Virgin Galactic announced that it's opening ticket sales to the general public for its spaceflight system, "letting you become an astronaut if you're willing to pay $450,000 and put down a $150,000 deposit," reports Engadget. From the report: For that $450K, you'll get a 90-minute ride to the edge of space including the "signature air launch and Mach-3 boost to space," the company said. Passengers will enjoy several minutes of weightlessness and spectacular views of Earth from the 17 windows, as it showed in a new video (below). The ticket also includes several days of astronaut training, a fitted Under Armour spacesuit, and membership in the Future Astronaut community. All flights launch from Spaceport America in New Mexico.

"We plan to have our first 1,000 customers on board at the start of commercial service later this year, providing an incredibly strong foundation as we begin regular operations and scale our fleet," said Virgin Galactic CEO Michael Colglazier in a statement. As of late last year, the company had sold 100 tickets to space at the updated $450,000 ticket price. Around 700 people, including Elon Musk, have made reservations.

Microsoft is releasing its first big update to Windows 11 today, and it includes a lot of new additions. From a report: A public preview of Android apps on Windows 11 will be available today in the US, alongside redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. The first big Windows 11 update will also include a bunch of improvements to the taskbar. The public preview of Android apps on Windows 11 will allow users to install apps from Amazon's Appstore. The Verge points to workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11 unofficially. Back to more changes: The biggest changes in this Windows 11 update are related to the taskbar. The time and date will finally be available on multiple monitors in Windows 11, something that was missing at launch. The weather widget also returns to the taskbar in this update, and a new mute / unmute feature in the taskbar will be available for Microsoft Teams calls. You'll also be able to quickly screen share a specific app or window from the taskbar directly into a Microsoft Teams call. Microsoft has also redesigned the Media Player and Notepad apps for Windows 11. Notepad now includes multi-step undo, an improved search interface, and dark mode support. The new Media Player app is designed to replace Groove Music and Windows Media Player and includes support for both audio and video and a design that better matches Windows 11's UI improvements.

Microsoft is enabling a Microsoft Defender 'Attack Surface Reduction' security rule by default to block hackers' attempts to steal Windows credentials from the LSASS process. BleepingComputer reports: When threat actors compromise a network, they attempt to spread laterally to other devices by stealing credentials or using exploits. One of the most common methods to steal Windows credentials is to gain admin privileges on a compromised device and then dump the memory of the Local Security Authority Server Service (LSASS) process running in Windows. This memory dump contains NTLM hashes of Windows credentials of users who had logged into the computer that can be brute-forced for clear-text passwords or used in Pass-the-Hash attacks to login into other devices. While Microsoft Defender block programs like Mimikatz, a LSASS memory dump can still be transferred to a remote computer to dump credentials without fear of being blocked.

To prevent threat actors from abusing LSASS memory dumps, Microsoft has introduced security features that prevent access to the LSASS process. One of these security features is Credential Guard, which isolates the LSASS process in a virtualized container that prevents other processes from accessing it. However, this feature can lead to conflicts with drivers or applications, causing some organizations not to enable it. As a way to mitigate Windows credential theft without causing the conflicts introduced by Credential Guard, Microsoft will soon be enabling a Microsoft Defender Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) rule by default. The rule, ' Block credential stealing from the Windows local security authority subsystem,' prevents processes from opening the LSASS process and dumping its memory, even if it has administrative privileges.

While enabling the ASR rule by default will significantly impact the stealing of Windows credentials, it is not a silver bullet by any means. This is because the full Attack Surface Reduction feature is only supported on Windows Enterprise licenses running Microsoft Defender as the primary antivirus. However, BleepingComputer's tests show that the LSASS ASR rule also works on Windows 10 and Windows 11 Pro clients. Unfortunately, once another antivirus solution is installed, ASR is immediately disabled on the device. Furthermore, security researchers have discovered built-in Microsoft Defender exclusion paths allowing threat actors to run their tools from those filenames/directories to bypass the ASR rules and continue to dump the LSASS process. Mimikatz developer Benjamin Delpy told BleepingComputer that Microsoft probably added these built-in exclusions for another rule, but as exclusions affect ALL rules, it bypasses the LSASS restriction.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2014, Google made a remarkable offer: anyone with a Google Apps for Education account in the US got unlimited storage for free. The logic was sound at the time. Three years earlier, the tech giant had launched the Chromebook -- cheap, robust and secure, the web-browser-based kit was a natural fit for education. The cloud was its primary storage, so what could be better than making that bigger than any hard disk in a Mac or Windows PC could ever swallow? The idea was that if you catch users when they are young, they're yours for life. The axiom had already been tested by both Apple and Microsoft, with creative types and workers in jobs with sensible shoes respectively. Google played on its own strengths as the first cloud-native platform for everyone. And lo, it was good. Seven years later, Google has killed the deal.

In place of all you can stash, each institution in the scheme was getting a total pool of 100TB to give to student and teacher alike. If they wanted anything more, the cash register was open. For a small primary school with a couple of hundred pupils, this was perfectly adequate. A large science-heavy university could have a single experiment using that much, however. That announcement was a year ago, and gave existing users 18 months of grace, with new users denied the unlimited package from, well, now. Those with experience of academic deadlines won't be surprised that it has taken this long for lots of people to notice.

ZDNet reports: Cyber criminals are increasingly targeting Linux servers and cloud infrastructure to launch ransomware campaigns, cryptojacking attacks and other illicit activity — and many organisations are leaving themselves open to attacks because Linux infrastructure is misconfigured or poorly managed. Analysis from cybersecurity researchers at VMware warns that malware targeting Linux-based systems is increasing in volume and complexity, while there's also a lack of focus on managing and detecting threats against them.

This comes after an increase in the use of enterprises relying on cloud-based services because of the rise of hybrid working, with Linux the most common operating system in these environments. That rise has opened new avenues that cyber criminals can exploit to compromise enterprise networks, as detailed by the research paper, including ransomware and cryptojacking attacks tailored to target Linux servers in environments that might not be as strictly monitored as those running Windows. These attacks are designed for maximum impact, as the cyber criminals look to compromise as much as the network as possible before triggering the encryption process and ultimately demanding a ransom for the decryption key.

The report warns that ransomware has evolved to target Linux host images used to spin up workloads in virtualised environments, enabling the attackers to simultaneously encrypt vast swathes of the network and make incident response more difficult. The attacks on cloud environments also result in attackers stealing information from servers, which they threaten to publish if they're not paid a ransom.... Cryptojacking and other malware attacks are also increasingly targeting Linux servers. Cryptojacking malware steals processing power from CPUs and servers in order to mine for cryptocurrency....

Many of the cyberattacks targeting Linux environments are still relatively unsophisticated when compared with equivalent attacks targeting Windows systems — that means that with the correct approach to monitoring and securing Linux-based systems, many of these attacks can be prevented. That includes cybersecurity hygiene procedures such as ensuring default passwords aren't in use and avoiding sharing one account across multiple users.

The Linux 5.18 kernel is adding support this spring for the Intel Hardware Feedback Interface to make better decisions about where to place given work among available CPU cores/threads, reports Phoronix.

This is significant because Intel's Alder Lake CPUs "are the first x86-64 processors to embrace a hybrid paradigm with two separate CPU architectures on the same die," explains Hot Hardware: These two separate CPU architectures have different strengths and capabilities. The Golden Cove "performance cores" (or P-cores) feature Intel's latest high-performance desktop CPU architecture, and they are blisteringly fast. Meanwhile, the Gracemont "efficiency cores" (or E-cores) are so small that four of them, along with 2MB of shared L2 cache, can nearly fit in the same space as a single Golden Cove core. They're slower than the Golden Cove cores, but also much more efficient, at least in theory.

The idea is that background tasks and light workloads can be run on the E-cores, saving power, while latency-sensitive and compute-intensive tasks can be run on the faster P-cores. The benefits of this may not have been exactly as clear as Intel would have liked on Windows, but they were even less visible on Linux. That's because Linux isn't aware of the unusual configuration of Alder Lake CPUs.

Well, that's changing in Linux 5.18, slated for release this spring. Linux 5.18 is bringing support for the Intel Enhanced Hardware Feedback Interface, or EHFI...

This is essentially the crux of Intel's "Thread Director," which is an intelligent, low-latency hardware-assisted scheduler.

America's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency (CISA) "says that American companies should be extra wary about potential hacking attempts from Russia as tensions with the country rise," reports PC Magazine: Even if Russia doesn't invade Ukraine, it has often targeted the country with what Wired has characterized as "many of the most costly cyberattacks in history." Those attacks might not always be confined to Ukraine, however, which is where CISA's new Shields Up campaign comes in.... CISA says that it "recommends all organizations — regardless of size — adopt a heightened posture when it comes to cybersecurity and protecting their most critical assets." It also says that it's collaborated with its "critical infrastructure partners" to raise awareness of these risks.

The agency wants everyone to "reduce the likelihood of a damaging cyber intrusion," "take steps to quickly detect a potential intrusion," "ensure that the organization is prepared to respond if an intrusion occurs," and "maximize the organization's resilience to a destructive cyber incident." CISA offers advice related to each of those focus areas on its website.
Earlier this week CISA also added 15 "known exploited" vulnerabilities to its catalog, ZDNet reports, in products from Apache, Apple, Jenkins, and Microsoft: The list includes a Microsoft Windows SAM local privilege escalation vulnerability with a remediation date set for February 24. Vulcan Cyber engineer Mike Parkin said the vulnerability — CVE-2021-36934 — was patched in August 2021 shortly after it was disclosed. "It is a local vulnerability, which reduces the risk of attack and gives more time to deploy the patch. CISA set the due date for Federal organizations who take direction from them, and that date is based on their own risk criteria," Parkin said. "With Microsoft releasing the fix 5 months ago, and given the relative threat, it is reasonable for them to set late February as the deadline."

Liliputing reports: When Valve's Steam Deck begins shipping to customers later this month, the handheld gaming PC will be running a Linux-based operating system called Steam OS. And that could give gaming on Linux a bit of a boost.

While Valve's game client has been able to run on Linux for years, as of last month just over 1% of Steam users were running Linux (and fewer than 3% were using macOS, with Windows holding a 96% share). It'll be interesting to see if that starts to change once the Steam Deck hits the streets. And if it does, maybe we'll see more game makers add support for Linux... but one of the most popular games around isn't going to add Linux support anytime soon: Epic CEO Tim Sweeney says the company has no plans to port Fortnite to Linux.

He says it's because Epic doesn't "have confidence that we'd be able to combat cheating at scale under a wide array of kernel configurations including custom ones," but it's an interesting take since Epic has already ported its anti-cheat software to support Mac and Linux devices including the Steam Deck.

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Beware fake Windows 11 upgrades install RedLine malware, reports Bleeping Computer.

"Threat actors have started distributing fake Windows 11 upgrade installers to users of Windows 10, tricking them into downloading and executing RedLine stealer malware." Bleeping Computer advises, "...these dangerous sites are promoted via forum and social media posts or instant messages, so don't trust anything but the official Windows upgrade system alerts."
Bleeping Computer points out that hardware incompatibilities rule out upgrades for many Windows 10 users from official distribution channels — "something that malware operators see as an excellent opportunity for finding new victims." The timing of the attacks coincides with the moment that Microsoft announced Windows 11's broad deployment phase, so the attackers were well-prepared for this move and waited for the right moment to maximize their operation's success. RedLine stealer is currently the most widely deployed password, browser cookies, credit card, and cryptocurrency wallet info grabber, so its infections can have dire consequences for the victims.

According to researchers at HP, who have spotted this campaign, the actors used the seemingly legitimate "windows-upgraded.com" domain for the malware distribution part of their campaign. The site appears like a genuine Microsoft site and, if the visitor clicked on the 'Download Now' button, they received a 1.5 MB ZIP archive named "Windows11InstallationAssistant.zip," fetched directly from a Discord CDN...

Although the distribution site is down now, nothing stops the actors from setting up a new domain and restarting their campaign. In fact, this is very likely already happening in the wild.

Microsoft executives are warming up regulators to their proposed acquisition of gaming giant Activision Blizzard in Washington by pledging a future that includes an open, "universal" app store. From a report: On Wednesday, Microsoft announced a set of "Open App Store Principles" the company says will apply to the Microsoft Store on Windows and the next generation of its marketplaces for games. [...] Seven of those principles center around security, privacy, quality, safety, accountability, fairness and transparency, and the company says it is committing to those principles starting today. The four remaining principles would change how developers use app stores by not requiring developers to use Microsoft's payment system, not giving its app store more favorable terms, not disadvantaging developers who use a different payment system and not preventing developers from communicating directly with customers.

jrepin writes: Plasma is a popular desktop environment, which will also be powering the desktop mode on the Steam Deck hand-held gaming console. Today, KDE Community announced release of KDE Plasma 5.24, a Long Term Support (LTS) release that will receive updates and bug fixes until the final Plasma 5 version, before transition to Plasma 6.

This new Plasma release focuses on smoothing out wrinkles, evolving the design, and improving the overall feel and usability of the environment. Highlights include: Overview effect for managing all your desktops and application windows, easy discovery of KRunner features with the help assistant, and unlocking screen and authentication using fingerprint reader. You will also notice a new Honeywave wallpaper, the ability to pick any color for accent, and critically important Plasma notifications now come with an orange strip on the side to visually distinguish them from less urgent messages.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: One of the most outspoken proponents of the metaverse is struggling to find its place in this hypothetical virtual world. Microsoft has reportedly scrapped plans to make a HoloLens 3 -- what would have been a successor to its current mixed reality headset -- and infighting within the mixed reality division has fueled uncertainty about its future, according to Business Insider. One source told Insider that the decision to abandon plans for a HoloLens 3 would mark the end of the "product as we know it." Multiple sources said Microsoft had agreed to partner with Samsung to develop a new mixed reality device, a decision that has reportedly "inflamed" division within the team. One employee called the partnership a "shit show." Insider spoke to 20 current and former employees at Microsoft who described "confusion and strategic uncertainty."

Some folks within Microsoft believe the company should continue to make hardware while others favor pivoting to a software platform for the metaverse -- that is, a Windows for the digital world. There is also a question of which customer base to target. Microsoft employees are apparently split on creating hardware and software for consumers or continuing their focus on enterprise customers. HoloLens 2, the company's latest AR/VR hardware, is a commercial product that sells for $3,500. Ruben Caballero, a former Apple executive who was hired in 2020 to join the mixed reality and AI division, reportedly wants to shift focus to consumers and the metaverse. Others within the team believe they should continue selling to businesses, and even fulfill military contracts.

LinkedIn profiles show that at least 25 Microsoft employees working on mixed reality left to join Meta last year alone, and Wall Street Journal reports the team lost around 100 people in 2021, many of them to Facebook's parent company. The HoloLens team is now uncertain about the long-term goals of the project and whether they will transition to working on a software platform. Disagreement on what to do next has made HoloLens's future unclear, though Microsoft maintains its commitment to the headset and promises to release more products in the future, "Microsoft HoloLens remains a critical part of our plans for emerging categories like mixed reality and the metaverse," said Microsoft spokesman Frank Shaw. "We remain committed to HoloLens and future HoloLens development." Despite slow progress, Microsoft has doubled down on augmented and virtual reality in recent months, claiming its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard will provide the "building blocks for the metaverse." Microsoft's mixed-reality plans now appear to be hanging by a thread, and its most ambitious project yet is on the brink of collapse, just as talk about the metaverse -- the future it was meant to help create -- reaches a fever pitch.

In a tech world still hindered by component shortages, choices have to be made. And in the world of laptops, it seems that choice is Windows-based devices over those running Chrome OS. From a report: IDC on Monday released early data from its latest Worldwide Quarterly Personal Computing Device Tracker. It pointed to a sharp 63.6 percent decline in Chromebook shipments, which the IDC defines as "shipments to distribution channels or end users, in Q4 2021 (4.8 million shipments) compared to Q4 2020 with (13.1 million shipments)." In addition to market saturation, supply issues also hurt Chromebook shipments, as the industry still struggles with a deficit of PC components, from CPUs to integrated circuits for Wi-Fi modules and power management. "Supply has also been unusually tight for Chromebooks as component shortages have led vendors to prioritize Windows machines due to their higher price tags, further suppressing Chromebook shipments on a global scale," Jitesh Ubrani, research manager with IDC's Mobility and Consumer Device Trackers, said in a statement accompanying Monday's announcement.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Plenty of apps that you install on your computer have a setting that tells them to launch when you initially log in to save you the trouble of launching your most commonly used apps yourself. Leaving this setting on can also allow apps to check for updates or launch more quickly when you start them for the first time. The difference for some of the preinstalled Microsoft apps in Windows 10 and 11 is that they use some of these resources by default, whether you actually use the apps or not. Developer and IT admin Michael Niehaus drew attention to some of these apps in recent blog posts examining the resource usage of Windows 11's widgets, Microsoft Teams, and Microsoft Edge in a fresh install of Windows 11 (the Edge observations apply to Windows 10, too).

Both Widgets and Teams spawn a number of Microsoft Edge WebView2 processes in order to work—WebView2 is a way to use Edge and its rendering engine without launching Edge or using its user interface. Collectively, these processes use a few hundred megabytes of memory to work. The widget-related processes don't start unless you actually click the widgets button, though they remain in the background afterward, even if you're not actively viewing your widgets. But the Teams processes all launch automatically, whether you actually use Teams or not. Uninstalling Teams will prevent this from happening, but Niehaus points out that simply removing the Teams icon from Windows 11's Taskbar in the Taskbar settings is enough to keep these WebView2 processes from launching when you log in. Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham also recommends disabling System Boost in the Edge settings if you don't use it as your default browser. Otherwise, it too will use a couple hundred megabytes of memory.

According to a post on the Microsoft IT Pro Blog, Windows computers will need at least eight hours of online time to obtain and install the latest OS updates successfully. Tom's Hardware reports: Another revelation in the post is that Microsoft tracks how long PCs are connected to Windows Update, calling the statistics "Update Connectivity." The data is available to IT managers in the InTune app, a component of the Endpoint management suite. The post details Microsoft's attempts to figure out why some Windows devices aren't getting the latest quality and feature updates, and discovered that two hours of continuous connectivity was required to get updates. It then took six hours after the release of the patch for a machine to update itself reliably.

Microsoft's figures show that 50 percent of Windows devices left behind by Windows Update and running a build of Windows 10 that's no longer serviced do not spend enough time connected to have the patches downloaded and installed in the background. This figure drops to 25 percent for customers using a serviced build of the operating system that lags behind in security updates by 60 days or more. The goods news, as noted by Tom's Hardware, is that "Windows 11 updates are smaller than their Windows 10 counterparts due to improved compression [and] new Microsoft Graph APIs," which should help speed up the update process.

Citrix, a cloud computing and virtualization company used by companies including Microsoft, Google, and SAP, has revealed plans to be acquired by affiliates of global investment firm Vista Equity Partners, and an affiliate of Elliott Investment Management called Evergreen Coast Capital Corporation. From a report: The all-cash deal is valued at $16.5 billion, representing a near 30 percent premium on Citrix's market capitalization before rumors of a possible deal first started to emerge last month. Founded in 1989, Citrix was originally known for its Windows-based remote access products, but over the past few decades the company has evolved endeavored to move with the times, and now offers myriad technologies spanning cloud computing, servers, networking, and more.

Researchers have uncovered advanced, never-before-seen macOS malware that was installed using exploits that were almost impossible for most users to detect or stop once the users landed on a malicious website. From a report: The malware was a full-featured backdoor that was written from scratch, an indication that the developers behind it have significant resources and expertise. DazzleSpy, as researchers from security firm Eset have named it, provides an array of advanced capabilities that give the attackers the ability to fully monitor and control infected Macs. Features include: victim device fingerprinting, screen capture, file download/upload, execute terminal commands, audio recording, and keylogging. Mac malware has become more common over the years, but the universe of advanced macOS backdoors remains considerably smaller than that of advanced backdoors for Windows. The sophistication of DazzleSpy -- as well as the exploit chain used to install it -- is impressive. It also doesn't appear to have any corresponding counterpart for Windows. This has led Eset to say that the people who developed DazzleSpy are unusual. "First, they seem to be targeting Macs only," Eset researcher Marc-Etienne M.Leveille wrote in an email. "We haven't seen payloads for Windows nor clues that it would exist. Secondly, they have the resources to develop complex exploits and their own spying malware, which is quite significant."

Microsoft is planning to launch a public preview of its Android apps for Windows 11 next month, alongside some taskbar improvements and redesigned Notepad and Media Player apps. Windows chief Panos Panay outlined the upcoming changes to Windows 11 in a blog post today, and they appear to be part of Windows 11's first big update. From a report: The taskbar improvements include a mute and unmute feature and likely the ability to show a clock on secondary monitors. Both were missing at the launch of Windows 11, but Microsoft is still working on improving the taskbar further to bring back missing functionality like drag and drop. The upcoming Windows 11 next month will also include the weather widget returning to the taskbar, something Microsoft started testing last month. Microsoft is also redesigning its Notepad and Media Player apps, and both include dark modes and design tweaks that more closely match Windows 11.

The big new addition will be Android apps on Windows 11, though. Panay says this will be a "public preview," indicating that the feature will still be in beta when it's widely available next month. Microsoft first started testing Android apps on Windows 11 with testers in October, and the feature allows you to install a limited number of apps from Amazon's Appstore. There are a variety of workarounds to get Google Play Store running on Windows 11, but Microsoft isn't officially supporting this. Panay also shared a variety of stats about how important Windows has become over the past couple of years. Windows 10 and Windows 11 now run on 1.4 billion devices each month, and the PC market has experienced strong growth throughout the pandemic.

After years of stagnation, the PC industry has seen its best growth in a decade as people buy new laptops and desktops. But while some pandemic-fueled changes may prove temporary, Microsoft product chief Panos Panay sees the industry's return to growth as durable. From a report: "This pandemic has been a forcing function," Panay said in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, following the release of Microsoft's quarterly earnings report. The PC market got a boost as life moved online, but the question for the industry now is whether and how it can keep the momentum going. Before the pandemic, many households focused their tech spending on buying bigger TVs and upgrading their cell phones every couple of years, while trying to keep their PCs as long as possible. During COVID-19, the PC has taken on new life as a tool for remote work, distance learning and staying in touch with friends and family in a world where travel has been greatly curtailed. That drove the global shipments of laptops and desktops for the last quarter to surpass 90 million for the second year in a row, and sales for the year reached a level not seen since 2012. Microsoft reported 25% growth in the revenue it gets from having Windows installed on new PCs.

"Qt, the framework that powers the KDE desktop, is announcing support for ads in client-side applications," reports Neowin: This means that application developers will now be able to serve ads in traditional desktop applications.... Windows users have been dealing with this in Metro UI apps since Windows 8 and it's something that's never gone over well on the desktop.

While it's doubtful you'll see ads in KDE's core applications, it would be possible for distributions that wish to further monetize their work to fork these applications, placing ads in them.... According to the documentation, the advertising plugin supports a variety of platforms. They are as follows:

- Windows 10
- Ubuntu 20.04
- Raspbian Buster
- macOS
- Android 7.0
— iOS

"Our offering aims to disrupt the IoT industry," explains Qt's press release, "enabling new business models and business cases that before were not possible."

Reactions have been mixed. Comments on Phoronix ranged from calling it "a great way for boost development on KDE" to "Not sure if I like this."

Thanks to Slashdot reader segaboy81 for sharing the story