Hasta La Gadget!

When Microsoft has a new product they want to make perfect before release – all of their products, that is – they work with a testing model they call dogfooding. With dogfooding, they feed themselves the product, the product here being Windows 8, before they send it out as a final iteration. An update from Patrick O’Rourke of Microsoft IT revealed this week how they deployed Windows 8 and Internet Explorer 10 to their staff well before they did to the general public to test the builds in real world situation on the regular.

With this update we learn that Microsoft is confident enough in their products to test them on their own staff – that’s something that not just Microsoft does, but it does instill a sense of confidence and trust no matter who says it. They noted that they also used a forum called “//pointers” for early adopters which thrived due to users who not only wanted to get help working with Windows 8, but wanted to help others in the online community as well. With a release like this based even in part on a community that’s willing to help itself, Microsoft has a winner on its hands.

It was reiterated that some of the most important points that were tested again and again nearly endlessly were Security, User Experience, and Support. The support element appeared to never have been a problem as not just Microsoft was able to work easily with early adopters, but early adopters were able to easily help one another as the software was tested. The user experience was pushed from the installation process to the assurance of software compliance to data migration – and that’s all right at the start of the experience.

Microsoft has been clear that they mean business in security with Windows 8 with Trusted Boot – made in an effort to protect the boot process specifically from malware. DirectAccess has been updated with validation of virtual smart cards using Trusted Platform Module chips – complicated stuff – and Measured Boot for the testing of the health of any Windows 8 machine at startup. BitLocker is also at the center of the security world in Windows 8, with a new feature called Network Key Protector Unlock able to unlock a drive when the machine you’re suing is plugged into your corporate network.

Business owners should here be confident that their adoption of Windows 8 across their network will have a massive amount of support both inside the software and from Microsoft itself right from the start. This news bit was made more to assure IT users that they’ve tasted the food first before they send it to the restaurant, so to speak, and that it’s more than safe – it’s tasty.

[via Microsoft]

Windows 8 promises it’s been tested on its makers first is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

We do know that the recent Zero Day exploit in Internet Explorer was patched by Microsoft (albeit this is but a temporary measure), but there are rumors going around that Microsoft was aware concerning this exploit for a good 7 weeks prior, and for a company of their size and stature to not do anything about it nor release a statement of caution to the masses reeks of irresponsibility – assuming that the rumors are true, of course.

An online source as reported by Gregg Keizer, said “Microsoft may have known about last week’s Internet Explorer (IE) zero-day bug for some time.” The security bulletin saw Microsoft issue thanks to “an anonymous researcher, working with TippingPoint’s Zero Day Initiative, for reporting the execCommand Use After Free Vulnerability ( CVE-2012-4969).” Assuming that the latest report was CVE-2012-4969, one can then make the inference that Microsoft was already aware of the IE Zero Day exploit for over seven weeks before Eric Romang, the researcher who announced the discovery of the exploit on a hacker-controlled server, did so in the middle of September. Juicy stuff, but rumors remain as just that until they are substantiated by cold, hard facts.

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: German government discourages Internet Explorer browser use due to bug, Internet Explorer bug fix pushed to the masses ,

Remember how a temporary Internet Explorer bug fix was pushed to the masses yesterday by Microsoft? Well, knowing German efficiency, it is most likely that the government does not want to take any chances with computers in the country getting compromised, hence the German government has issued word to the public to stop using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser temporarily, at least until the bug is fixed so that PCs will no longer be vulnerable to hacker attacks, at least from that perspective.

According to the German government’s Federal Office for Information Security, or BSI in short, they are aware of targeted attacks and all it takes is the simple act of luring Web surfers to a website where hackers had previously planted malicious software which are able to exploit the bug. A statement was recorded, where “a fast spreading of the code has to be feared.” Are you still rocking to Internet Explorer?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Internet Explorer bug fix pushed to the masses , Microsoft thanked Google for spotting security vulnerability in Internet Explorer,

Internet search giant Google has decided that their Google Apps cloud-based enterprise email and collaboration platform will no longer offer support for Internet Explorer 8, and when you read between the lines for that, it would mean you would be forced to make an operating system upgrade from Windows XP to something newer. In a way this is rather sad for the more melancholic among you, but then again there is always this sense of inevitability as time passes by. I mean, the day had to come sooner or later, right? Unless Microsoft figured out that we would still be using Windows XP a couple of decades down the road.

(more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: IE6 Users To Lose Gmail And Google Calendar Support Too, Google to stop free accounts for Google Apps?,

Google’s had one foot in the web privacy door for a while, offering Chrome users the Keep My Opt-Outs extension in its browser’s Web Store since 2011. Still, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari already offer a Do Not Track option directly in their browser settings. Mountain View is now working to close that gap by bringing that same privacy configuration to Chrome. Do Not Track will let users opt out of tracking cookies and targeted advertising (from ad networks that comply with the standard, that is), and is currently live on Chrome’s developer channel. The option will reportedly be baked into the stable version of the browser by the end of the year.

Filed under: Internet, Software

Google plays privacy catch-up, adds Do Not Track option to Chrome originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 14 Sep 2012 13:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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