"Microsoft has quietly revealed that WordPad, the basic word processor that's been included with Windows since 1995, is being retired," reports Windows blog Paul Thurrott: "WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows," the Deprecated features for Windows client page on Microsoft Learn notes in a September 1, 2023 addition. "We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt...."

[W]hile Microsoft's advice to use Microsoft Word instead seems a bit off-base, given that Word is a paid product, RTF is rarely used these days, and anyone can access the web versions of Word for free if needed.
The actual date of removal is unclear. But Neowin isn't the only thing Microsoft is removing from Windows: The company recently turned off Cortana, its neglected voice assistant, and announced the end of Microsoft Support Diagnostic Tool (MSDT). Also, Microsoft will soon disable old Transport Layer Security protocols to make Windows 11 more secure.

Microsoft's August 2023 preview updates for Windows 11 and Windows 10, labeled as KB5029351 and KB5029331 respectively, have led to blue screen errors citing an unsupported processor problem. BleepingComputer reports: "Microsoft has received reports of an issue in which users are receiving an 'UNSUPPORTED_PROCESSOR' error message on a blue screen after installing updates released on August 2," Redmond said. The company also added that the problematic cumulative updates "might automatically uninstall to allow Windows to start up as expected." Microsoft is investigating the newly acknowledged known issue to find out whether it stems from a Microsoft-related cause. The company also urged users encountering these BSOD errors to file a report using the Feedback Hub.

Recent developments, such as Adobe ending support for Type 1 fonts in 2023 and Microsoft discontinuing Type 1 font support in Office apps, may impact users who manage their own fonts, potentially leading to compatibility and layout issues in older files. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham writes: If you want to know about the history of desktop publishing, you need to know about Adobe's PostScript fonts. PostScript fonts used vector graphics so that they could look crisp and clear no matter what size they were, and Apple licensed PostScript fonts for the original LaserWriter printer; together with publishing software like Aldus PageMaker, they made it possible to create a file that would look exactly the same on your computer screen as it did when you printed it. The most important PostScript fonts were so-called "Type 1" fonts, which Adobe initially didn't publish a specification for. From the 1980s up until roughly the early 2000s or so, if you were working in desktop publishing professionally, you were probably using Type 1 fonts.

Other companies didn't want Adobe to have a monopoly on vector-based fonts or desktop publishing, of course; Apple created the TrueType format in the early 90s and licensed it to Microsoft, which used it in Windows 3.1 and later versions. Adobe and Microsoft later collaborated on a new font format called OpenType that could replace both TrueType and PostScript Type 1, and by the mid-2000s, it had been released as an open standard and had become the predominant font format used across most operating systems and software. For a while after that, apps that had supported PostScript Type 1 fonts continued to support them, with some exceptions (Microsoft Office for Windows dropped support for Type 1 fonts in 2013). But now we're reaching an inflection point; Adobe ended support for PostScript Type 1 fonts in January 2023, a couple of years after announcing the change. Yesterday, a Microsoft Office for Mac update deprecated Type 1 font support for the continuously updated Microsoft 365 versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Outlook for Mac (plus the standalone versions of those apps in Office 2019 and 2021). The LibreOffice suite, otherwise a good way to open ancient Word documents, stopped supporting Type 1 fonts in the 5.3 release in mid-2022.

If you began using Adobe and Microsoft's productivity apps at some point in the last 10 or 15 years and you've stuck mostly with the default fonts -- either the ones included with the software or the ones from Adobe's extensive font library -- it's not too likely that you've been using a Type 1 font unintentionally. For these kinds of users, this change will be effectively invisible. But if you install and manage your own fonts and you've been using the same ones for a while, it's possible that you created a document in 2022 that you simply won't be able to open in 2023. The change will also cause problems if you open and work with decades-old files with any kind of regularity; files that use Type 1 fonts will begin generating lots of "missing font" messages, and the substitution OpenType fonts that apps might try to use instead can introduce layout issues. You'll also either need to convert any specialized PostScript Type 1 font that you may have paid for in the past or pay for an equivalent OpenType alternative.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company's first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday. The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total -- the space plane's commander and former Nasa astronaut CJ Sturckow, the pilot Kelly Latimer, as well as Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor who trained the crew before to the flight. The spacecraft also carried three private passengers, including the health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers, both of whom are Antiguan. [...]

Galactic 02 is a suborbital flight. However, despite VSS Unity not reaching orbit, the trajectory allows passengers to experience several minutes of weightlessness at an altitude high enough for them to see the Earth's curvature, Space.com explains. Following liftoff, Virgin Galactic's carrier plane VMS Eve transported VSS Unity to an altitude of about 44,300ft. Eve then dropped Unity which then fired its own rocket motor and ascended to suborbital space. Passengers aboard experienced approximately 3Gs. Live footage inside the spacecraft showed the passengers unstrapping themselves from their seats and peering out down to earth through the windows as they floated throughout the spacecraft.

Despite Galactic 02 being Virgin Galactic's second commercial spaceflight mission, it is the first flight to carry private customers. In June, Galactic 01 carried three crew members from the Italian air force and the National Research Council of Italy. According to Virgin Galactic, the company has already booked a backlog of about 800 customers. Tickets have ranged from $250,000 to $450,000. Galactic 03, the company's third commercial spaceflight, is planned for September.

Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs. From a report: This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier. But that total is beaten by just one company -- Amazon -- which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst.

Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.

After a hurricane hit Florida, 484 buildings just at the Tyndall Air Force base were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Five years later, it's part of a $5 billion, nine-year rebuilding effort the Washington Post describes as rare "blank slate." The plan is "not merely to rebuild it, but to construct what the U.S. military calls 'the installation of the future,' which will be able to withstand rising seas, stronger storms and other threats..." The rebuild at Tyndall, which is expected to continue into 2027, marks the largest military construction project undertaken by the Pentagon. "Think of it as the Air Force throwing its Costco card down on the table and buying buildings in bulk," said Michael Dwyer, deputy chief of the Natural Disaster Recovery Division. A dizzying array of new technologies and approaches have been incorporated into the effort, from semiautonomous robot dogs patrolling the grounds to artificial intelligence software designed to detect and deter any armed person who enters the base.

But the most robust funding is aimed at making Tyndall more efficient, connected and resilient in the face of a warming world. Structures under construction — from dormitory complexes to a child care center to hangars that will house three new squadrons of the F-35A Lightning II later this year — are being built to withstand winds in excess of 165 mph. Steel frames, high-impact windows, concrete facades and roofing with additional bracing are among the features meant to weather the stronger storms to come.

At nearby Panama City, sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, with federal data showing seas have risen there more than 4 inches since 2010. Planners factored in the potential for as much as 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and as a result placed the "vast majority" of new buildings at elevations that should be safe from storm surges for decades, Dwyer said. In addition, sensors placed near the low spots of buildings will send alerts the moment a flood threatens. The Air Force also has created a "digital twin" of Tyndall — essentially, a virtual duplicate of the base that allows officials to simulate how roads, buildings and other infrastructure would hold up in different scenarios, such as a hurricane or historic rainfall events.
Other efforts include restoring the beach's 10-foot sand dunes and its rocky shoreline, along with "the installation of submerged oyster reef breakwater that can reduce wave energy and erosion."

But the article points out that the Air Force also has a second hope for their base: "that the lessons unfolding here can be replicated at other bases around the world that will face — or already are facing — similar threats...

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

Blizzard Entertainment is bringing its PC games to Steam, starting with the release of Overwatch 2 on Valve's digital storefront on Aug. 10, Blizzard announced Wednesday. Polygon reports: The Windows PC version of Overwatch 2, like many of Blizzard's PC games, is currently only available through Battle.net. But with Microsoft's impending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and declining player engagement in the game, the maker of Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch appears to be changing its strategy. Blizzard says it will bring "a selection" of its games to Steam, but did not specify which titles beyond Overwatch 2 will make the jump from Battle.net. (A few classic Blizzard games, including the original Diablo and the first two Warcraft games, are available through GOG.com.)

The acceptance of Steam as a platform for Blizzard's games is part of the studio's evolution, the company said in a blog post. "[O]ne of the ideas pushing us forward is meeting players around the world where they are, and making our games as easy as possible to access and play," the company said. "We want to give everyone a chance to experience our universes with old friends while making new ones, no matter how they choose to play." In its announcement, Blizzard said it's not moving away from Battle.net. But, it explained, "as we've evolved, the industry has evolved too -- gaming is no longer just for specific communities as it was when Battle.net launched over two decades ago, gaming is for everyone -- and though we remain committed to continually investing in and supporting Battle.net, we want to break down the barriers to make it easier for players everywhere to find and enjoy our games."

Blizzard says that players on Steam will still need a Battle.net account connected to Overwatch 2 to play the game. The Steam version will support Steam achievements and friends lists, but Blizzard did not announce Steam Deck support. Overwatch 2 can now be wishlisted through Steam. As for Blizzard's future plans for other game releases on Steam, the company said it will be "sharing more about potential other games coming to the platform when the time is right."

An anonymous reader shared Thursday's report from eSecurity Planet: After Microsoft warned earlier this week that some drivers certified by the Windows Hardware Developer Program (MWHDP) are being leveraged maliciously, a Cisco Talos security researcher said the number of malicious drivers could number in the thousands.

Talos researcher Chris Neal discussed how the security problem evolved in a blog post. "Starting in Windows Vista 64-bit, to combat the threat of malicious drivers, Microsoft began to require kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate from a verified certificate authority," Neal wrote. "Without signature enforcement, malicious drivers would be extremely difficult to defend against as they can easily evade anti-malware software and endpoint detection." Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607, Neal said, Microsoft has required kernel-mode drivers to be signed by its Developer Portal. "This process is intended to ensure that drivers meet Microsoft's requirements and security standards," he wrote.

Still, there are exceptions — most notably, one for drivers signed with certificates that expired or were issued prior to July 29, 2015. If a newly compiled driver is signed with non-revoked certificates that were issued before that date, it won't be blocked. "As a result, multiple open source tools have been developed to exploit this loophole," Neal wrote. And while Sophos reported that it had uncovered more than 100 malicious drivers, Neal said Cisco Talos "has observed multiple threat actors taking advantage of the aforementioned Windows policy loophole to deploy thousands of malicious, signed drivers without submitting them to Microsoft for verification...."

"Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post," he noted.

A luxury horse barn in Florida is primed to be the world's largest 3D-printed building. From a report: Once it's complete, the 3D-printed luxury equestrian barn in Wellington, Florida will overtake a building in Oman as the world's largest 3D-printed structure. According to Printed Farms, the Florida-based startup developing the project, the building will have a total floor area of 10,678 square feet. While the team finished the 3D-printing portion of the site build Wednesday, the installation of doors, windows, electrical fittings and other structural components is still needed.

Printed Farms founder Jim Ritter told Axios construction is expected to be finished by the end of August -- refuting other reports that the build was already completed. What they're saying: The climate case for 3D-printing buildings, according to Ritter, lies in waste reduction. "America is a very wasteful society. We have to start keeping things longer. Our clothing, our cars, everything. That's the whole point of a greener, more sustainable building system," said Ritter.

williamyf writes: Today, Mozilla released Firefox 115. Changes most visible to users include:

But the most important feature is that this release is the new ESR. Why this is important? y'all ask, well:

CNBC has created a 15-minute video titled "The Rise and Fall of Skype," telling the story of how Skype was developed in just nine months in 2003 by a six-person group of childhood friends in Estonia. "We were smart engineers," says Skype's former chief technical architect Ahti Heinla. "We learned on the go. None of us had any telecoms background." But at the end of the interview, he concedes "I myself use Skype right now fairly little. I still have it installed on my phone, but my primary communication methods now are elsewhere."

GigaOm founder Om Malik tells CNBC it was Skype's missteps that enabled the massive growth of WhatsApp, and shared this succinct diagnosis of what's happening to Skype. "Microsoft is where consumer brands go to die." From an accompanying article on CNBC's web site: In 2005 eBay bought it. That deal didn't work out as planned, and an investor group led by Silver Lake purchased a majority stake. Microsoft then stepped in, shelling out $8.5 billion for the company in 2011. Even backed by the world's largest software company, Skype is falling by the wayside. During the pandemic, consumers and business workers turned to tools like Zoom and Meta's WhatsApp, and now there are any number of options to quickly connect with groups of friends and colleagues over smartphones... Microsoft has promoted Skype in Outlook and Windows and even enriched the app with its Bing generative artificial intelligence chatbot. But the numbers still don't look great.

In March 2020, Microsoft said Skype had 40 million daily active users, a number that's since slipped to 36 million, according to a spokesperson. Microsoft's newer Teams communication app, by contrast, is growing in popularity, rising from nearly 250 million monthly users in July 2021 to a record of over 300 million in the first quarter.
Microsoft Teams reached an all-time high of 300 million active users in the second quarter of 2023, according to CNBC's video report. But a research VP at International Data Corp says Microsoft Teams was successful — in taking users away from Skype.

GigaOm's Malik says Microsoft "failed to capitalize on Skype, 100%. Steve Balmer was the king of buying things and not knowing what to do with them... What happened with Skype is the story of every large company with a lot of middle management: they didn't innovate on the product for a very long time."

Jordan Novet from CNBC Business News calls Skype "a product with an uncertain future," arguing that Microsoft "is pouring a lot of engineering resources into making Teams a big destination for communication. It's not doing the same thing with Skype." Could Skype make a comeback? "Anything is possible," Novet concedes. "Microsoft is trying to make Skype happen in a bigger way now." He points out that Skype is now equipped with Bing's AI-powered chatbot, so "You can talk to Bing in Skype. Will that make Skype explode in popularity, or make a comeback? I don't think so."

Microsoft's current head of Skype was not available for CNBC's video. But as a kind of epilogue, they report that Jaan Tallinn, one of Skype's original programmers, now "spends most of his time discussing the dangers of unchecked AI development."

"I don't know what the future holds for Skype..." he tells CNBC. "I'm concerned about humans being wiped out, so it's unlikely that we'll need Skype if that happens."

"A developer brought Clippy back from the dead, giving it new AI powers," writes BGR.

"This unofficial version of Clippy will bring ChatGPT to your computer in the form of Microsoft's infamous Office assistant." You can take advantage of FireCube's unofficial Clippy app. It's available as a free download from the Microsoft Store. The app adds a Clippy icon to your desktop. The unofficial Clippy works both on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Tap on the Clippy icon, and you'll get access to the free ChatGPT 3.5 generative AI bot from OpenAI. It's the same ChatGPT that you load in your browser.
The app "was put on Github only a couple of days ago, with the developer FireCube observing that there are still issues with random crashes," notes TechRadar. "So, stability is likely to be somewhat wonky for the time being, we'd imagine." A further sticking point is that an OpenAI key is required to use this preview version of the Clippy app. If you haven't paid for one of those, you won't be able to fire up Clippy. As noted by the dev, this is one of the most pressing known issues for the application, and FireCube is working on a way around this that'll hopefully be implemented soon enough.

Further work promised in the near future is the ability to drag and resize Clippy, and FireCube aims to bring more classic characters into the mix alongside the paperclip — like Microsoft Bob.

Microsoft is removing its built-in Microsoft Teams client in Windows 11. "The Chat functionality will be replaced with the more flexible free version of Microsoft Teams that's also available as an app for Windows 10," reports The Verge. The changes were announced in a new Windows 11 test build this week. From the report: The original Teams integration in Windows 11, named Chat, was deeply woven into the operating system. Enabled by default, the Chat app was pinned to the taskbar and you'd have to dig into Settings to remove it. Chat offers consumers a way to use Microsoft Teams to contact friends and family. It was weirdly limited to just consumers though, making it useless for the vast majority of Microsoft Teams users that use the work version of the app. Windows 11 users could also end up with two confusing versions of Teams installed to handle work calls and personal ones.

Up until today, Microsoft had been continually adding new features to Chat inside Windows 11, with improved video calling features in October and Discord-like communities and an AI art tool earlier this month. The built-in Chat functionality in Windows 11 was based on the Microsoft Teams 2.0 client, which served as the foundation for the new Microsoft Teams app that's rolling out to businesses at the moment.

In a support document today, Microsoft announced its ending support for Cortana on Windows in late 2023. "Cortana continues to live on in Outlook mobile, Teams mobile, Teams display, and Teams rooms," notes XDA Developers. From the report: In the support document announcing the end of the Cortana era, Microsoft notes that you'll still be able to access AI experiences in Windows 11, and calls out Windows Copilot by name. Alongside that, there's the new Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and voice access in Windows, the last of which lets you control your PC with your voice.

The writing has been on the wall for Cortana for some time now. It was first introduced as a virtual assistant for Windows Phone 8.1, back in 2014, competing with the likes of Apple's Siri. In 2015, it launched on the desktop with Windows 10, and then it started to feel like Microsoft was putting Cortana everywhere. It started showing up in apps like Office and such, similar to what we're seeing with Copilot now. There were third-party Cortana devices too, like the Harman Kardon Invoke smart speaker and the Johnson Controls Glas thermostat, both of which are no longer supported.

Soon after it started becoming apparent that Cortana wouldn't compete with Amazon Alexa, Microsoft started to roll back. Cortana was stripped out of Windows, becoming a standalone app rather than something you found in the taskbar. For a couple of years now, it's just kind of lived as an app on Windows 11, with no news arriving about any kinds of new features. Now is the era of Bing Chat and Copilot.

Arm unveiled its upcoming flagship CPUs for 2024, including the Arm Cortex X4, Cortex A720, and Cortex A520. These chips, built on the Armv9.2 architecture, promise higher performance and improved power efficiency. Arm also introduced a new 'QARMA3 algorithm' for memory security and showcased a potential 14-core mega-chip design for high-performance laptops. Ars Technica reports: Arm claims the big Cortex X3 chip will have 15 percent higher performance than this year's X3 chip, and "40 percent better power efficiency." The company also promises a 20 percent efficiency boost for the A700 series and a 22 percent efficiency boost for the A500. The new chips are all built on the new 'Armv9.2' architecture, which adds a "new QARMA3 algorithm" for Arm's Pointer Authentication memory security feature. Pointer authentication assigns a cryptographic signature to memory pointers and is meant to shut down memory corruption vulnerabilities like buffer overflows by making it harder for unauthenticated programs to create valid memory pointers. This feature has been around for a while, but Arm's new algorithm reduces the CPU overhead of all this extra memory work to just 1 percent of the chip's power, which hopefully will get more manufacturers to enable it.

Arm's SoC recommendations are usually a "1+3+4" design. That's one big X chip, three medium A700 chips, and four A500 chips. This year the company is floating a new layout, though, swapping out two small chips for two medium chips, which would put you at a "1+5+2" configuration. Arm's benchmarks -- which were run on Android 13 -- claim this will get you 27 percent more performance. That's assuming anything can cool and power that for a reasonable amount of time. Arm's blog post also mentions a 1+4+4 chip -- nine cores -- for a flagship smartphone. [...]

Every year with these Arm flagship chip announcements, the company also includes a wild design for a giant mega-chip that usually never gets built. Last year the company's blueprint monster was a design with eight Cortex X3 chips and four A715 cores, which the company claimed would rival an Intel Core i7. The biggest X3-based chip on the market is the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3, which landed in a few Windows laptops. That was only a four X3/four A715 chip, though. This year's mega chip is a 14-core monster with 10 Cortex X4 chips and four A720 chips, which Arm says is meant for "high-performance laptops." Arm calls the design the company's "most powerful cluster ever built," but will it ever actually be built? Will it ever be more than words on a page?

Microsoft is adding a Copilot AI assistant to Windows 11. Much like the Copilot sidebars we've seen in Edge, Office apps, and even GitHub, Windows Copilot will be integrated directly into Windows 11 and available to open and use from the taskbar across all apps and programs. From a report: "Once open, the Windows Copilot side bar stays consistent across your apps, programs, and windows, always available to act as your personal assistant," explains Panos Panay, Microsoft's head of Windows and devices. "It makes every user a power user, helping you take action, customize your settings, and seamlessly connect across your favorite apps."

The Windows Copilot can summarize content you're viewing in apps, rewrite it, or even explain it. It looks very similar to the dialog box that's found in Bing Chat, so you can ask it general questions and things you might usually ask a search engine. It won't directly replace the search bar on the Windows 11 taskbar and is a separate Copilot button alongside it instead, much like how Cortana had its own dedicated space on the taskbar in Windows 10. Windows Copilot is a "personal assistant," according to Microsoft, which sounds a lot like how Microsoft described Cortana as a "personal productivity assistant."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: AWS offered A Look Inside the Making of an NFL Football Schedule in conjunction with Thursday's release of the 2023 NFL Schedule Powered by AWS. AWS notes that producing the schedule required the use of 4,000+ AWS EC2 Spot Instances. An AWS promotional video claims they "saved the NFL an estimated $2 million each season" by leveraging AWS Spot Instances for a discount of up to 90% off compared to AWS On-Demand pricing..

"In just three months," AWS explains, "National Football League (NFL) schedule makers methodically build an exciting 18 week 272-game schedule spanning 576 possible game windows." Up until 10 years ago, AWS notes in an accompanying infographic, the NFL used a white-boarding process to manually craft its schedule.

Not to diminish the NFL's and AWS's 2023 scheduling achievement, but the 2013 documentary The Schedule Makers told the remarkable tale of the husband-and-wife duo of Henry and Holly Stephenson, who for almost a quarter of a century in the pre-Cloud era managed the scheduling for 30 Major League Baseball (MLB) teams who each played 162 regular season games a year. According to the May 1985 Atari Compendium (pg. 38), the Stephensons were using a self-written program running on a 64K IMS-8000 to help schedule games for the MLB (2,106 games over a 6-month season), NBA, and NASL/MISL (defunct soccer leagues). So perhaps the NFL's claim that "There's no way the NFL could deliver the quality of schedule that we put out every year for our fans and television partners without the contributions of our friends at AWS" should be taken with a grain of salt.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this week, Microsoft released a patch to fix a Secure Boot bypass bug used by the BlackLotus bootkit we reported on in March. The original vulnerability, CVE-2022-21894, was patched in January, but the new patch for CVE-2023-24932 addresses another actively exploited workaround for systems running Windows 10 and 11 and Windows Server versions going back to Windows Server 2008. The BlackLotus bootkit is the first-known real-world malware that can bypass Secure Boot protections, allowing for the execution of malicious code before your PC begins loading Windows and its many security protections. Secure Boot has been enabled by default for over a decade on most Windows PCs sold by companies like Dell, Lenovo, HP, Acer, and others. PCs running Windows 11 must have it enabled to meet the software's system requirements.

Microsoft says that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker with either physical access to a system or administrator rights on a system. It can affect physical PCs and virtual machines with Secure Boot enabled. We highlight the new fix partly because, unlike many high-priority Windows fixes, the update will be disabled by default for at least a few months after it's installed and partly because it will eventually render current Windows boot media unbootable. The fix requires changes to the Windows boot manager that can't be reversed once they've been enabled. Additionally, once the fixes have been enabled, your PC will no longer be able to boot from older bootable media that doesn't include the fixes. On the lengthy list of affected media: Windows install media like DVDs and USB drives created from Microsoft's ISO files; custom Windows install images maintained by IT departments; full system backups; network boot drives including those used by IT departments to troubleshoot machines and deploy new Windows images; stripped-down boot drives that use Windows PE; and the recovery media sold with OEM PCs.

Not wanting to suddenly render any users' systems unbootable, Microsoft will be rolling the update out in phases over the next few months. The initial version of the patch requires substantial user intervention to enable -- you first need to install May's security updates, then use a five-step process to manually apply and verify a pair of "revocation files" that update your system's hidden EFI boot partition and your registry. These will make it so that older, vulnerable versions of the bootloader will no longer be trusted by PCs. A second update will follow in July that won't enable the patch by default but will make it easier to enable. A third update in "first quarter 2024" will enable the fix by default and render older boot media unbootable on all patched Windows PCs. Microsoft says it is "looking for opportunities to accelerate this schedule," though it's unclear what that would entail.

For Red Hat's 30th anniversary, North Carolina's News & Observer newspaper ran a special four-part series of articles.

In the first article Red Hat co-founder Bob Young remembers Red Hat's first big breakthrough: winning InfoWorld's "OS of the Year" award in 1998 — at a time when Microsoft's Windows controlled 85% of the market. "How is that possible," Young said, "that one of the world's biggest technology companies, on this strategically critical product, loses the product of the year to a company with 50 employees in the tobacco fields of North Carolina?" The answer, he would tell the many reporters who suddenly wanted to learn about his upstart company, strikes at "the beauty" of open-source software.

"Our engineering team is an order of magnitude bigger than Microsoft's engineering team on Windows, and I don't really care how many people they have," Young would say. "Like they may have thousands of the smartest operating system engineers that they could scour the planet for, and we had 10,000 engineers by comparison...."

Young was a 40-year-old Canadian computer equipment salesperson with a software catalog when he noticed what Marc Ewing was doing. [Ewing was a recent college graduate bored with his two-month job at IBM, selling customized Linux as a side hustle.] It's pretty primitive, but it's going in the right direction, Young thought. He began reselling Ewing's Red Hat product. Eventually, he called Ewing, and the two met at a tech conference in New York City. "I needed a product, and Marc needed some marketing help," said Young, who was living in Connecticut at the time. "So we put our two little businesses together."

Red Hat incorporated in March 1993, with the earliest employees operating the nascent business out of Ewing's Durham apartment. Eventually, the landlord discovered what they were doing and kicked them out.
The four articles capture the highlights. ("A visual effects group used its Linux 4.1 to design parts of the 1997 film Titanic.") And it doesn't leave out Red Hat's skirmishes with Microsoft. ("Microsoft was owned by the richest person in the world. Red Hat engineers were still linking servers together with extension cords. ") "We were changing the industry and a lot of companies were mad at us," says Michael Ferris, Red Hat's VP of corporate development/strategy. Soon there were corporate partnerships with Netscape, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Compaq, Dell, and IBM — and when Red Hat finally goes public in 1999, its stock sees the eighth-largest first-day gain in Wall Street history, rising in value in days to over $7 billion and "making overnight millionaires of its earliest employees."

But there's also inspiring details like the quote painted on the wall of Red Hat's headquarters in Durham: "Every revolution was first a thought in one man's mind; and when the same thought occurs to another man, it is the key to that era..." It's fun to see the story told by a local newspaper, with subheadings like "It started with a student from Finland" and "Red Hat takes on the Microsoft Goliath."

Something I'd never thought of. 2001's 9/11 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center "destroyed the principal data centers of many Wall Street investment banks, which were housed in the twin towers. With their computers wiped out, financial institutions had to choose whether to rebuild with standard proprietary software or the emergent open source. Many picked the latter." And by the mid-2000s, "Red Hat was the world's largest provider of Linux...' according to part two of the series. "Soon, Red Hat was servicing more than 90% of Fortune 500 companies." By then, even the most vehement former critics were amenable to Red Hat's kind of software. Microsoft had begun to integrate open source into its core operations. "Microsoft was on the wrong side of history when open source exploded at the beginning of the century, and I can say that about me personally," Microsoft President Brad Smith later said.

In the 2010s, "open source has won" became a popular tagline among programmers. After years of fighting for legitimacy, former Red Hat executives said victory felt good. "There was never gloating," Tiemann said.

"But there was always pride."
In 2017 Red Hat's CEO answered questions from Slashdot's readers.