It appears that Microsoft has started to block Windows ISO downloads that originate from Rufus.

A security flaw in the way Microsoft Windows guards users against malicious files was actively exploited in malware attacks for two years before last week, when Microsoft finally issued a software update to correct the problem.

A research paper suggests the data Microsoft Edge sends to its back-end servers has a persistent hardware-based identifier which could be used to find a user's identity.

New Microsoft Edge now displayed on Windows 10

The Microsoft Alternatives project (MAlt) started a year ago to mitigate anticipated software license fee increases. MAlt’s objective is to put us back in control using open software. It is now time to present more widely this project and to explain how it will shape our computing environment.

Background

Over the years, CERN’s activities and services have increasingly relied on commercial software and solutions to deliver core functionalities, often leveraged by advantageous financial conditions based on the recognition of CERN’s status as an academic, non-profit or research institute. Once installed, well-spread and heavily used, the leverage used to attract CERN service managers to the commercial solutions tends to disappear and be replaced by licensing schemes and business models tuned for the private sector.

Given the collaborative nature of CERN and its wide community, a high number of licenses are required to deliver services to everyone, and when traditional business models on a per-user basis are applied, the costs per product can be huge and become unaffordable in the long term.

A prime example is that CERN has enjoyed special conditions for the use of Microsoft products for the last 20 years, by virtue of its status as an “academic institution”. However, recently, the company has decided to revoke CERN’s academic status, a measure that took effect at the end of the previous contract in March 2019, replaced by a new contract based on user numbers, increasing the license costs by more than a factor of ten. Although CERN has negotiated a ramp-up profile over ten years to give the necessary time to adapt, such costs are not sustainable.

Anticipating this situation, the IT department created the Microsoft Alternatives project, MAlt, a year ago.

MAlt’s objective

The initial objective was to investigate the migration from commercial software products (Microsoft and others) to open-source solutions, so as to minimise CERN’s exposure to the risks of unsustainable commercial conditions. By doing so, the laboratory is playing a pioneering role among public research institutions, most of whom have recently been faced with the same dilemma. 

MAlt is a multi-year effort and it will now enter a new phase with the first migrations.

The project’s principles of engagement are to:

Deliver the same service to every category of CERN personnel
Avoid vendor lock-in to decrease risk and dependency
Keep hands on the data
Address the common use-cases

Coming in 2019

The first major change coming is a pilot mail Service for the IT department and volunteers this summer, followed by the start of CERN-wide migration. In parallel, some Skype for Business clients and analogue phones will migrate to a softphone telephony pilot.

Many other products and services are being worked on: evaluations of alternative solutions for various software packages used for IT core services, prototypes and pilots will emerge along the course of the next few years.

How will MAlt impact you and how to contribute?

You will find all the details and progress on the project site and more particularly the list of products addressed in the project. 

The new computing newsletter blog will communicate on general items, and in addition, a general presentation will be provided in the Main Auditorium on 10 September at 2.30 p.m.

Needless to say, isolated initiatives will waste effort and resources. Instead, if you or your team are willing to participate, if you have ideas, the best way is to join the coordinated Microsoft Alternatives effort by checking the project site and contributing to the discussion channel. 

Interesting times ahead! While the Microsoft Alternatives project is ambitious, it’s also a unique opportunity for CERN to demonstrate that building core services can be done without vendor and data lock-in, that the next generation of services can be tailored to the community’s needs and finally that CERN can inspire its partners by collaborating around a new range of products. 

Follow the project, get details, join: cern.ch/malt

Microsoft automatically installs six bloatware apps on every Windows 10 PC, even after a clean install. This needs to stop.

Five-year-old program provides government with direct access to email, messages, browser history, more

Bing has made very significant investments in the area of deep learning, computer vision and artificial intelligence to support a number of different search scenarios. The Bing Maps team has been applying these techniques as well with the goal to increase the coverage of building footprints available for OpenStreetMap.

An ethical crisis in the digital forensics industry came to a head last week with the release of new details on Microsoft’s undocumented “Activities” API. A previously unknown trove of access and activity logs held by Microsoft allows investigators to track Office 365 mailbox activity in minute detail. Following a long period of mystery and rumors... View Article

Le but de cette page est de synthétiser, clarifier et documenter les raisons techniques, économiques et politiques (passées et présentes) pour lesquelles je ne veux plus remettre les pieds sous Windows et pour lesquelles je n'arrive plus à faire confiance à Microsoft. Chacun des points est argumenté et (quand cela est possible) donne les liens correspondants, tout comme je l'avais fait à l'époque pour Apple.

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...

Les consommateurs allemands ont peu goûté les méthodes de Microsoft pour faciliter (pour ne pas dire forcer la main) l’installation de Windows 10 sur les machines dotées de Windows 7 et 8.1. Rappelons que, lors du lancement du nouvel OS en juillet 2015, l’éditeur forçait son pré-téléchargement sur les PC sans le consentement des utilisateurs. Un volume de données qui occupait jusqu’à 6 Go sur le disque.

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Cette affaire est loin d’être la seule à toucher Windows 10. L’OS de Redmond a été sous le feu des critiques à plusieurs reprises. Il a particulièrement été critiqué pour sa tendance à aspirer massivement des données personnelles posant nombre de questions sur le respect de la vie privée des utilisateurs. Une méthode qui a pris fin avec la livraison de Creators Update en avril dernier. Autre initiative discutable : l’affichage promotionnel de produits maison (Edge, Bing…) sur l’écran d’accueil.

Suite à la question d’une sénatrice, la ministre des Armées confirme le renouvellement du contrat Open Bar avec Microsoft et se justifie.

Décidément, Microsoft se transforme de plus en plus en geôlier pour ses utilisateurs, Onedrive ne veut plus lire d'autres stockages que les NTFS.

Microsoft says it is releasing updates for Windows XP, Windows Vista, and all other more recent unsupported and supported versions of Windows due to an “elevated risk” of attacks that are similar to the WannaCry malware.

The Financial Times reports big internet companies are paying Adblock Plus "30% of additional revenues" they would make from ads being unblocked.

Alors qu'une cyberattaque exploitant une faille de Windows touche des dizaines de milliers d'ordinateurs dans le monde, le ministère de la Défense a reconduit son contrat avec Microsoft. Bill Gates a, quant à lui, été décoré de la Légion d'honneur. Marianne s'est penché sur les liens étroits entre la firme de Redmond et l'Etat français.

L’équipe de journalistes d’Investigate Europe s’est lancée pendant trois mois dans une mission d’exploration pour établir des faits et interviewer des économistes, des responsables informatiques, des experts en sécurité et des politiciens dans douze pays européens, ainsi qu’à la Commission et au Parlement européens. Les résultats sont inquiétants.

La dépendance des États envers Microsoft :

• engendre des coûts en hausse constante et bloque le progrès technique au sein des autorités publiques ;
• contourne systématiquement les lois européennes en matière de passation des marchés et de règles de concurrence ;
• introduit une influence politique étouffante de la part de cette entreprise ;
• crée pour les systèmes informatiques étatiques, ainsi que pour les données de leurs citoyens, un grand risque technique et de sécurité politique.

It's no wonder that privacy activists are up in arms.

And it took three months to release despite Eternalblue leak

Microsoft has built such an empire inside the European public sector that attempts to challenge its dominant position are rarely successful. Nevertheless, some government agencies have managed to migrate to open source alternatives. How have they done it?

Microsoft spends more than any other tech company in the world on lobbying the EU, if you believe the figures in the non-obligatory EU Transparency Register.

A new online tool called LobbyFacts.eu allows data from the register to be automatically sorted, compared, ranked and analysed in ways not possible through the official EU site. It calculates that Microsoft is number three in the lobbying stakes, spending €4.75m per year, behind tobacco giant Philip Morris and petrol company ExxonMobil.

It’s estimated that Microsoft makes around two billion euros in Europe every year, just from its business with the public sector. In 2012 the European Commission released a report that stated that 1.1 billion euros were unnecessarily lost by the European public sector due to being locked-in in business with IT system providers.

Cette problématique d’« enfermement propriétaire » est connue de longue date au sein de l’UE. En 2013, elle a publié un guide pour inciter les gouvernements à lutter contre en se tournant vers les logiciels libres. « Les standards ouverts créent de la concurrence, favorisent l’innovation et permettent d’économiser de l’argent » précise alors la commissaire de la concurrence Neelie Kroës. À l’inverse, continuer d’investir dans des services compatibles avec Windows (comme les documents et factures en ligne) ne fait qu’entretenir cette dépendance dont il devient de fait encore plus difficile de sortir.

Microsoft a publié ses derniers résultats financiers trimestriels, arrêtés au 31 mars 2017 et portant sur son troisième trimestre fiscal. Trois mois durant lesquels la firme a réalisé un chiffre d'affaires global de 22,1 milliards de dollars et généré 4,8 milliards de bénéfice net. Les revenus comme les profits sont en hausse par rapport à la même période un an plus tôt, et l'on remarque que les produits Office et Cloud confirment leur importance dans les sommes générées par l'entreprise.

To understand why it is so difficult to defend computers from even moderately capable hackers, consider the case of the security flaw officially known as CVE-2017-0199.

Thousands of Microsoft Windows machines worldwide are infected with an NSA-developed backdoor that hackers installed by reusing leaked executable code from an outdated hacking toolkit belonging to the spy agency, multiple security researchers tell CyberScoop. The mysterious Shadow Brokers group published a package of internal NSA documents last week, containing among other things the computer code for a series of exploits, implants and other hacking tools. In the days since the leak first became public, hackers have mulled over the trove and begun reverse-engineering and recycling some of the capabilities, CyberScoop previously reported. One of these hacking tools, a backdoor implant codenamed DOUBLEPULSAR — which is used to run malicious code on an already compromised box — has already been installed on 30,000 to 50,000 hosts, according to Phobos Group founder Dan Tentler. Other researchers have also engineered different detection scripts to quickly scan the internet for infected computers. John Matherly, …

In fact, our GitHub organization now has more than 16,000 open source contributors – more than any other organization – and we’re proud to partner closely with GitHub to promote open source.

Si vous êtes équipé d'une machine avec un processeur récent vous n'avez plus accès aux mises à jour Microsoft de Windows 7 et Windows 8.

« En laissant un acteur du marché offrir gratuitement ses produits ou ses services à l'État, la contrepartie est évidemment de les imposer au grand public qui en aura pris l'habitude – le risque étant démultiplié dans certains secteurs sensibles comme l'éducation où cette fourniture gratuite de produits et services aboutira à former et formater des millions d'enfants à leur usage à un âge où ils auraient au contraire besoin de comprendre qu'il existe une grande diversité de possibilités »

Ajustements et décalages de revenus mis à part, Microsoft a réalisé sur les trois derniers mois de 2016 un chiffre d'affaires de 24,090 milliards de dollars (GAAP). Cela représente une croissance de l'ordre de 1 % par rapport à la même période en 2015. Le bénéfice d'exploitation, de son côté, a atteint 6,177 milliards de dollars, contre 6,026 milliards il y a un an. Le résultat net, enfin, s'est établi à 5,200 milliards de dollars, en hausse de près de 4 % par rapport aux 5,018 milliards engrangés sur les derniers mois de 2015.

Microsoft, manifestement convaincu de la qualité de son extension Chrome dédiée à la comparaison de prix, a décidé qu'il était de bon ton d'en faire la publicité sur Windows 10. La manière, quelque peu intrusive, n'est pas vraiment du goût des utilisateurs.

L’Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), une importante organisation américaine de défense des libertés numériques, [...] dénonçait sur son site « la masse de données sans précédent transmise à Microsoft » par Windows 10 « sans prendre en compte l’opinion des utilisateurs ». L’organisme assurait alors que les informations sur la localisation de l’utilisateur, le texte qu’il tape, sa voix, son activité sur le téléphone et sa navigation Internet étaient envoyés à Microsoft.

Charity analysis of the 50 biggest US businesses claims Apple have $181bn held offshore, while General Electric has $119bn and Microsoft $108bn

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Technology giant Apple, the world’s second biggest company, topped Oxfam’s league table, with some $181bn held offshore in three subsidiaries.

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Computing firm Microsoft was third with $108bn, in a top 10 that also included pharmaceuticals giant Pfizer, Google’s parent company Alphabet and Exxon Mobil, the largest oil company not owned by an oil-producing state.

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“For every $1 spent on lobbying, these 50 companies collectively received $130 in tax breaks and more than $4,000 in federal loans, loan guarantees and bailouts,” said Oxfam.

Google recently announced that it would start including individual users' names and photos in some ads. This means that if you rate some product positively, your friends may see ads for that product with your name and photo attached -- without your knowledge or consent. Meanwhile, Facebook is eliminating a feature that allowed people to retain some portions of their anonymity on its website.

These changes come on the heels of Google's move to explore replacing tracking cookies with something that users have even less control over. Microsoft is doing something similar by developing its own tracking technology.