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US recommends Windows users patch against worm vulnerability
Microsoft Windows users who haven't patched their OS (or are using an unsupported version) are at risk of attackers exploiting a vulnerability known as BlueKeep. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Homeland Security's lead cybersecurity agency, said it successfully tested a working exploit for the BlueKeep vulnerability. Specifically, the agency was able to remotely run code on a Windows 2000 computer using BlueKeep, it stated in an advisory. The bug effects computers that are running Windows 7 or earlier (as well as Windows Server 2003 and 2008), and gives potential attackers access through Microsoft's Remote Desktop Services.
One week with Microsoft Cortana
"Never mind it. Never mind," I cursed, looking down on the poorly formed monstrosity that gazed back at me with a singular pulsing eye. No, not at me -- through me. This was not my trusty Google Assistant, with whom I shared a deep logistical and day-planning-based bond. This thing barely looked like the AI to which I was accustomed and -- even then -- only in passing. This alien program appears to have eaten my digital assistant and started wearing its skin -- and I'm about to spend the next week having it organize my life.
Microsoft will offer 3 flavors of Linux in the Windows Store
Microsoft made headlines at last year's Build developer conference when it announced that it would build support for the Bash shell and Ubuntu Linux binaries directly into Windows 10. Doing so enables devs to run command-line tools while building apps as well as allows power users to run limited instances of Linux directly on top of Windows without installing a virtual machine. Today, at this year's conference, the company one-upped itself and announced that it's expanding Linux support to include OpenSUSE and Fedora distributions.
T-Mobile leaks new Windows 10 phone ahead of announcement
T-Mobile accidentally leaked the newest Windows 10 phone, the Alcatel Idol 4S, ahead of the handset's official announcement during Microsoft's Surface event in New York City today. The handset-and-VR-headset bundle was originally released in July as a low-cost competitor to Samsung's Gear VR, though back then, the Idol was still running Android. T-Mobile is now offering the Idol 4S bundled with a VR headset as well as a 45-day trial subscription of Hulu, a 60-day trial subscription to Groove Music and a free copy of Halo Spartan. There's no word yet on pricing or availability.
Make massive mechanizations with Minecraft's Overworld update
Following on from last fall's update to Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition beta and Minecraft: Pocket Edition, which saw the introduction of basic redstone components, Microsoft today announced that the game's next update will deliver even more advanced mechanisms as well as new enemies and achievements. Players will also be able to more easily share their favorite worlds with a new map import/export function.
Skype's 'Mojis' insert Muppets into your boring video calls
Skype announced a new feature for its chat and messaging services on Tuesday that will allow users to incorporate short, Gif-like video clips into their conversations. The company is calling these new visual hybrids "Mojis" (le sigh). Just as Gmail now allows users to drop Giphy Gifs directly into emails, Skype now allows users to browse and select a moji by tapping an in-chat emoticon button. The new feature currently includes clips from Despicable Me, Bridesmaids, Pitch Perfect, Jurassic Park, The Muppets and other intellectual properties. There's no word on whether users will be able to upload their own clips or whether the service is limited to participating corporate content partners. The feature begins rolling out to users running the latest app version on Windows, Mac, Android and iOS today.
November's Xbox One update boosts speed and social
Microsoft has revealed new details on the major update coming to Xbox One this November. The tile-based Xbone dashboard that we've grown accustomed to since the days of the 360 will be replaced with a sleeker and faster UI based on Windows 10 and geared heavily towards social interactions. The company initially revealed the update back at E3 in August. The new dashboard will reportedly "get you to popular gaming features up to 50 percent faster," according to a recent post by Mike Ybarra, Director of Program Management for Xbox.
Daily Roundup: 8GB iPhone 5c rumor, Microsoft OneNote goes free, and more
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Daily Roundup: new Amazon and Valve controllers, Samsung's ultrasonic phone case and more!
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Why what you think about that "new category" thing may be all wrong
Spectacle. We love it. That moment when technology changes and our minds are blown. It's easy to forget that many "one more thing" things were actually pretty boring: the iPod mini, Safari for Windows, the Power Mac G5. Our current obsession with "new categories" derives from the heroin-like highs of the iPhone and iPad. While every year, Apple's laptop and desktop lines iteratively improve in user features and hardware, it's hard to get past that rush of newness that iOS delivered. Even iPod, the consumer device that more or less revolutionized Apple's marketplace in 2001, didn't produce the kind of magical expectations that iOS mobile did. Is Apple still innovating? Is the Tim Cook catholic...er...in the woods...um...wait, I'm pretty sure there's a metaphor here that means "yes". Yes, Apple is still innovating. Since we haven't had our next holycrapdoodle moment, I'm going to guess that none of these internally developed products have been suitable or mature enough to bring to market yet. There's the whole wearables thing... If you're willing to strap your iPhone 5S to your forehead, it's already here with its new-fangled motion chip supported by literally several apps! It's not what everyone was expecting, but it kind of positions Apple. There's also Apple TV, which keeps getting better but still doesn't "rule the living room" in any meaningful way. And then there's that car thing, which, *shrug*. Back in reality, there are lots of hints in iOS 7 about possible future directions. The latest OS now supports hardware keyboards including control keys, and alt keys, and stuff like that. There's also massively expanded support for document containers like RTF. It all could potentially hint at a toasterfridge merging of iOS and OS X -- or not. The problem is that two major innovations do not a corporate trend make. They were amazing but they may not have been defining as in specifically "Apple is the company whose new products always produce paradigm shift". Sure, we want more amazing but it's not something that it's reasonable to expect on a regular, scheduled basis. You know the meme. Meth, not even once.
Microsoft wants you to buy their products, to start offering cash for iPhones
Earlier in the month, Microsoft -- which would love for you to pick up one of its new second-generation Surface 2 tablets -- began offering iPad owners a paltry US$200 or more for a trade-in in hopes that you'd actually fall for the ploy, grab the cash and buy one of their beleaguered tablets. Now Forbes is reporting that Microsoft will be offering you a minimum of $200 for your iPhone 4s or iPhone 5 at some of the US and Canadian Microsoft Stores. In this case, the trade-in promotion is part of the #timetoswitch campaign, and Microsoft is hoping that you'll ditch your nice and relatively new iPhone for a Windows Phone instead of an iPhone 5s or 5c. Not that Microsoft seems desperate or anything, but they also have an online campaign that started a few weeks ago where they'll take any Apple, Android or BlackBerry device in return for a Visa gift card. I wonder how much they'll give me for that third-generation iPod classic that's sitting on the shelf... Forbes' Kelly Clay said it best: "Apple's impressive sales figures of the iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c in the past few days mean millions of consumers are not only freshly tied into new contracts but overtly prefer the iOS platform over Windows as they waited to purchase the new line of iPhones -- and avoided purchasing a Windows Phone when they had the chance." It's beginning to look like Microsoft's business strategy for the near future is to become the leading vendor of used smartphones and tablets.
Parallels Desktop 9 announced, available September 5
Hot on the heels of the announcement of Parallels Access, Parallels today announced the latest upgrade to the Parallels Desktop virtualization application. Parallels Desktop 9 will be available to the public on September 5, 2013, and includes a variety of new features: Support for cloud services: Sync iCloud, Dropbox, Google Drive, SkyDrive, etc. with your Mac and your Windows virtual machine without unnecessary duplication of files locally. Enhanced Windows 8 and 8.1 support: Parallels Desktop brings back the real Start menu and lets customers use Metro apps in a window instead of full-screen. Security Center: Easily access and install complimentary security software subscriptions to keep the Mac and Windows virtual machines safe from viruses and malware, all from one location. Enhanced new Virtual Machine Wizard: It is easier than ever to set up a new virtual machine, especially on computers that don't have DVD drives. Power Nap support: On a Retina MacBook Pro or a MacBook Air, the Power Nap feature now extends to Windows and Windows apps, so virtual machines and all Windows applications are always up-to-date. Mac gestures inside Windows apps: Parallels Desktop now includes the addition of the Dictionary lookup gesture in Windows applications. Thunderbolt and Firewire storage device support: For convenience of everyday use, customers can connect those devices directly to a Windows virtual machine. PDF printer for Windows: Lets people print from any Windows application to a PDF on the Mac desktop, even if the application doesn't have that functionality. Sticky multi-monitor setup: When using Windows in Full Screen mode and connecting to an external monitor, Parallels Desktop will remember settings and put the Windows virtual machine back in full-screen mode on the remote monitor. Custom keyboard: Editable keyboard shortcuts help customize the Windows experience. Linux guest integration: Parallels Desktop customers who use Linux now have additional and enhanced integration with the Mac OS. Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac is priced at US$79.99, and the Student Edition is available for $39.99. Parallels Desktop 9 Switch to Mac Edition is $99.95. Upgrades are starting today for existing Parallels Desktop 7 or 8 for Mac customers for $49.99. Parallels Desktop 9 for Mac customers receive a complimentary six-month subscription to Parallels Access for the Mac when Parallels Desktop 9 is installed and activated, a $39.99 value. TUAW will have a full review of Parallels Desktop 9 in the near future. In the meantime, here's a short video demonstrating the new features.
Amazon opens Mac-friendly download store in UK
Mac owners in the US have had the ability to purchase and download software from Amazon for quite some time. Now Electronista is reporting that the online retailer has opened at Mac-friendly download store in the United Kingdom. The store offers software downloads for Mac and Windows, and implies that Amazon might be providing similar country-specific digital stores going forward. At the present time, there's not exactly an avalanche of Mac-specific software in the store compared to the US store; the UK store currently has fewer than a hundred titles, while the US store features a whopping 1,372 results. What can you purchase from the digital software store in the UK right now? Mostly Microsoft Office and Adobe products, as well as a handful of games. The store is still shown as being in beta right now, so UK Mac owners can expect to see the selection of apps increase as time goes on.
gdgt's best deals for August 7: Best Buy gift cards with Xbox 360, Wii U purchases
Ready to save some cash on your tech buys? Then you've come to the right place. Our sister site gdgt tracks price drops on thousands of products every day, and twice a week they feature some of the best deals they've found right here. But act fast! Many of these are limited-time offers, and won't last long. Today's hottest deals both come from Best Buy, which is offering big-ticket gift cards to those who purchase the latest Xbox 360 iteration or a Wii U. There's also an appealing offer out there for those who crave DirecTV's NFL Sunday Ticket Max app. Join gdgt and add the gadgets you're shopping for to your "Want" list. Every time there's a price cut, you'll get an email alert!
gdgt's best deals for July 17: HP Envy TouchSmart, Logitech Bluetooth Illuminated Keyboard
Ready to save some cash on your tech buys? Then you've come to the right place. Our sister site gdgt tracks price drops on thousands of products every day, and twice a week they feature some of the best deals they've found right here. But act fast! Many of these are limited-time offers, and won't last long. Today's hottest deals include a a sweet Costco deal on an HP touchscreen laptop, as well as a glowing offer for a Logitech Bluetooth Illuminated Keyboard. Want the latest deals delivered to your inbox? Join gdgt and add the gadgets you're shopping for to your "Want" list. Every time there's a price cut, you'll get an email alert!
Gauging the scale of the post-PC opportunity: "Mobile Is Eating The World"
Speaking at All Things D in 2010, Steve Jobs famously predicted that "PCs are going to be like trucks": specialised devices that only appeal to people with particular demands of their computing experience while ordinary people would come to prefer smartphones and tablets for all their computing activities. Last month, Enders Analysis consultant Benedict Evans gave a presentation at BookExpo America entitled "Mobile Is Eating The World." In it, he laid out a thorough series of metrics that suggest, when taken as a whole, that the scale of the post-PC opportunity is somewhere between 'ginormous' and 'staggering' -- and that Jobs's vision is coming inexorably to pass. Now, I don't want to spoil the whole thing. I urge you to read the slide deck for yourself. But I am going to cherry pick a few of the figures I found most interesting to whet your appetite, and add in some of my own ideas as to what this all could mean for the future. Before that, though, an aside about analysts. There's a strong meme circulating amongst Apple blogs that analysts are idiots and their writing to be universally shunned. Like most strong memes, this one presents a simple narrative; like most simple narratives, this one is wrong. Reality is far more nuanced than that. There are good analysts and bad analysts, as with people in all walks of life. Certainly, I cannot understand why Gene Munster is obsessed with the Apple TV, an idea that makes no sense to me. Evans is one of the good guys though. The scale of the post-PC opportunity Evans starts out by talking about just how big the post-PC device market could be in the future. Total global PC sales in 2012 were 350 million; there are 1.6 billion PCs in use, most of them shared between multiple users, and they are replaced every 4-5 years. For mobile devices (including smartphones, feature phones, and tablets), 2012 saw 1.7 billion sales -- almost five times as many as there were PCs -- to a total of 3.2 billion users, almost always used only by one person, and typically upgraded every two years. In other words, mobile is a whole different ballgame to computers, and it always has been. Dwell on those figures for a moment -- 3.2 billion means almost half the planet has a mobile device today (almost all of them low-end feature phones, of course). Still, mobile sales have outnumbered PC sales for decades; that's old news. What's changed about mobile is the rise of the smartphone and (to a slightly lesser extent, because it started later) the tablet. Since 2007, although feature phone sales have been declining slightly, smartphone and tablet sales have grown very quickly. Today, smartphones make up about one in every three phones sold, and that ratio is continuing to move in smartphone's favour. Furthermore, unlike PC sales -- broadly stagnant for several years now -- there is no sign of growth in phone sales slackening off. There's still half the planet to go, after all. So where does this lead? Evans predicts that in the next five years, we'll see no change in the size of the PC market -- but explosive growth in the smartphone and tablet space, three to four times bigger than where they stand today. That'll put tablet sales well above combined sales of desktop and laptop PCs, and smartphone sales far above that again. So it seems Jobs was right. The scale of opportunity in mobile technology is huge. But how well positioned is Apple to benefit from this? And what of its competitors? Is Microsoft withering on the vine? In a slide entitled "the irrelevance of Microsoft", Evans paints a stark portrait. As little ago as 2009, almost all online access was done via PCs and as almost all PCs run Windows that meant Microsoft's share of the "connected device" market was pretty large: 80% or so. But as more and more smartphones and tablets have been sold, which almost entirely run non-Microsoft OSs, so that share has steadily declined ever since. It's now down to 25% or so. Certainly, in terms of things like determining web standards, Microsoft is a much diminished influence. Does that bode ill for the company, however? Don't forget that although Microsoft's share of the connected device market has declined, that's mostly because the overall market itself has grown. PC sales, as I remarked above, have been largely static through this era, and therefore so has Microsoft's revenue from Windows licences. It had a revenue of $18.8 billion in the first quarter of 2013, and $6.06 billion in profit. Not too bad, right? This is because most of the mobile growth has been in smart phones, and very few people are buying a smart phone to use as a PC, so (so far) the affect of the growth in mobile tech haven't been felt in Microsoft's markets. However, in the last two years, tablets have also been growing explosively (although far behind smartphones) and this is a product category that can replace a PC. So PC sales have, finally, switched from stagnating to declining, and there's the real threat to Microsoft's bottom line. There's also another element to this story, which is Microsoft's other cash cow: Office. Office sales largely work through a sort of institutional inertia: the main value is that everyone uses it, so everyone shares files around in its formats, and no third party app has ever managed to do a flawless job of opening and working with those formats without munging the layout, breaking the fonts, or some other irritation. But today we're in a world where less than a quarter of people are using Microsoft devices online, and so less than a quarter of people online can choose to work on Office. Most of those of those people are on phones, of course, where it doesn't matter much -- only the brave and foolhardy are doing complex word processing on a smartphone. But many of them are also on tablets, and that could be a problem for Microsoft as tablets eat into laptop and desktop PC sales. Now, this is a line of reasoning that leads you to the conclusion that Microsoft should port Office to the iPad. I used to have a hunch we'd have seen this happen by now, but so far, it's chosen not to do so, and instead use the existence of Office as an extra selling point for its Windows RT and Windows 8 tablets. In other words, Microsoft is prioritising protecting Windows PC and tablet revenue over protecting Office revenue. It remains to be proven if that was a smart call or not; perhaps the release of Office 365 for iPhone means Microsoft's resolve is weakening, although I'd argue that's not quite the same thing. Few people would choose to use a smartphone rather than a PC for document editing, so the two products don't really compete; whereas people might well perfer to use a tablet to a PC, so the competition has more direct consequences. The "Four Horsemen" Evans's lists "four horsemen" of the post-PC world: Apple, Google, Samsung, and Amazon. (He sees RIM and Microsoft as rapidly becoming irrelevant and never gaining relevance, respectively.) How does Evans see competition between these companies today, and how does he see it playing out in the future? Consider the business of selling devices. In this, Apple and Samsung rule supreme: not in terms of units (Apple and Samsung combined sell less than 30% of all handsets), but in terms of profit (Apple and Samsung hold more than 95% of the profit in the entire handset industry, with the lion's share of that going to Apple). Note that it's a mistake to believe that this somehow means Android is a failure because Google doesn't make any money on it. Remember that from the very outset Android was supplied by Google to the handset OEMs (HTC, Motorola, Samsung, etc) for free. If one's plan is to make a lot of money, one doesn't generally start by giving things away. Android was never supposed to generate any direct revenue for Google. Google makes money by serving up ads, and to do so effectively it needs people using its various products -- search, email, maps, coughReadercough. Android was designed to ensure that no-one like Apple could establish a stranglehold on the future mobile market and freeze Google out. Or, as Erick Schonfeld wrote for our sister site TechCrunch, "search is Google's castle, everything else is a [defensive] moat [around it]". Evans also believes there will be significant growth in low-end Android tablets, with 7" screen sizes and prices below (often far below) the $330 price point for a poverty spec iPad mini. There could be as many as 125m cheap Android tablets sold in China alone in 2013, he claims -- compared to 120m tablets sold in the entire world in 2012 (of which 66m were iPads). However, as many others have pointed out, Evans underscores that Apple products seem to lead the market in usage, far out of proportion to sales; depending on the exact metric you believe, anything up to 80% of all tablet web traffic comes from the iPad. I've yet to find an explanation that entirely addresses this. It's easy to list factors -- some Android tablets are shipped but never sold to end users; some of them are awful, and after a few weeks end up gathering dust; some of them are used regularly, but for much smaller amounts of time per day than iPads; some of them are mostly used for purposes other than web surfing (e.g. in-car satnav and entertainment centers); some of the metrics are biased towards English-language sites, whereas Android is huge in China. But to my mind, none of that convincingly adds up to the size of the difference in the stats. Perhaps I'm wrong, though, and that's all it is; or perhaps there's some other factor I've overlooked. Please let me know your thoughts in the comments. The ecosystem is key Selling devices isn't the whole of it, though. For Google, Android devices itself are only a means to an end -- a way to make Google services more accessible and attractive to end users. It's about building and supporting an ecosystem. Evans finishes on differentiating between ecosystem types and sizes between the key software platform players: Apple with iOS, Google with Android, but also Facebook and Amazon with its as-predicted-by-me (why yes, I am still smug about this; thanks for asking) Android fork. He (rightly) points out that Apple is qualitatively different from the other companies discussed here. For Google, Facebook and Amazon the platforms are designed to facilitate and increase customer engagement with their services -- ultimately, to either serve them adverts or enable them to buy things. Apple, however, remains primarily a hardware company that uses a strong software ecosystem as a hardware differentiator rather than a end in its own right. If you're inclined to disagree with that, remember that iOS updates are free and OS X updates are cheap -- but iPhones and Macs are neither. Apple's main profit driver and main focus remains hardware sales. The bottom line Three years ago, Jobs predicted that mobile devices would come to compete with and ultimately domainate over PC sales, coining the phrase "post-PC" to cover mobile devices that overlap with PCs -- so, smartphones and tablets, as opposed to feature phones. He tied a significant chunk of Apple's future to this vision, by concentrating much of its effort onto iOS and the hardware that runs it. There's plenty of evidence that Jobs was right, and as these trends continue, so companies that are involved in this space -- Apple and Samsung being the most obvious -- will continue to thrive. If you like his data, I humbly urge you to follow Benedict Evans on Twitter and subscribe to his weekly newsletter, where he routinely shares his insight and data like this. I would also like to extend my personal thanks to Mr Evans for allowing me to reprint some of this slides in this writeup.
The Daily Roundup for 02.04.2013
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
The Daily Roundup for 11.24.2012
You might say the day is never really done in consumer technology news. Your workday, however, hopefully draws to a close at some point. This is the Daily Roundup on Engadget, a quick peek back at the top headlines for the past 24 hours -- all handpicked by the editors here at the site. Click on through the break, and enjoy.
Windows 8 review
It's unusual, to say the least, for us to spend a year with a product before publishing our review. In the case of Windows 8, we've written thousands of words already, starting with our first hands-on in September of 2011, followed by deep dives on the Developer Preview, Consumer Preview, Release Preview and RTM build. Even our readers have had ample time to get acquainted with the OS -- it's been available as a public download since February. And yet, we've never tested a final version of the software running on brand new, made-for-Windows-8 hardware. With the OS now on sale (alongside dozens of new PCs), it's finally time for us to double back and revisit everything we've previously written in the form of a final, comprehensive review. And what a challenging assignment this was: it's hard enough to give an OS the full review treatment without burying the reader in minute details. It's even tougher when the software was built for so many different kinds of hardware. Combining a traditional desktop with Windows Phone-inspired Live Tiles, Windows 8 was designed to be equally at home on traditional PCs and more finger-friendly devices, like tablets and hybrids. In addition to walking you through the operating system's various gestures and built-in apps, then, we'll spend some time talking about which form factors are best suited to this redesigned version of Windows. Read on to see what we found out.
Windows 8 is in stores today -- are you buying a copy?
That special moment has come which usually rolls around only once every three years: Microsoft has released a new version of Windows. For the version 8 update, though, the stakes are higher than ever. Redmond isn't just trying to convince legions of existing Windows users that they should break their PC update cycles. It's trying to reclaim a foothold in a tablet space that's now dominated by Apple and Google -- and it's dipping into self-designed computers for the first time with a Surface tablet that theoretically represents Microsoft's perfect vision. But how well is Windows 8 resonating with you? Did you download a copy as soon as the servers were warmed up, or do you see it as a calamity that restricts a perfectly good platform? Sound off in our poll and in the comments below. [Image credit: Steven Sinofsky, SkyDrive] %Poll-78538%
