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On Thursday, February 4, Satya Nadella will celebrate his second anniversary as the CEO of Microsoft. It's been an eventful couple of years. Microsoft has grown its crucial cloud business, released Windows 10 to a much better reception than its loathed predecessor, launched a bunch of great apps for iPhone and Android, and generally made people like it a lot more. But the real victory of Satya Nadella — the truly monumental shift — has been within the company. Under Nadella, Microsoft is pointed in one direction for first time in modern memory.

After Brendan Eich resigned as CEO of the Mozilla Corporation amid controversy when it was revealed that he had given $1,000 to support a California ban on same-sex marriage, he set out to do again what he had done with Mozilla's Firefox browser: revolutionize the way people access the Internet.His newest venture is as bold as what he did when he co-founded the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He has started a new company that is producing a browser that promises to strike a balance between web-based advertising and privacy. Coming from anyone else, this promise...

A massive luxury yacht owned by Microsoft Corp co-founder Paul Allen destroyed most of a protected coral reef during a visit to the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean earlier this month, media reported. An anchor chain from the vessel damaged nearly 14,000 square feet (1,300 square meters), or about 80 percent, of reef near two scuba diving sites in the West Bay, the islands' environment department said, according to the Cayman News Service. Allen's Seattle-based Vulcan Inc organization, which manages his fortune, said on Wednesday that the M/V Tatoosh was moored on Jan. 14 in a "position explicitly directed" by...

With its engineers involved in more than 2,000 open source projects, you'd have to agree that open source has more than a foothold at Microsoft these days. Most recently, for example, the browser team made the Chakra JavaScript engine that powers both Edge and Internet Explorer open source, for a very practical reason. Node, the popular JavaScript runtime, currently works only with Google's V8 JavaScript engine. With Chakra now open source, Microsoft can take the fork of Node that it created to run on Chakra and contribute it back to the project -- which means developers who use Node will...

The campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is raising questions about the involvement of Microsoft in the Iowa Caucuses, now just five days away, and has built a independent system to check the official results. For the first time this year, Microsoft partnered with the Iowa Democratic and Republican Parties to provide a technology platform with which the parties will run their caucuses. The software giant created separate mobile apps for each party, which officials at hundreds of caucuses across the state will use to report out results from individual precincts to party headquarters for tabulation. The arrangement has...

I have an old XP computer that I need to keep running and something updated and I've lost all printer drivers My error message is: Operation could not be completed. The print spooler service is not running. I've tried system restore and it doesn't fix it. I've tried to download drivers and spooler. Any suggestions........and I'm not getting rid of this computer there are things I can do on XP that I can't begin to figure out how to do on Windows 7 which is on the rest of my computers.

I'm having problems with Internet Explorer.I am looking for help.Before I go on...Yes, I am logged on.Seems I have a text sizing issue with IE.Suddenly started last week. Text sizing won't stay consistent. I open a new tab or window and I get tiny text. Usually when I refresh a time or two or three, it'll straighten itself out.Then other times, it goes larger instead of correct size.I've messed with zoom. I've messed with text size.I also have a problem with boxes that I have to type in. No matter the zoom level or text size setting, I have a...

Tablets on New England Patriots' sideline fail, preventing coaches and players from using the devices to review plays. Microsoft's tablet partnership with the National Football League has not always been smooth. After Microsoft struck a reported $400 million deal in 2013 with the NFL to have its Surfaces exclusively on team sidelines for reviewing plays, TV commentators kept referring to them as "iPads." At the time, it was said that networks were constantly reminding their talkers that the Surface looks nothing like an iPad and should therefore be referred to by its actual name. Microsoft suffered another public black eye...

Shmoocon Foxglove Security bod Stephen Breen has strung together dusty unpatched Windows vulnerabilities to gain local system-level access on Windows versions up to 8.1. The unholy zero-day concoction, reported to Microsoft in September and still unpatched, is a reliable way of p0wning Windows for attackers that have managed to pop user machines. Breen released exploit code for his attack dubbed Hot Potato following his talk at the Shmoocon conference in Washington over the weekend. "Hot Potato takes advantage of known issues in Windows to gain local privilege escalation in default configurations, namely NTLM relay -\- specifically HTTP-SMB relay - and...

Microsoft and its hardware partners have revealed the list of Intel Skylake-based PCs that will lose support after 18 months if the computers are downgraded from Windows 10 to Windows 7 or 8.1. The software giant along with Dell, HP, Lenovo and NEC today outlined a list of 100 PCs that will fall victim to a policy change outlined by Microsoft earlier this month. The company previously said it would support downgrades to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 until January 2020 and January 2023. But on January 16, Microsoft backtracked on its pledge for newer hardware featuring Intel's Skylake processors....

Announced in October 2015, and released a month later, Microsoft's Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL smartphones have not set the world alight. The first 'out of the box' Windows 10 powered smartphones occupy a curious pivot point in Microsoft's plans. What do they tell us about the direction of Microsoft and how it will approach mobile in 2016? Between them they represent the end of a line of smartphones that stretches back to Nokia's 2011 decision to go with Windows Phone rather than Android, They also represent Microsoft's future attitudes to smartphones as a single element of a wide...

Gotcha: Symantec fires reseller nabbed in tech support scam Malwarebytes sting operation catches out Silurian Tech Support 22 Jan 2016 at 10:52, John Leyden An authorised Symantec reseller has been caught hoodwinking users into buying security software by employing underhand marketing tactics. Silurian Tech Support was spotted flinging fake Norton-themed security warnings in an attempt to drum up business by Symantec rival Malwarebytes. The alerts were used to direct users towards a tech support service that researchers discovered offered to fix non-existent problems for a flat fee of $199 or more. All the well-worn themes of the far-too-prevalent tech support...

The billionaire philanthropist Bill Gates has told the BBC that the United States "should set a better example" by taking in more refugees. Mr Gates said his home country "had the capacity" to follow the examples of Germany and Sweden, who were "to be congratulated" for welcoming migrants. But he acknowledged that relaxing immigration laws "was not easy". Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Mr Gates added that governments were dealing with "tight budgets". However, he emphasised that the issue was largely a political one, and that "the total number of refugees is not a world record".

Security is something that is always on the minds of users these days, and that includes those who use Linux. TechWeek Europe has a disturbing article about a Linux trojan that captures audio and takes screenshots. It remains to be seen how widespread this Trojan is among Linux users and what the exact attack vector is for it. Steve McCaskill reports for TechWeek Europe: Security researchers have found a new Linux Trojan capable of taking screenshots of infected systems and even recording sound. Russian anti-virus firm Dr Web says that once the Linux.Ekoms.1 malware is launched it checks for two...

Intel has patched a major flaw in its driver utility tool that could allow attackers to install malware on victim PCs remotely. The chipmaker has issued a patch advisory for its Driver Update Utility, urging customers to download the new version of the software. The tool analyses system drivers on a user's computer and reports on and downloads any new drivers that are available. The flaw - which exists because the software requests new drivers from Intel servers over an unencrypted connection - allows attackers to instigate man-in-the-middle attacks and cause the download of malicious files and software on victim...

Many people feel they have a right to privacy, but do they? Does the Constitution protect the notion of privacy? Well yes and no. The general right to privacy is derived loosely from three places in the Bill of Rights and the 14th Amendment known as The Liberty Clause. None of them are enough to protect privacy in the modern age. The 1st Amendment protects privacy of beliefs among other things like speech, press, religion, the ability to meet peaceably, and petition the government. The 3rd Amendment protects your home from being taken over by the government. The 4th Amendment...

Microsoft's first Patch Wednesday update for the year has taken care of multiple vulnerabilities rated as critical. No known exploits are available for the vulnerabilities, but Microsoft recommends that users apply the patches through Windows Update as soon as possible. Internet Explorer 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 see two common vulnerabilities and exploits (CVEs) fixed - CVE-2016-0002 and CVE-2016-0005 - as part of a cumulative update. Supported version of the Windows client and server operating systems are all affected by the vulnerabilities, which Microsoft rates as critical and exploitable. Microsoft's new Edge browser in Windows 10 is also being...

Tech giants - Apple, Samsung and Microsoft among them - are under fire following the release of a new report that links the companies to the child mining of cobalt in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. As portable electronics such as smartphones, tablets and laptops become more and more ubiquitous, the global demand for rechargeable batteries and in turn cobalt - a major component in lithium-ion batteries - continues to grow. According to estimates, the African country is responsible for more than 50% of the world's cobalt production, a portion of which is sourced from artisanal mines in the...

Microsoft just dropped a bombshell. Older versions of Windows will not be supported on the newest chips from Intel and others. The crux of a statement from Terry Myerson, executive vice president at Microsoft, is that new processors won't run older versions of Windows reliably -- and won't be supported. "Going forward, as new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that time for support," Myerson wrote, in a blog post addressed to "enterprise customers," aka, businesses. So, in the future, don't expect to be able to run Windows 7, for example, on the newest...

Microsoft is working with Intel, AMD, nVidia, and Qualcomm to support Windows 10 at a chipset level, effectively killing the future of Windows 7 and 8. The changes, which were announced in a company blog post, are the next step in Microsoft's big push to get everyone, from personal users to businesses, onto the latest version of the operating system. The partnership with the chip makers is surprising, as cutting support for Windows 7 and 8.1 on future PCs could adversely affect sales. "Going forward, as new silicon generations are introduced, they will require the latest Windows platform at that...