Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Germany’s competition watchdog is set to look into whether Microsoft should come under the scope of new rules that allow the country to rapidly prohibit anti-competitive conduct, according to people familiar with the matter.

Microsoft has apparently gone back on initial plans to cut off some generations of its Office software. The company had initially planned to end support for Office 2016 and Office 2019 from October 2023, with users unable to use the software to connect to Microsoft 365 services, including Exchange Online.

Today is Microsoft’s August 2022 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for the actively exploited ‘DogWalk’ zero-day vulnerability and a total of 121 flaws. Seventeen of the 121 vulnerabilities fixed in today’s update are classified as ‘Critical’ as they allow remote code execution or elevation of privileges.

DuckDuckGo is looking to douse the fire that started in late June, when researchers discovered its mobile browser permitted Microsoft’s trackers to operate, while blocking those of Google, and Facebook. Third-party tracker scripts from Microsoft are now blocked from loading across DuckDuckGo’s browsing apps (opens in new tab) (iOS and Android) and browser extensions (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Edge, and Opera).

Microsoft has acknowledged an issue where Outlook on Windows will stop responding or crash when you view Uber receipt emails. The issue started recently in what Microsoft calls the Current Channel Version of Outlook that’s available for Microsoft 365 subscribers. Microsoft is developing a fix, but it won’t be available until Patch Tuesday on August 9th.

Valve has put out their usual monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey and it’s looking like good news for Linux and Steam Deck once again. We’ve seen the user share rise up to 1.23%, making it the highest point in multiple years (again).

Fedora / Red Hat engineers are ringing the alarm bells over dual booting Windows and Linux becoming more challenging to support. In particular, Windows’ BitLocker for full-disk encryption where the encryption key is sealed using the TPM hardware.

The last two cumulative updates for Windows 11 – KB5015882 and KB5015814 – are causing major issues for some users, according to several reports and Microsoft’s own documentation. The latest round of updates could make the Start menu disappear as soon as you try to open it, thanks to a bug in the operating system.

Microsoft has said a recent deployment that contained a “broken connection to an internal storage service” was the likely cause of an outage that left many users unable to access or use various Microsoft 365 apps for several hours.

Microsoft has performed a u-turn on its plans to prevent developers from selling open source software on the Microsoft store. It announced the policy that would essentially lead to this back in June, with the policy due to come into effect on July 16. Microsoft received plenty of pushback from the open source community though and has since deleted it. Everyone seems to be happy with the decision.