An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One of the enduring legacies of the '90s browser wars has been an outsize attention to how Microsoft handles default app settings in Windows, especially browser settings. The company plans to make it more straightforward to change your app defaults in future versions of Windows 11, according to a new blog post that outlines a "principled approach to app pinning and app defaults in Windows."

The company's principled approach is a combination of broad, vague platitudes ("we will ensure people who use Windows are in control of changes to their pins and their defaults") and new developer features. A future version of Windows 11 will offer a consistent "deep link URI" for apps so they can send users to the right place in the Settings app for changing app defaults. Microsoft will also add a pop-up notification that should be used when newly installed apps want to pin themselves to your Taskbar, rather than either pinning themselves by default or getting lost somewhere in your Start menu.

These new features will be added to Windows "in the coming months," starting in the Dev channel Windows Insider Preview builds. Though Microsoft frames these changes as a way to make changing default apps easier and more consistent, they also serve as a gentle rebuke to developers who handle things differently.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: In Something Pretty Right: A History of Visual Basic, Retool's Ryan Lucas has a nice round-up of how Visual Basic became the world's most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.

Visual Basic (or VB) burst onto the scene at a magical, transitional moment, presenting a radically simpler alternative for Windows 3.0 development. Bill Gates' genuine enthusiasm for VB is evident in an accompanying 1991 video in which BillG personally and playfully demonstrates Visual Basic 1.0 at its launch event, as well as in a 1994 video in which Gates thanks Alan Cooper, the "Father of Visual Basic," with the Windows Pioneer Award.

For Gates, VB was love at first sight. "It blew his mind, he had never seen anything like it," recalls Cooper of Gates's reaction to his 1988 demo of a prototype. "At one point he turned to his retinue and asked 'Why can't we do stuff like this?'" Gates even came up with the idea of taking Cooper's visual programming frontend and replacing its small custom internal language with BASIC.

After seeing what Microsoft had done to his baby, Cooper reportedly sat frustrated in the front row at the launch event. But it's hard to argue with success, and Cooper eventually came to appreciate VB's impact. "Had Ruby [Cooper's creation] gone to the market as a shell construction set," Cooper said, "it would have made millions of people happier, but then Visual Basic made hundreds of millions of people happier. I was not right, or rather, I was right enough, had a modicum of rightness. Same for Bill Gates, but the two of us together did something pretty right."

At its peak, Visual Basic had nearly 3.5 million developers worldwide. Many of the innovations that Alan Cooper and Scott Ferguson's teams introduced 30 years ago with VB are nowhere to be found in modern development, fueling a nostalgic fondness for the ease and magic VB delivered that we have yet to rekindle.

Microsoft appears to be testing a built-in cryptocurrency wallet for Edge, according to screenshots pulled from a beta build of the browser. Ars Technica reports: The feature, which the screenshots say is strictly for internal testing, was unearthed by Twitter user @thebookisclosed, who has a history of digging up present-but-disabled features in everything from new Windows 11 builds to ancient Windows Vista betas. According to the screenshots, the crypto wallet is "embedded in Edge, making it easy to use without installing any extension," and it can handle multiple types of cryptocurrency. It will also record transactions and the value of your individual currencies as they fluctuate. An "explore" tab offers news stories relevant to cryptocurrency, and an "assets" tab will let you stare lovingly at your NFTs. The wallet is "non-custodial" (also called "self-custodial"), meaning that you have sole ownership of and responsibility for the passwords and recovery keys that allow access to your funds. Microsoft won't be able to let you back in if you lose your credentials.

Remember Second Life? The virtual world launched on the desktop web back in 2003 with 3D avatars and spaces for various social activities. Believe it or not, it has been running continually this entire time -- and now it's coming to mobile for the first time. From a report: In fact, this will be the first time that Second Life has expanded beyond the PC (across Windows, macOS, and Linux) in any form. In a post to the virtual world's community web forum, a community manager for Second Life developer Linden Lab shared a video with some details about the mobile version's development, and announced that a beta version of the mobile app will launch sometime this year.

The video reveals that the app was built using Unity -- in part to make for an easy path to releasing and maintaining the app on multiple platforms, including the iPhone, iPad, Android phones, and Android tablets. It also includes a few minutes of footage of Second Life's detailed character models and environments, with accompanying commentary by Linden Lab developers about bringing as much of the experience to mobile as possible.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft announced Tuesday that it has signed a 10-year deal to bring its Xbox PC games to little-known Ukraine-based streaming platform Boosteroid. The move is being positioned in part to "mak[e] even more clear to regulators that our acquisition of Activision Blizzard will make Call of Duty available on far more devices than before," as Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a statement. "If the only argument is that Microsoft is going to withhold Call of Duty from other platforms, and we've now entered into contracts that are going to bring this to many more devices and many more platforms, that is a pretty hard case to make to a court," Smith told The Wall Street Journal.

Started in 2017, Boosteroid boasts 4 million streaming customers using servers based in nine European countries and six US states. Those customers pay 7.50 euro per month to stream games from those servers to any smartphone, Windows/Mac/Linux-based PC, or Android TV device. Boosteroid currently links to users' accounts on other PC-based platforms -- including Steam, the Epic Games Store, Blizzard's Battle.net, EA's Origin, the Rockstar Game Launcher, and Wargaming -- and lets them play games from those services without having to install them on a local gaming PC. With this new deal, that access will expand to include games available through Microsoft's Xbox app on the PC.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Friday, a software developer named Georgi Gerganov created a tool called "llama.cpp" that can run Meta's new GPT-3-class AI large language model, LLaMA, locally on a Mac laptop. Soon thereafter, people worked out how to run LLaMA on Windows as well. Then someone showed it running on a Pixel 6 phone, and next came a Raspberry Pi (albeit running very slowly). If this keeps up, we may be looking at a pocket-sized ChatGPT competitor before we know it. [...]

Typically, running GPT-3 requires several datacenter-class A100 GPUs (also, the weights for GPT-3 are not public), but LLaMA made waves because it could run on a single beefy consumer GPU. And now, with optimizations that reduce the model size using a technique called quantization, LLaMA can run on an M1 Mac or a lesser Nvidia consumer GPU. After obtaining the LLaMA weights ourselves, we followed [independent AI researcher Simon Willison's] instructions and got the 7B parameter version running on an M1 Macbook Air, and it runs at a reasonable rate of speed. You call it as a script on the command line with a prompt, and LLaMA does its best to complete it in a reasonable way.

There's still the question of how much the quantization affects the quality of the output. In our tests, LLaMA 7B trimmed down to 4-bit quantization was very impressive for running on a MacBook Air -- but still not on par with what you might expect from ChatGPT. It's entirely possible that better prompting techniques might generate better results. Also, optimizations and fine-tunings come quickly when everyone has their hands on the code and the weights -- even though LLaMA is still saddled with some fairly restrictive terms of use. The release of Alpaca today by Stanford proves that fine tuning (additional training with a specific goal in mind) can improve performance, and it's still early days after LLaMA's release. A step-by-step instruction guide for running LLaMA on a Mac can be found here (Warning: it's fairly technical).

An anonymous reader shares this report from Dark Reading: In recent weeks, hackers have been deploying the "IceFire" ransomware against Linux enterprise networks, a noted shift for what was once a Windows-only malware.

A report from SentinelOne suggests that this may represent a budding trend. Ransomware actors have been targeting Linux systems more than ever in cyberattacks in recent weeks and months, notable not least because "in comparison to Windows, Linux is more difficult to deploy ransomware against, particularly at scale," Alex Delamotte, security researcher at SentinelOne, tells Dark Reading....

"[M]any Linux systems are servers," Delamotte points out, "so typical infection vectors like phishing or drive-by download are less effective." So instead, recent IceFire attacks have exploited CVE-2022-47986 — a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the IBM Aspera data transfer service, with a CVSS rating of 9.8.

Delamotte posits a few reasons for why more ransomware actors are choosing Linux as of late. For one thing, she says, "Linux-based systems are frequently utilized in enterprise settings to perform crucial tasks such as hosting databases, Web servers, and other mission-critical applications. Consequently, these systems are often more valuable targets for ransomware actors due to the possibility of a larger payout resulting from a successful attack, compared to a typical Windows user."

A second factor, she guesses, "is that some ransomware actors may perceive Linux as an unexploited market that could yield a higher return on investment."
While previous reports had IceFire targetting tech companies, SentinelLabs says they've seen recent attacks against organizations "in the media and entertainment sector," impacting victims "in Turkey, Iran, Pakistan, and the United Arab Emirates, which are typically not a focus for organized ransomware actors."

Microsoft is starting to test a system called File Recommendations in File Explorer, which does exactly what the name suggests -- when you visit the home tab, it shows specific files that you may want to open at the top. The Verge reports: In a blog post, the company says the current version is only available to some Insiders in its Dev Channel who have installed the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 23403 update and will only work if you're logged in with an Azure Active Directory account (meaning that currently, this feature feels squarely aimed at business users). For those that do have it, it'll suggest cloud files that you own or that have been shared with you.

Microsoft says it plans to "monitor feedback and see how it lands before pushing it out to everyone," so it seems as if it's aware that the feature could be controversial. Part of that may be just down to the fact that not everybody will want unexpected results in their file browser -- though based on the screenshot, you will be able to collapse the Recommended section.

Microsoft is getting ready to publicly test major new Windows features even earlier. While the software giant has been previewing changes to Windows for nearly a decade, a new Canary channel for Windows Insiders will allow anyone to try out "hot off the presses" builds of Windows that include major changes to the kernel, APIs, and other big parts of Windows. From a report: It feels like this new Canary channel is preparation work for Windows 12, which Intel and Microsoft have both been hinting at recently. "The new Canary Channel is going to be the place to preview platform changes that require longer-lead time before getting released to customers," says Amanda Langowski, Microsoft's head of the Windows Insider program, in a blog post today. "Some examples of this include major changes to the Windows kernel, new APIs, etc." We've seen Microsoft test underlying platform changes to Windows before that eventually shipped in a future version of Windows. Microsoft tested some display changes to Windows 10 preview builds before Windows 11 was announced, and the changes only ended up shipping in what became Windows 11. Likewise, x64 emulation for Windows 10 on Arm was tested early on and only ever shipped in Windows 11.

Researchers have announced a major cybersecurity find -- the world's first-known instance of real-world malware that can hijack a computer's boot process even when Secure Boot and other advanced protections are enabled and running on fully updated versions of Windows. From a report: Dubbed BlackLotus, the malware is what's known as a UEFI bootkit. These sophisticated pieces of malware hijack the UEFI -- short for Unified Extensible Firmware Interface -- the low-level and complex chain of firmware responsible for booting up virtually every modern computer. As the mechanism that bridges a PC's device firmware with its operating system, the UEFI is an OS in its own right. It's located in an SPI-connected flash storage chip soldered onto the computer motherboard, making it difficult to inspect or patch. Because the UEFI is the first thing to run when a computer is turned on, it influences the OS, security apps, and all other software that follows. These traits make the UEFI the perfect place to run malware. When successful, UEFI bootkits disable OS security mechanisms and ensure that a computer remains infected with stealthy malware that runs at the kernel mode or user mode, even after the operating system is reinstalled or a hard drive is replaced.

As appealing as it is to threat actors to install nearly invisible and unremovable malware that has kernel-level access, there are a few formidable hurdles standing in their way. One is the requirement that they first hack the device and gain administrator system rights, either by exploiting one or more vulnerabilities in the OS or apps or by tricking a user into installing trojanized software. Only after this high bar is cleared can the threat actor attempt an installation of the bootkit. The second thing standing in the way of UEFI attacks is UEFI Secure Boot, an industry-wide standard that uses cryptographic signatures to ensure that each piece of software used during startup is trusted by a computer's manufacturer. Secure Boot is designed to create a chain of trust that will prevent attackers from replacing the intended bootup firmware with malicious firmware. If a single firmware link in that chain isn't recognized, Secure Boot will prevent the device from starting.

Microsoft is making Outlook for Mac free to use today. From a report: Outlook is now available free in Apple's App Store, and you no longer need a Microsoft 365 subscription or Office license to use it. It's a surprise move that coincides with Microsoft's push to make its Windows desktop Outlook email client more web-powered. Outlook for Mac includes support for Outlook.com accounts, Gmail, iCloud, Yahoo, and any email provider that has IMAP support. Microsoft redesigned its Mac email client in 2020, with a user interface that's optimized for Apple's latest macOS design changes.

"I think the answer is no, but there are some clever people around here," writes long-time Slashdot reader shanen, "so...

"Is there any firewall or router or some other device that can adequately protect an old and no longer supported computer?" I have at least two of those that come to mind, and I might use them more often if there was a safe way to connect them to the Internet.

The specifics probably matter, though that's like opening a can of worms, but... One is a little old machine running an old and no longer supported version of Linux. Another is a Windows XP box that's too customized at a low level to run Linux.

But the big concern involves a couple of old boxes that are only alive now because Windows 10 saved them from the end-of-service of Windows 7. Right now it looks like they might outlive Windows 10, too, but two of them are not suitable for Windows 11. Plus my spouse has an old Windows 8 box now running under 10...
What happens when you combine missed security updates with internet connectivity? Share your best thoughts in the comments.

Can you use an unsafe computer safely?

Microsoft "is adding iPhone support to its Phone Link app on Windows 11," reports MacRumors. "The app allows iPhone users to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages, and view an iPhone's notifications directly on a PC." Notably, the app brings limited iMessage functionality to Windows. After pairing an iPhone with a PC via Bluetooth and granting some permissions on the iPhone, users can send and receive iMessages and SMS text messages in Phone Link, but there is no support for group chats or sending photos and videos.
The Verge notes you won't see the full message history in conversations, "as only messages that have been sent or received using Phone Link will be displayed." Microsoft isn't using blue or green bubbles in Phone Link either, as the company isn't able to differentiate between a standard text message and one sent via iMessage. The Phone Link integration for iOS is basic compared to what's available for Android, but Microsoft has never supported messaging or calls for iPhone users before, so this is a step in the right direction....

This new Phone Link support arrives alongside a big new Windows 11 update that includes AI-powered Bing on the taskbar, a screen recording feature, better touch optimizations, and more. If you're interested in testing this new Phone Link support for iOS, it will be available for Windows Insiders in the Dev, Beta, and Release Preview channels, but Microsoft is kicking off testing with a "small percentage" of testers this week.
Thanks to ttyler (Slashdot reader #20,687) for sharing the news.

Matt_Bennett (Slashdot reader #79,107) writes: Swedish power company Vattenfall released a study on the interactions of seabirds and offshore wind turbines. They used cameras and radar to record the tracks of the birds during daylight hours at Aberdeen Offshore Wind Farm over peak periods of bird activity in 2020 and 2021.

The study observed no collisions or even narrow escapes between birds and rotor blades. In 97.7% of the recordings, the birds avoided the RSZ (rotor swept zone).
The company (owned by the Swedish government) spent €3 million on the two-year study, according to Electrek, and now has ten thousand videos of birds flying...nowhere near the wind turbines. Herring gulls avoided the rotor blades by a full 90-110 meters (295-361 feet) while kittiwakes flew even further from the blades — 140-160 meters (459-525 feet).

"By way of comparison, each of these human-related sources kill millions or even billions of birds per year: fossil fuels, deforestation, pesticides, windows, and the common housecat."

Microsoft is releasing an update to Windows 11 today that adds the company's new AI-powered Bing search to the taskbar. From a report: The new Windows 11 update will offer quick access to the new Bing chat feature alongside a bunch of new features. Windows 11 is also getting improvements to widgets, a better touch mode, a screen recording feature, tabs inside Notepad, and more. The new Bing integration is a surprise addition that Microsoft hasn't been testing with its Windows Insiders. A new Bing icon will appear within the search box in the taskbar, with Microsoft highlighting the new chat answers experience in the search flyout. While chat answers won't be available directly within the search flyout, Windows 11 users will be able to quickly start a Bing chat in Edge from here -- providing they have access to the Bing preview. Microsoft is also opening up a preview of its Phone Link app for iOS, meaning iPhone users can link their devices to Windows. This will include access to send and receive messages (yes, even iMessage), calls, and notifications.

Microsoft is now force-installing the Microsoft Defender for Individuals application when installing or updating the Microsoft 365 apps. BleepingComputer reports: It was first unveiled for Windows 11 Insiders in March 2022 and has been available for customers with Personal or Family subscriptions since June 2022. However, starting earlier this month, it will also be automatically installed when first running the Microsoft 365 installer or after the next update, as spotted by WindowsLatest.

"Starting in late February of 2023, the Microsoft Defender app will be included in the Microsoft 365 installer," the company says in a support document updated last week. "That means that when you install the Microsoft 365 apps on your Windows device, the Microsoft Defender app will automatically be installed for you along with the other apps. If you have an active Microsoft 365 subscription and have already installed the Microsoft 365 apps, then the Microsoft Defender app will be automatically installed for you with the next update."

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: .NET 8, the next planned version of the Microsoft's open source software development platform, is set to emphasize Linux accommodations as well as cloud development and containers.

A first preview of .NET 8 is available for download at dot.microsoft.com for Windows, Linux, and macOS, Microsoft said on February 21. A long-term support (LTS) release that will be supported for three years, .NET 8 is due for production availability in November, a year after the release of predecessor .NET 7.

The new .NET release will be buildable on Linux directly from the dotnet/dotnet repository, using dotnet/source-build to build .NET runtimes, tools, and SDKs. This is the same build used by Red Hat and Canonical to build .NET. Over time, this capability will be extended to support Windows and macOS. Previously, .NET could be built from the source, but a "source tarball" was required from the dotnet/installer.
"We are publishing Ubuntu Chiseled images with .NET 8," adds Microsoft's announcement.

And when it comes to the .NET Monitor tool, "We plan to ship to dotnet/monitor images exclusively as Ubuntu Chiseled, starting with .NET 8. That's notable because the monitor images are the one production app image we publish."

Kaare Eriksen writes via Variety: As the Digital Entertainment Group, the trade association for home entertainment, tells it, business is better than ever: The U.S. consumer spend on home entertainment grew 11.4% year over year in 2022, totaling nearly $37 billion. Of course, success depends on how you define "home entertainment": Essentially none of that growth came courtesy of anything other than streaming, let alone DVD sales of any kind. When you remove SVOD from the equation, the truth is tough but unsurprising -- outside of theaters, people are increasingly losing the urge to pay for individual films or TV series, with all rentals and physical sales continuing to decline on an annual basis.

One apparent exception to this is digital sales made across platforms like Amazon, Apple TV and Vudu. Digital sell-through commands the largest share of home entertainment spend after streaming and increased ever so slightly in 2022. That said, it's important to remember that the scaling back of COVID restrictions throughout 2021 meant 2022 was the first (relatively) normal year at the box office since the pandemic started. As a result, more films from major studios were released in theaters and subsequently hit their digital windows sooner, per a bevy of deals Hollywood has worked out with exhibitors. But the key word there is films. TV is a different situation.

Between February of last year and May 2023, just over 100 TV releases from the major studios alongside AMC Networks and Lionsgate will have received Blu-ray or 4K Ultra HD releases in the U.S. market. From a studio-by-studio standpoint, there is little to no consistency as to the strategy behind these physical releases. The most staggering factor is how Paramount alone accounts for well over a third of these releases. [...] What's strange is Paramount's sheer commitment to physical releases for its more obscure series spread across the TV landscape. Just about everything originating from Paramount Pictures has at least a Blu-ray release. "Other than those Paramount releases, the only TV series that got 4K physical editions over the last 12 months are 'House of the Dragon' and the final season of 'Westworld,'" adds Variety. "By contrast, Disney has practically parted ways with physical TV releases altogether. To date, the only Disney+ series that has received a Blu-ray release is Peter Jackson's 'The Beatles: Get Back' docuseries." The same is true for Hulu.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Being the default out-of-the-box browser on Windows 10 and 11 makes Microsoft Edge a go-to utility for downloading Chrome or another browser. That upsets Microsoft so much that it constantly comes with more aggressive and user-hostile methods to make customers stay on Edge. An attempt to install Chrome using Edge Canary now results in the browser displaying two ads: the first (tiny one) will pop on the screen when the Chrome website loads, and the second, a humongous full-size banner, will appear once the download starts. Yikes!

Microsoft also plays with words to throw shade at Chrome. The banner states that Edge uses the same technology as Chrome with the "added trust of Microsoft." The "trust" that your computer will connect to ad providers the moment you turn it on for the first time. The "trust" that Edge will shove more "recommended content" down your throat and enforce Bing without you even making a click. The "trust" that you cannot remove Edge from your computer and many more.

Images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter reveal that China's Zhurong rover remains stationary on the Red Planet as China remains silent on the status of its spacecraft. SpaceNews reports: The High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera aboard the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) captured images of the rover on March 11, 2022, a second on Sept. 8, 2022 and finally Feb. 7, 2023. The images were published Feb. 21 by the HiRISE Operations Center The images show that the solar-powered Zhurong -- which landed in May 2021 -- has not moved since at least September 2022. It had entered a planned hibernation state in May 2022 to ride out the low solar radiation levels of winter in Mars's Utopia Planitia region.

Zhurong was expected to autonomously resume activities around December, around the time of Spring solstice in the northern hemisphere, when temperatures and light levels reached levels allowing the rover's battery and solar arrays to generate sufficient electrical power. However Chinese space authorities have not provided an update on the status of the rover. The South China Morning Post reported Jan. 7, citing sources that do not wish to be named, that the mission team was yet to receive a signal from Zhurong.

The progression of the HiRISE images suggest that Zhurong may have accumulated a covering of Martian dust on its surface. This could impact the function of both its solar arrays and the pair of "windows" which allow a chemical called n-undecane to store heat energy during the day and release it during the night. Zhurong does not carry a radioisotope heater unit -- which are used by the country's Yutu lunar rovers -- instead using systems including n-undecane for heating and a coating of aerogel for insulation.