Starting 16 January 2021, Flash Player is officially dead and any current installations will block the playing of any Flash content. Adobe ceased to support Adobe Flash Player as of 31 December 2020 and all download pages from their website have been taken down. Why is this happening? Adobe Flash Player is a legacy multi-media... Continue Reading →
Windows 10 Feature Update 2004 Released
In May 2020 Microsoft released their latest feature update to Windows 10. This will be delivered through Windows Updates as a feature update to targeted devices in the short term and your device may be specifically blocked while drivers and other software (e.g. Anti Virus software) is updated. As with all new releases, there are... Continue Reading →
Windows 7 Support ends 14th January 2020
As I have blogged on two previous occasions, support for Windows 7 ends on 14th January 2020. This means: All patching of security flaws ends and you will not receive any further patches from 14th January 2020 being the last patch Tuesday that will include widely available Windows 7 patchesMicrosoft Security Essentials also retires on... Continue Reading →
Windows Update Changes
Any regular followers of this site will know that I am a strong advocate of fully licencing software with a valid licence and keeping your licenced software up to date. If you want to read about the consequences of not doing this please see my blog The Dangers to using Unsupported Devices and Software. Microsoft in... Continue Reading →
Windows 7 Updates (Updated)
UPDATED 31 May 2019 If you are still on Windows 7, and a corporate without an exit strategy, you need to take note of two things: Window's 7 ceases extended support in January 2020, after which you won't get any security patchesUpdates happening in the next few months, if not applied, will stop your security... Continue Reading →
Privacy and Security at the Microsoft Build 2019 Developers Conference
Normally in May Microsoft hold their annual developers conference called Microsoft Build (and for this year and last year (2018) it clashed with the Google IO developer conference - not sure if that is by design or just bad planning) . You need to understand where Microsoft is right now in relation to what services... Continue Reading →
The Dangers to using Unsupported Devices and Software
When was the last time you received an update to the device you are reading this on? If it was within the last month, you are among the lucky ones. If you are on a Windows 10 PC, Mac, iPhone/iPad then you will receive regular updates, but if you are on Android, then its a... Continue Reading →
Windows 10 Update Returns Power to the People
In the last couple of days Microsoft have announced a few changes to the way Windows 10 is updated. First, let me just set the current state of affairs. Windows 10 feature updates (the major half yearly updates) just appear on your PC when Microsoft deems your device is ready to be updated. It then... Continue Reading →
Thunderbolt Vulnerability
This is a bit technical, so I will try to explain it in simple language that most people can understand, and if you want to read the technical detail I will post a link to the research at the end of this blog post. A lot of PC's and Laptops (Windows, Mac's and Linux based... Continue Reading →
Microsoft Implements RetPoline Fix for Windows 10
This may take some explaining. Back in January 2018, the computing industry was rocked by the announcement of the Spectre and Meltdown CPU vulnerabilities. These were Meltdown and Spectre Variant 1 and 2. If you want to read my summary of these vulnerabilities, please read my blog post here. Because of the way Spectre variant... Continue Reading →
Microsoft Edge – Adobe Flash Whitelist Issue
Not sure how many people this will apply to (I am one of them), but in Microsoft's infinite wisdom, they decided to put a hidden whitelist of domains that could bypass asking for permission to run Flash videos using the Click-to-Run feature. In Microsoft Windows, there is a file C:\Windows\system32\edgehtmlpluginpolicy.bin that contains the default whitelist... Continue Reading →