older and XP has become something from my teenage years. The look and feel of Windows XP – the classic theme, not that horrendous Fisher Price nonsense – the sound set, the wallpaper of course – has become iconic, warts and all, and whole generations of people will feel instant feelings as soon as they see Bliss or hear that iconic startup sound.

Windows XP with a few service packs now belongs to the small group of Windows releases that I would call the peak of the platform, together with Windows 95 and Windows 7 (and perhaps Server 2003, but that’s more of a personal thing and not a consumer operating system). Everything else has not exactly been great or even aged well, and I doubt Windows 10 and 11 will suddenly get good, either.

There are various ways you can change the default browser and similar defaults on Windows, but oneof the ways many third-party tools do this is by editing the relevant registry strings. It turns out that Microsoft is not particularly happy with this, as they’ve recently introduced a new driver specifically designed to prevent this from happening, by blocking tools like regedit or PowerShell from editing a number of registry keys for setting default applications. The driver was discovered by Christoph Kolbicz.

Microsoft implemented a driver based protection to block changes to http/https and .pdf associations by 3rd party utilities. The rollout was staggered and activated “randomly”, but in the meantime I got many reports – also from business or education environments (but not Server OS).

Microsoft also updated the driver during my tests (from 2.0 to 2.1) and extended the deny list of executables. This means, they can change the behavior almost on the fly and add new tricks or block additional extensions/protocols!

↫ Christoph Kolbicz

Digging further into what, exactly, this driver can do, Microsoft also made it so that even if you disable the driver, an additional scheduled task will run to re-enable the driver and revert the registry changes. It also seems this is somehow related to the changes Microsoft has to make to comply with the EU’s DMA, but the driver is also installed on systems outside of the EU, so it’s all a bit unclear at the moment.

Users recently noticed that third-party apps for customizing the user interface no longer work in the upcoming Windows 11 version 24H2. Not only does Microsoft not allow you to run those apps, but it even blocks you from upgrading to newer builds. StartAllBack, a popular tool for tweaking the taskbar and Start menu in Windows 11, was among the first to fail on 24H2. Sadly, it is not the only one. ExplorerPatcher also no longer works in Windows 11 24H2.

ExplorerPatcher from Valinet is quite a popular app that lets you bring back the old Windows 10 taskbar in Windows 11, apply additional modifications to make Windows 11 slightly better, and restore some of its missing features. Windows 11 version 24H2 is now flagging ExplorerPatcher as incompatible due to “security or performance issues” with the following message.

↫ Taras Buria at Neowin

I guess the taskbar and Start menu are incredibly important real estate for Microsoft, since it’s the absolute prime spot for showing ads. If users replace their taskbar and Start menu with something from a third party, that prime real estate is gone. Major conspiracy vibes, yes, and I know this isn’t the reason, but why else would they be blocking these applications?

I can’t think of anything that makes more sense.

With Microsoft’s rollout of the new Outlook for Windows, it appears the company has transformed its email app into a surveillance tool for targeted advertising.

Everyone talks about the privacy-washing campaigns of Google and Apple as they mine your online data to generate advertising revenue. But now it looks like Outlook is no longer simply an email service; it’s a data collection mechanism for Microsoft’s 801 external partners and an ad delivery system for Microsoft itself.

↫ Edward Komenda on the Proton blog

Now, note that this is an article written by Proton, posted on the company blog, so of course they’re not going to be too kind towards their competitors. That being said, the article’s not wrong: the new Outlook web application, now the default in Windows, not only shared your data with around 800 partners, it also displays ads inside of the application. On macOS, it will even show yo fake emails that are, in fact, ads.

Furthermore, once you add your accounts to this new Outlook web application, you’ll also be uploading your username and password to Microsoft, giving them access to your email accounts for advertising and data collection purposes, a shady practice a ton of email clients on mobile devices tend to do as well.

Suffice it to say you really shouldn’t be using this new Outlook, and you should make sure friends and family don’t either. This is yet another nail in the coffin of Windows, now an advertising and data collection platform first, and operating system second.

WinBtrfs is a Windows driver for the next-generation Linux filesystem Btrfs. A reimplementation from scratch, it contains no code from the Linux kernel, and should work on any version from Windows XP onwards. It is also included as part of the free operating system ReactOS.

↫ WinBtrfs GitHub page

If you’re running a distribution that defaults to Btrfs, or you actively choose to use it on other distributions, and you also happen to dual-boot Windows because your boss makes you use some garbage corpo software, this driver will make your setup a bit easier to manage.

Windows 10 is reaching end of support on October 14, 2025, so if you’re still using Windows 10 – and let’s face it, if you’re somehow forced to still use Windows, better 10 than 11 – your time is running out. Luckily, end of support is a bit of a nebulous term when it comes to Microsoft products, and many among you, especially those managing larger fleets of systems, will know Microsoft offers something called the Extended Security Update (ESU) program, wherein you get additional security updates even after end of support.

Microsoft just unveiled the prices for this program for Windows 10. While there’s several schemes, the one most of you will be interested in is this one:

With the 5-by-5 activation method, you’ll download an activation key and apply it to individual Windows 10 devices that you’ve selected for your ESU program. Manage it via scripting or the Volume Activation Management Tool (VAMT), among other methods. You can use on-premises management tools such as Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) with Configuration Manager to download and apply the updates to your Windows 10 devices.

The 5-by-5 activation subscription will establish the Year One list price of ESU for Windows 10.

This is the base license and will cost $61 USD per device for Year 1, similar to the Windows 7 ESU Year 1 price.

↫ Jason Leznek

Honestly, that’s not an egregious price, but do note that this price doubles every year for three years total, and note that if you want to start using ESU in year two, you’ll have to pay for year one as well. In other words, pricing ramps up fast. Furthermore, this program only includes security updates – no new features or anything like that, and it doesn’t include support either.

So, if you’re still using Windows 10 after October 14, 2025, you’ll either have to pay up, have an insecure system, downgrade to Windows 11, or move to a better alternative. Choice’s yours.

In October 2023, we published a recap of the top 10 features Windows 11 users want for the redesigned Start menu. Number 6 was the ability to switch from list view to grid view in the “All Apps” list, which received over 1,500 upvotes in the Feedback Hub. Six months later, Microsoft finally appears to be ready to give users what they want.

PhantomOfEarth, the ever-giving source of hidden stuff in Windows 11 preview builds, discovered that Windows 11 build 22635.3420 lets you change from list to grid view in the “All Apps” section. Like other unannounced features, this one requires a bit of tinkering using the ViVeTool app until Microsoft makes it official.

↫ Taras Buria

I’m still baffled Microsoft consistently manages to mess up something as once-iconic and impactful like the Start menu. It seems like Microsoft just can’t leave it well enough alone, even though it kind of already nailed it in Windows 95 – just give us that, but with a modern search function, and we’re all going to be happy. That’s it. We don’t want or need more.

They say the only backup you ever regret is the one you didn’t make. Starting in Windows 10, the operating system (OS) now comes with a built-in tool to back up your files, themes, some settings, many of your installed apps, and your Wi-Fi information.

First, you’ll need to sign in with your Microsoft account

Go to Start  > Settings  > Accounts  > Your info . Select Sign in with a Microsoft account instead. You’ll see this only if you’re using a local account. If you see Sign in with a local account instead, you’re already using your Microsoft account.

To start the backup process select Start  > Windows Backup.

Select Folders to drop down a list, and select which of your user folders you want to back up by toggling them On or Off. The ones you have already backed up will say Backed up next to them.

Next, you can move forward to back up your settings. You can use the drop down for each category and select the items you want to back up by setting them to On or Off.

First choose your apps:

Then your settings:

Then your credentials:

When you’ve decided on what to back up, click Back up and the backup will be made.

From this point on, Windows will synchronize these backups at regular intervals. If it’s been a while since you made your backups or changed your settings, you can check the status by going to Start  > Settings  > Accounts  > Windows backup.

Current status

We don’t just report on threats—we remove them

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your devices by downloading Malwarebytes today.

They say the only backup you ever regret is the one you didn’t make. iPhone backups can be used to easily move your apps and data to a new phone, to recover things you’ve lost, or to fix things that have failed.

We’ve published posts on how to back up your iPhone to iCloud, and how to backup an iPhone to a Mac. Another method is to backup using the iTunes app on a Windows system.

Choose whichever backup method works best for you, and will continue to work.

First, connect your iPhone to the Windows system with a cable.

You are likely to see a prompt on your iPhone asking whether it can trust this computer.

To proceed, tap Trust and entering your passcode.

Then open the iTunes app on your Windows device.

In iTunes click the Device symbol in the upper left corner (next to the Music drop down box).

Note: It may take a while before the device icon appears

In the Settings of the iTunes app select Summary.

You’ll see some device data about your iPhone, and below that a Backups menu.

Here you can select either iCloud or This Computer.

To create a local backup select This Computer and click on Back Up Now to create a new backup of your iPhone on your Windows System.

To encrypt your backups, select Encrypt local backup, type a password, then click Set Password.

We don’t just report on phone security—we provide it

Cybersecurity risks should never spread beyond a headline. Keep threats off your mobile devices by downloading Malwarebytes for iOS, and Malwarebytes for Android today.

Windows’ celebrated CLI (Command-Line Interpreter) is a treasure trove of hidden features, tools, and settings. Command Prompt lets you tap into every area of your Operating System, from creating new folders to formatting internal and external storage. To help you navigate cmd.exe like a pro, we’ve prepared a compressive list of cool CMD commands to […]

The post 80+ Essential Command Prompt (CMD) Commands appeared first on Heimdal Security Blog.