Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

Microsoft’s given users of its collaboration apps on Windows Phone under a month’s warning of their demise. A support note from late last week advises that “Windows phone apps for Skype for Business, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer are retiring on May 20, 2018.” “Retiring” means all three will vanish from the Microsoft store on May 20, with differing results.

Windows 10 Springwatch participants got a treat last night in the form of a bumper update to Windows 10 1709 (aka the Fall Creators Update). The patch (KB4093105) landed a week after older versions of Windows 10 (1703 and 1609) got their own variety of Microsoft’s secret sauce. The patch included a truckload of what Redmond likes to call “Quality Improvements”, fixes for the functionality that was broken following the 10 April Patch Tuesday.

Microsoft has released the April edition of its monthly security update, this time addressing a total of 63 CVE-listed vulnerabilities. This month’s update includes critical fixes for the usual suspects: Windows, Edge, Internet Explorer, and Office, as well as one flaw Redmond previously fixed with an unscheduled update. You should install these fixes as soon as you can, if your system hasn’t already.

Microsoft Office 365 is up and running after an outage on Friday that left users without email throughout Europe and the Asia-Pacific. Account holders who tried to access email reportedly were informed: “Service is temporarily unavailable. Please retry later.” The UK appeared to be especially hard-hit.

Microsoft started forcing Mail to use Edge for email links in Windows 10 build 17623 last month. This week, the company started including Office 365 ads right at the bottom of the app. But even these poor decisions are just extra nails in the coffin.

A remote-code execution vulnerability in Windows Defender – a flaw that can be exploited by malicious .rar files to run malware on PCs – has been traced back to an open-source archiving tool Microsoft adopted for its own use.

Days after Microsoft released its third attempt at a fix for the Meltdown security vulnerability in Intel’s modern processors, system administrators say many of their 64-bit Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2 boxes are still unable to be properly patched.

Microsoft will ban ‘offensive language’ and ‘inappropriate content’ from Skype, Xbox, Office and other services on May 1, claiming it has the right to go through your private data to ‘investigate.’

WSL is effectively a layer that translates applications’ Linux kernel system calls into something Windows 10 understands, allowing programs – such as Bash and sed – built for the open-source operating system to run on Win 10. It has been embraced by developers who might otherwise have jumped platform.

Microsoft’s January and February security fixes for Intel’s Meltdown processor vulnerability opened up an even worse security hole on Windows 7 PCs and Server 2008 R2 boxes.