Examiners found out-of-place programs known as dynamic link libraries, or DLLs, that had been written onto the Wisconsin computer. The programs were designed to “redirect” a drawing if certain conditions were met, according to the complaint, helping orchestrate the outcome.
Source: Here’s how brothers rigged lotteries, authorities say
The lock screen is one of several ways that Windows 10 isn’t exactly free. From Start menu promotions to subscription-based games to personalized ads in Bing and the Edge browser, Microsoft has plenty of money-making hooks built into its latest OS.
Source: Windows 10 lock screen ads begin with Rise of the Tomb Raider push | PCWorld
Microsoft told us: “For individuals who have chosen to receive automatic updates through Windows Update, we help upgradable devices get ready for Windows 10 by downloading the files they’ll need if they decide to upgrade.
Source: Microsoft is downloading Windows 10 to your machine ‘just in case’
From: The Appeal of Free: 75 Million Users Download Windows 10 in First Month
Free Windows is proving to be a very attractive price indeed. Seventy-five million users have downloaded Windows 10 to their personal computers and tablets in the first month of its release, Microsoft announced on Wednesday.
Sign into Windows with your Microsoft account and the operating system immediately syncs settings and data to the company’s servers. That includes your browser history, favorites and the websites you currently have open as well as saved app, website and mobile hotspot passwords and Wi-Fi network names and passwords.
Source: Windows 10? Here are privacy issues you should consider
The updated terms also state that Microsoft will collect information “from you and your devices, including for example ‘app use data for apps that run on Windows’ and ‘data about the networks you connect to.’”
If you want to see what services are being hosted by a particular svchost.exe instance, you can use the tasklist command from the command prompt in order to see the list of services.
tasklist /SVC
WinSCP is an open source free SFTP client, FTP client, WebDAV client and SCP client for Windows. Its main function is file transfer between a local and a remote computer. Beyond this, WinSCP offers scripting and basic file manager functionality.
via Introducing WinSCP :: WinSCP.
This is a very useful program to get files off a PC and onto a Linux server which supports these services out of the box. I find Samba to be too clunky, unreliable, and very noisy on an open network by broadcasting packets to everyone. Only now did I have a need for something like this and SCP solves my problem and is more secure and easier to use than standard ftp. I still map drives using Samba on my closed network but I may try out the windows version of sshfs sometime in the future. The user interface on this tool is very intuitive and works well.
EMET, short for the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, is a free tool from Microsoft that can help Windows users beef up the security of commonly used applications, whether they are made by a third-party vendor or by Microsoft. EMET allows users to force applications to use one or both of two key security defenses built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 — Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP).
Put very simply, DEP is designed to make it harder to exploit security vulnerabilities on Windows, and ASLR makes it more difficult for exploits and malware to find the specific places in a system’s memory that they need to do their dirty work.
via Tools for a Safer PC — Krebs on Security.
By creating a free account at OpenDNS.com, changing the DNS settings on your machine, and registering your Internet address with OpenDNS, the company will block your computer from communicating with known malware and phishing sites. OpenDNS also offers a fairly effective adult content filtering service that can be used to block porn sites on an entire household’s network.
IDC is projecting Windows tablets to occupy 10.2 percent of the market by 2017, growing from a projected market share of 3 percent this year. By comparison, tablets based on Android and iOS will register slight dips in market share.
via Windows tablet shipments to grow, but won’t challenge Android, iOS | PCWorld.
In an amazing tour de force, Microsoft’s Automatic Update chute released at least six bad patches on Tuesday. Here’s what’s amazing: It’s just 48 hours or so since the bomb bay doors opened, and Microsoft has acknowledged problems with all of these patches.
via Microsoft botches six Windows patches in latest Automatic Update | Microsoft windows – InfoWorld.
This is why I never do automatic update.
Perhaps most of our computing will move to the cloud, but you know what device we’ll still be using for most of our interactions? It will be a PC, simply because it’s easier to enter data with a real keyboard than any other interface.