Новости за 16.01.2018

If you’re wondering whether your computer is susceptible to the latest bête noir, Meltdown and Spectre, you can take the official Microsoft patch and, after a suitable amount of technical drudgery, come away with a result that doesn’t answer much. Or you can try Steve Gibson’s new InSpectre and – with suitable caveats – see some meaningful results and a few hints about catching up.

Suddenly, we are having a debate on device addiction of smartphones like Apple iPhone and Google Android. I have written about this many times over the last decade. This impacts everyone, from the enterprise to users and needs to have a higher profile. We need to find solutions to this growing problem. It’s good to see that we are finally discussing this important point.

I’ve seen a lot of bizarre Microsoft patches-of-patches, but the new patches for AMD processors are in a world of their own. The security-only, manually downloadable patches appear to be Meltdown/Spectre patches for machines that were bricked by other bad patches, earlier this month, but they’ve arrived with no instructions — and a strange circular logic.

[Disclosure: Microsoft is a client of the author.]

I got to sit down with Microsoft prior to the start of CES to talk about the broad future visions they’ve been sharing with folks all week.  As you would expect, given this is CES, focus was on personal technology.  This was separate from Surface or any other tightly focused effort and it was more Windows centric as well.  The near-term future of personal technology strategy from Microsoft is broken down into the following areas:

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Apple may (or may not) have scaled-back its ambition to build its own connected vehicles, but at CES 2018 we still saw lots of news around its CarPlay system. Here’s a brief run-down on what happened:

Maersk and IBM today announced a joint venture to deploy a blockchain-based  electronic shipping system that will digitize supply chains and track international cargo in real time.

The Windows emergency security updates issued by Microsoft earlier this month came with an unprecedented prerequisite - a new key stored in the operating system's registry - that antivirus vendors were told to generate after they'd guaranteed their code wouldn't trigger dreaded Blue Screens of Death (BSoD) when users apply the patches.

You’ve been asked to supply a letter of reference by email. You compose one in Microsoft Word — but this is sensitive information. How do you keep someone from changing your words?

Flashback to the 1980s, when this pilot fish at a big computer vendor is working on a team that's wiring hardware for some production equipment.

At first I thought Apple would get away with deliberately slowing down its older iPhones when their batteries aged. I mean, when it comes to techno fandom loyalty, you can’t beat hardcore Apple fans. They love their iGadgets. But maybe I was wrong.