John Lister

Microsoft has unveiled some of the features for the next major update to Windows 10. Among the biggest surprise is better support for the world of Linux. The new features and tweaks will come in an update that's been codenamed Windows 10 Redstone. ... It's expected some time this summer and is planned to be the biggest update yet. Microsoft has likened Redstone to the level of change that came with Windows 8.1, though thankfully this time it will be less about undoing changes in the initial release that went down badly. Cortana & Action Center Overhauled The most visible changes for ... (view more)

The FBI has asked businesses for urgent help dealing with a new form of ransomware. The attack is designed to compromise an entire network, rather than just a single computer. Ransomware is a form of malware that damages a computer in a way that's ... usually reversible - but only by the malware creators. Commonly it involves encrypting files or even an entire hard drive so that they can't be accessed without a key, which is only provided when the victim hands over a fee. Last month the FBI put out a warning of a form of ransomware dubbed MSIL/Samas.A. It targets a security vulnerability ... (view more)

Microsoft has finished work on a special edition of Windows 10 for Chinese users. It appears to be designed to keep the country's authoritarian government happy. The edition is known as Windows 10 Zhuangongban, which translates as Specially Provided ... Edition, and will be aimed mainly at government agencies and government-owned businesses. The new software is described in an article on Chinese website Caixin, though its unclear how free the site was to cover the news without either direct censorship or self-censorship. Software Meets 'Special Needs' Based on an automated Google ... (view more)

The FBI says it may be able to unlock the San Bernadino shooter's phone without Apple's help. But it's refusing to reveal details of its apparent solution. Apple recently refused to comply with an order to assist law enforcement officials with ... unlocking the phone, leading to a planned courtroom hearing this week. The FBI then asked for the case to be put on hold until next month, saying it wanted to investigate a method it discovered this past weekend that may make Apple's help irrelevant. The argument isn't about decrypting the data on the phone, something that's ... (view more)

Some of the biggest tech firms have joined together to call for new standards that could make emails more secure. The proposals have gone to the Internet Engineering Task Force, which develops voluntary but widely used technical standards for the ... Internet. These days around 30 percent of Internet traffic from North American users is encrypted, meaning that if somebody intercepts it on route, they'll struggle to be able to read it. That figure is expected to jump to 60 percent this year, though that's largely a quirk caused by a change in policy by Netflix. In any case, it's now ... (view more)

Owners of older Kindle eReaders have been warned to update their devices today or temporarily lose Internet connectivity. The loss won't be irreversible, but will cause added hassle. The issue affects all Kindle eReader models released before 2013. ... That includes the Keyboard, Touch and DX versions, along with the 5th generation and earlier of both the standard Kindle and Paperwhite editions. (Source: amazon.com ) The only unaffected models are those released from 2013 onwards, specifically the Paperwhite 6th and 7th generation, the 7th generation standard Kindle and the Voyage model. The ... (view more)

A Google-owned app aims to tell you the right time to leave on a car journey based on current traffic. It's something of a chicken and egg situation though, as the more people who use Waze, the more accurate it gets. Waze was developed by an Israeli ... company and bought out by Google in 2013. Unlike most GPS navigation tools, it doesn't work solely by databases of roads. Instead, it gathers anonymized information from users about their journeys, measuring exactly how long they take to cover a particular route and where they are being held up. The idea is to use this crowdsourced ... (view more)

Google is expanding a feature that automatically suggests quick email replies that you can send with one click. It's moving it from mobile only to the desktop, though won't yet be part of the main Gmail tool. The feature, called Smart Reply, debuted ... on the Inbox by Gmail mobile app. That's a separate tool to Gmail, though lets you access the same email accounts. The difference is that the app contains several tools designed to make it easier to deal with large numbers of messages, particularly for people who work on the move. Smart Reply works by scanning the content of an ... (view more)

Microsoft's push to get Windows 10 onto computers seems to be going a step further than anticipated. Even tech-savvy users are complaining their machines updated to the new system without their express consent. The last big change to the Windows 10 ... upgrade process took place last month, but seems to be working more aggressively than expected. The change involved Windows 10 being reclassified as a "Recommended" update in the automatic update program. That was hugely significant as the default setting for most Windows PCs is to install all recommended updates automatically. It ... (view more)

A court has ordered Google to hand over details that could identify the people behind four accounts used for bogus online reviews. One of the accounts had assumed the identity of a dead woman. The reviews were made on the social networking site ... Google+. While the site has arguably struggled to compete with the likes of Facebook, posts there are particularly likely to show up in search results for a relevant term. In this case the reviews were of an Amsterdam daycare center, and would appear next to a map of the center's location before the rest of the "ranked" search results. ... (view more)