Best Windows apps this week
Four-hundred-ninety in a series. Welcome to this week's overview of the best apps, games and extensions released for Windows 10 and 11 on the Microsoft Store and elsewhere in the past seven days.
The KB5013943 update for Windows 11 is causing application start issues on some devices. Affected users may want to check Sofia's article, as it contains a workaround.
Open source security plan aims to deliver on development, patching and more
White House officials, The Linux Foundation, OpenSSF and 37 private sector tech companies have announced a 10-point open source and software supply chain mobilization plan and $150 million of funding over two years.
At a summit meeting yesterday several participating organizations came together to collectively pledge an initial tranche of funding towards implementation of the plan. Those companies are Amazon, Ericsson, Google, Intel, Microsoft, and VMWare, pledging over $30M.
Emotet rockets to the top of the malware charts in Q1
The latest Threat Insights Report from HP Wolf Security shows a 27-fold increase in detections resulting from Emotet malicious spam campaigns in the first quarter of 2022.
Based on findings from millions of endpoints running HP Wolf Security, this makes Emotet the most seen malware family in the period accounting for nine percent of all malware captured.
The challenge of guarding against supply chain attacks [Q&A]
In recent years we've seen a trend towards attacks targeting the software supply chain rather than being directly against businesses.
Attacks can include poisoning the software components, stealing secrets to compromise an account, or modifying code repositories to allow for exploits.
Microsoft warns that KB5013943 update is causing authentication failures in Windows 11, Windows Server and more
Following the release of this month's Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has issued a warning that installing the KB5013943 update can lead to authentication issues for various Windows services.
The update was released on May 10, and was meant to -- among other things -- fix an issue with screen flicker in Safe Mode. But in addition to causing error messages for some users, the KB5013943 update has also led to authentication failures Windows domain controllers.
Enterprises struggle to discover cloud access policies
Cloud use is commonplace among large enterprises, with 82 percent of organizations with $1B or more in revenue using three or more clouds, up from 66 percent last year.
However, with the majority of companies (70 percent) using two or more identity systems, 75 percent of respondents say they lack the ability to easily discover all existing access policies, according to a new study conducted by Osterman Research for Strata Identity.
UK consumers willing to give up social media rather than part with more data
A new study shows that 63 percent of the UK population distrust social media due to privacy concerns and what's more as a result of privacy issues or other public scandals involving social media, 30 percent of consumers have either disabled social media (17 percent) or plan to within the next 12 months (13 percent).
The research, from digital experience company Acquia, shows only 27 percent say they would be willing to part with more data to retain access to platforms. While 48 percent indicate that recent revelations about data sharing practices have led to them using social media less often.
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Turn data into knowledge to accelerate innovation
Blackberry, Nokia, Blockbuster and Kodak: these are just some of the once-successful companies that failed because they failed to innovate. In our digital world, the difference between sinking and swimming often rests on a business’s ability to provide continuous digital innovations to its customers.
But consumer demands for new technologies and experiences also come with a stipulation: the availability of digital instant gratification must remain uninterrupted. After all, our digital economy doesn’t have normal business hours. It’s always running, and consumers expect to digitally access, interact and purchase at their convenience, at any hour of the day. Digital apps and services must always remain on. And facing an outage or poor system performance, consumers will just switch to another company that provides a better digital experience.
Google is bringing secure virtual credit cards to Chrome
Making payments online is fraught with potential dangers, and there is risk involved with making purchases with your credit card. To help offer a level of protection, many companies -- including the likes of Revolut -- enable their customers to create virtual, disposable credit cards.
Inspired by this, Google is building the same functionality into Chrome. The company announced the upcoming payment security feature at Google I/O, saying that there will be support for autofilling details to help speed up transactions.
Five years on from WannaCry -- what have we learned?
Today marks the fifth anniversary of the notorious WannaCry ransomware attack which hit a number of large organizations around the world and was many people's first encounter with ransomware.
Five years on then, what have we learned from the attack and what long-term effect has it had on the industry?
KB5013943 update for Windows 11 is causing 0xc0000135 errors
While each Patch Tuesday sees Microsoft fixing various problems with Windows 11, the following days see the negative fallout. We've become used to the updates that Microsoft releases having unwanted side, and this month's KB5013943 update is a prime example.
With echoes of a previous update fiasco that caused endless problems with printing, Microsoft intended the KB5013943 update to fix an issue with .NET Framework 3.5 apps introduced by another update. But rather than fixing the problem, installing the KB5013943 update seems to have made things worse for some users.
The Google Pixel 6a is affordable and looks great, but you can't buy the damn thing!
The Google Pixel 6a was announced today, and there is both good and bad news regarding it. The good news is, the Android smartphone doesn't cost an arm, nor does it cost a leg. Yes, as is typical with Google's "a" smartphones, the 6a is inexpensive. This is very much appreciated at a time when inflation is causing everything to be so expensive. The bad news we can touch on in a bit...
Despite being fairly affordable at just $450, the Pixel 6a is powered by the famed Google Tensor processor that is also found in both the Pixel 6 and 6 Pro. The Pixel 6a has some other nice specifications too. For instance, you get 6GB RAM and 128GB storage, and that's it -- there's only one configuration to be had. I rather like that strategy, as it makes things less confusing for consumers.
Microsoft releases Windows 11 Build 25115 with one new feature and lots of fixes
It’s Wednesday, so that usually (with occasional exceptions) means a new Windows 11 test build. Not today though, today Microsoft rolls out two new builds -- one for the Dev Channel (Build 25115) and one for the Beta Channel (Build 22621).
The Dev Channel flight comes with one new feature, but there is some bad news -- it won’t be offered to ARM64 PCs.
PNY Pro Elite V2 USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 Type-C Portable SSD is fast and tiny
While solid state drives make wonderful internal boot drives for computers, they are also great options for external storage. Not only are SSDs much smaller than mechanical hard disk drives, but they use less power and are much faster too.
Today, PNY launches its latest external solid state drive, and it is both beautiful and fast. Called "Pro Elite V2," this diminutive USB-C SSD uses the USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 interface to achieve speeds up to 1,100 MB/s!
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