An anonymous reader shares a report: Journalists, activists, and human rights defenders face a constant battle to keep files safe from a growing set of digital threats and surveillance. But physical attacks can be challenging to defend against, whether an opportunist snatch-and-grab thief or an oppressive government kicking down someone's door. This week, a project called BusKill launched a custom USB magnetic breakaway cable that acts as a "dead man's switch," locking a computer if someone physically snatches it and severs the magnetic connectors. BusKill has been in the works for more than two years as a do-it-yourself project. Anyone with the hardware could compile the source code, but it only worked on Linux and components quickly sold out. After a crowdsourcing effort, the cable is now available to buy starting at $59 and has an accompanying app that works on macOS, Windows, and Linux, allowing the person using the cable to easily arm and disarm the cable with a touch of a button.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft started shifting options from the Control Panel to the Settings app in Windows 8. The company has gradually moved settings away from the Control Panel since then. Quite a few options migrated over with the rollout of Windows 11, but a recent Insider build of Windows 11 moved a small handful of settings to the Settings app. Microsoft outlined the changes in the release notes of Windows 11 build 22509, which came out on December 1, 2021. The moves garnered attention from several outlets over the last week:

1. We have moved the advanced sharing settings (such as Network discovery, File and printer sharing, and public folder sharing) to a new page in Settings app under Advanced Network Settings.
2. We've made some updates to the device specific pages under Printers & Scanners in Settings to show more information about your printer or scanner directly in Settings when available.
3. Some of the entry points for network and devices settings in Control Panel will now redirect to the corresponding pages in Settings.

TikTok is testing a Windows program called TikTok Live Studio that will let users watch them play video games live on TikTok. TechCrunch reports: Once downloaded to your desktop, the program allows users to log in with their TikTok account and stream directly to TikTok Live. Within the program, you can communicate with viewers through the chat feature, and you can stream content from your computer, your phone or a gaming console. TikTok told TechCrunch that this program is currently available only in a handful of Western markets for a few thousand users. [...] Live Studio isn't guaranteed to roll out, the company told TechCrunch -- whenever TikTok tests a feature, that doesn't mean it's here to stay forever. But if we do see a true launch of TikTok Live Studio, the platform will study what creators are using the software for, then tailor it to better suit those use cases. [...] This streaming software could also mark an opportunity for TikTok to reach more desktop users.

Mozilla has fixed an issue in its Firefox browser where usernames and passwords were being recorded in the Windows Cloud Clipboard feature, in what the organization categorized as a severe security risk that could have exposed credentials to non-owners whenever users copied or cut a password. From a report: The issue was fixed in Firefox 94, released last month, but was detailed in more depth this week by Mozilla developers. At its core, the bug is related to Windows Cloud Clipboard, a feature added to Windows 10 in September 2018 (v1809 release), a feature that allows users to sync their local clipboard history to their Microsoft accounts. The feature is disabled by default, but once enabled, it allows users to access the cloud clipboard section by pressing the Windows+V shortcut. This grants users access to clipboard data from all devices, but the feature is also used for its clipboard history capabilities, allowing users to go through past items they copied or cut and re-paste the same data in new contexts, making it extremely useful for most IT workers. In a blog post on Wednesday, Mozilla said that they have now modified the Firefox browser so that usernames and passwords copied from the browser's password section (about:logins) won't be stored in the Windows Cloud Clipboard feature, but instead will be stored only locally, in a separate clipboard section.

New submitter segaboy81 writes: In 2001 the Manifesto for Agile Software Development was born, and it took the software engineering world by storm. Linux, Windows, Facebook, AAA games, and just about everything else, adheres to this manifesto in some form or another. It is a paradigm that allows teams to work collaboratively on projects in the most effective and streamlined way possible. However, EA may not have gotten the memo. According to a blogpost by former EA developer Adam Berg, different teams take very different approaches to development with one team in particular being especially slow to progress. Adam recounts his experience on the FIFA team where he worked on the Wii, PS Vita, and Nintendo 3DS ports of the game: "I often worked in the realm of competition logic. Testing changes here could mean progressing through several seasons of career mode in order to test out a change. No joke, it would take an entire day to change 3 lines of code and know that it actually worked correctly."

Microsoft is planning to make its Windows Terminal the default command line experience in Windows 11 next year. From a report: While Windows 11 currently supports setting Windows Terminal as default, the default terminal emulator has always been the Windows Console Host. Microsoft hasn't ever officially supported replacing this console host, meaning that command prompt and PowerShell always open in Windows Console Host. "Over the course of 2022, we are planning to make Windows Terminal the default experience on Windows 11 devices," explains Kayla Cinnamon, a program manager for Windows Terminal at Microsoft. "We will start with the Windows Insider Program and start moving through rings until we reach everyone on Windows 11."

According to job listings on LinkedIn, Google appears to be working on an augmented reality device and operating system to pair with it. Ars Technica reports: On LinkedIn, operating system engineering director Mark Lucovsky announced that he has joined Google. He previously headed up mixed reality operating system work for Meta, and before that he was one of the key architects of Windows NT at Microsoft. "My role is to lead the Operating System team for Augmented Reality at Google," he wrote. He also posted a link to some job listings at Google that give the impression Google is getting just as serious about AR as Apple or Meta.

As 9to5Google discovered, one of the listings ("Senior Software Developer, Embedded, Augmented Reality OS") described Google's objective in clear terms: "Our team is building the software components that control and manage the hardware on our Augmented Reality (AR) products. These are the software components that run on the AR devices and are the closest to the hardware. As Google adds products to the AR portfolio, the OS Foundations team is the very first software team to work with new hardware." Other job listings say new hires will be working on an "innovative AR device." And one specifies that Google is "focused on making immersive computing accessible to billions of people through mobile devices." The roles are largely in the United States, but some are located in Waterloo, Ontario -- the HQ of Canadian smart glasses maker North, which Google acquired in 2020.

"Windows Me was unstable, unloved and unusable," remembered Computerworld last year, on the 20th anniversary of its release, calling it "a stink bomb of an operating system." Windows Me was a ghastly, slapdash piece of work, incompatible with lots of hardware and software. It frequently failed during the installation process — which should have been the first sign for people that this was an operating system they shouldn't try.Often, when you tried to shut it down, it declined to do so, like a two-year-old throwing a temper tantrum over being forced to go to sleep. It was slow and insecure. Its web browser, Internet Explorer, frequently refused to load web pages.
But they ultimately argue that it wasn't as bad as Windows Vista, which "simply refused to run, or ran so badly it was useless on countless PCs. Not just old PCs, but even newly bought PCs, right out of the box, with Vista installed." And they conclude that the worst Microsoft OS of all is still Windows 8. ("You want bad? You want stupid? You want an operating system that not only was roundly reviled by consumers and businesses alike, but also set Microsoft's business plans back years?")

Slashdot reader alaskana98 even remembers Windows ME semi-fondly as "the last Microsoft OS to use the Windows 95 codebase." While rightly being panned as a buggy and crash-prone OS — indeed it was labelled as the worst version of Windows ever released by Computer World — it did introduce a number of features that continue on to this very day. Those features include:

-A personalized start menu that would show your most recently accessed programs, today a common feature in the Windows landscape.
-Software support for DVD playback. Previously one needed a dedicated card to playback DVDs.
-Windows Movie Maker and Windows Media Player 7, allowing home users to create, edit and burn their own digital home movies. While seemingly pedestrian in today's times, these were groundbreaking features for home users in the year 2000.
-The first iteration of System Restore — imagine a modern version of Windows not having the ability to conveniently restore to a working configuration — before Windows ME, this was simply not a possibility for the average home user unless you had a rigorous backup routine.
-The removal of real-mode DOS. While very controversial at the time, this change arguably improved the speed and reliability of the boot process.

Love it or hate it (well, lets face it, if you were a computer user at that point you probably hated it) — Windows ME did make several important contributions to the modern OS landscape that are often overlooked to this day. Do you have any stories from the heady days of late 2000 when Windows ME was first released?
Slashdot reader Z00L00K remembers in a comment that "The removal of real-mode DOS is what REALLY made ME impossible to use for most of us at the time. It broke backwards compatibility so hard that the only way out was to use any of the earlier versions of Windows instead!"

Is this re-awakening images of the year 2000 for anyone? Share your own memories and thoughts in the comments.

What do you remember about Windows ME?

Google is bringing Android games from Google Play to Windows laptops, PCs, and tablets, the company announced on Thursday. Gizmodo reports: Google announced a standalone Google Play Games launcher that lets gamers play mobile titles on Windows PCs at The Game Show Awards on Thursday. The upcoming app will allow players to close out of their game on one device and resume playing where they left off on another. This means you could switch between a Chromebook, Windows PC, and Android phone without losing saved data. The app, which is being built and distributed by Google, runs games locally on your system, no cloud streaming required. So far, Google has only teased the service in a brief video clip, so some important details haven't been revealed. We do, however, know it is set to arrive sometime in 2022.

Microsoft has launched this week a special web portal where users and researchers can report malicious drivers to the company's security team. From a report: The new Vulnerable and Malicious Driver Reporting Center is basically a web form that allows users to upload a copy of a malicious driver, which gets uploaded and analyzed by a Microsoft automated scanner. At a technical level, Microsoft says this automated scanner can identify techniques that are commonly abused by malicious drivers, such as:
Drivers with the ability to map arbitrary kernel, physical, or device memory to user mode.
Drivers with the ability to read or write arbitrary kernel, physical, or device memory, including Port I/O and central processing unit (CPU) registers from user mode.
Drivers that provide access to storage that bypass Windows access control.

Microsoft is continuing to update and refine Windows 11 two months after its public release, and the Notepad app is the latest bit of the operating system to get some attention. From a report: The updated version of the Notepad app is rolling out to Windows Insiders in the Dev channel, where the company is also testing tweaks to the taskbar and Start menu, a new-old button for setting the default web browser, an updated Media Player app, and other changes. The main changes appear pretty much as they did in the leaked Notepad screenshots from early October: the new unified title bar and menu bar pick up Windows 11's "mica" styling, as well as dark-mode support, support for switching between dark and light mode, and modernized font controls.

On Monday JetBrains (creators of the Kotlin programming language and makers of the integrated development environment IntelliJ IDEA) made an announcement: a preview for a lightweight new multi-language IDE called Fleet using IntelliJ's code-processing engine with a distributed IDE architecture and a reimagined UI.

By Friday they'd received an "overwhelming" number of requests, and announced the preview program had stopped accepting new requests. ("To subscribe for updates and the public preview announcement at jetbrains.com/fleet or follow @JetBrains_Fleet on Twitter.")

They'd received 80,000 requests in just the first 30 hours, reports Visual Studio magazine: Although JetBrains didn't even mention VS Code in its Nov. 28 announcement, many media pundits immediately characterized it along the lines of an "answer to Visual Studio Code," a "response to Visual Studio Code," a "competitor to Visual Studio Code" and so on...

"When you first launch Fleet, it starts up as a full-fledged editor that provides syntax highlighting, simple code completion, and all the things you'd expect from an editor," JetBrains said. "But wait, there's more! Fleet is also a fully functional IDE bringing smart completion, refactorings, navigation, debugging, and everything else that you're used to having in an IDE — all with a single button click."
"It starts up in an instant so you can begin working immediately..." boasts the Fleet web page, adding that Fleet "is designed to automatically detect your project configuration from the source code, maximizing the value you get from its smart code-processing engine while minimizing the need to configure the project in the IDE." And it also offers "project and context aware code completion, navigation to definitions and usages, on-the-fly code quality checks, and quick-fixes..."

Fleet also offers a collaborative environment allowing developers to work together — not just sharing the editor, but also terminals and debugging sessions. (There's even a diff view for reviewing changes.) "Others can connect to a collaboration session you initiate on your machine, or everyone can connect to a shared remote dev environment," explains Fleet's web page. "It supports a number of remote work scenarios and can be run locally on the developer's computer, in the cloud, or on a remote server," reports SD Times. (And Fleet's home page says soon it will even run in Docker containers configured with an appropriate environment for your project.)

SD Times adds that Fleet "currently supports Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, Rust, and JavaScript. The company plans to extend support to cover PHP, C++, C#, and HTML, which are the remaining languages that have IntelliJ IDEs." It's multi-platform — running on Linux, MacOS, or Windows — and Fleet's web page promises "a familiar and consistent user experience" offering one IDE for the many different technologies you might end up using.

And yes, there's a dark theme.

Zoom is rolling out a number of new updates for its video conferencing software and one of them might finally encourage users to ensure they're on time for their next big meeting. TechRadar reports: According to a new blog post from the company, Attendance Status makes it easier for organizations to streamline the start of their Zoom Meetings by allowing meeting hosts and co-hosts using its Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar integrations to view who has accepted or declined a meeting invite. However, this new feature also gives them the ability to see whether everyone invited to a meeting has joined. If you're used to arriving earlier for video calls, you should be fine but for those that try to slink in unnoticed later on in a meeting, your boss or manager will now be aware of your absence, so tread carefully. You'll also no longer be able to use the excuse that you had to update your Zoom client as Zoom recently added a new automatic update feature for Windows and macOS that ensures everyone in a meeting is running the latest version of the company's software. Zoom is also rolling out other new features, such as the ability for users to select multiple people to control the movements of slides in a presentation. They've also "added more options for creating polls including ranked responses, matching, short and long answers and even fill in the blank," adds TechRadar. "Finally, Zoom is adding additional watermark settings to its software to help organizations and individuals get the most out of their recorded content and avoid distracting watermarks."

The US Federal Bureau of Investigations said today that the operators of the Cuba ransomware have earned at least $43.9 million from ransom payments following attacks carried out this year. From a report: In a flash alert sent out on Friday, the Bureau said the Cuba gang has "compromised at least 49 entities in five critical infrastructure sectors, including but not limited to the financial, government, healthcare, manufacturing, and information technology sectors." The FBI said it traced attacks with the Cuba ransomware to systems infected with Hancitor, a malware operation that uses phishing emails, Microsoft Exchange vulnerabilities, compromised credentials, or RDP brute-forcing tools to gain access to vulnerable Windows systems. Once systems are added to their botnet, Hancitor operators rent access to these systems to other criminal gangs in a classic Malware-as-a-Service model. While an April 2021 McAfee report on the Cuba ransomware found no connection between the two groups, the FBI report highlights what appears to be a new partnership between MaaS providers and ransomware gangs after other ransomware operations struck similar partnerships throughout 2020.

Microsoft is backtracking on changes it made to Windows 11 that made it more difficult to switch default browsers. From a report: A new test build of Windows 11 now allows users of Chrome, Firefox, and other browsers to set a default browser with a single button, which is a far simpler process. Rafael Rivera, developer of the excellent EarTrumpet Windows app, discovered the new Windows 11 changes earlier this week. Instead of having to change individual file extensions or protocol handlers for HTTP, HTTPS, .HTML, and .HTM, Windows 11 now offers a simple button that lets people switch default browsers in a similar way to Windows 10. Microsoft has confirmed the changes are intentional and are currently being tested. "In the Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 22509 released to the Dev Channel on Wednesday, we streamlined the ability for a Windows Insider to set the 'default browser' to apps that register for HTTP:, HTTPS:, .HTM, and .HTML," explains Aaron Woodman, vice president of Windows marketing, in a statement to The Verge. "Through the Windows Insider Program you will continue to see us try new things based on customer feedback and testing."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Gizmodo: Microsoft, one of the pioneers of DNA storage, is making some headway, working with the University of Washington's Molecular Information Systems Laboratory, or MISL. The company announced in a new research paper the first nanoscale DNA storage writer, which the research group expects to scale for a DNA write density of 25 x 10^6 sequences per square centimeter, or "three orders of magnitude" (1,000x) more tightly than before. What makes this particularly significant is that it's the first indication of achieving the minimum write speeds required for DNA storage.

Microsoft is one of the biggest players in cloud storage and is looking at DNA data storage to gain an advantage over the competition by using its unparalleled density, sustainability, and shelf life. DNA is said to have a density capable of storing one exabyte, or 1 billion gigabytes, per square inch -- an amount many magnitudes larger than what our current best storage method, Linear Type-Open (LTO) magnetic tape, can provide. What do these advantages mean in real-world terms? Well, the International Data Corporation predicts data storage demands will reach nine zettabytes by 2024. As Microsoft notes, only one zettabyte of storage would be used if Windows 11 were downloaded on 15 billion devices. Using current methods, that data would need to be stored on millions of tape cartridges. Cut the tape and use DNA, and nine zettabytes of information can be stored in an area as small as a refrigerator (some scientists say every movie ever released could fit in the footprint of a sugar cube). But perhaps a freezer would be a better analogy, because data stored on DNA can last for thousands of years whereas data loss occurs on tape with 30 years and even sooner on SSDs and HDDs.

Finding ways to increase write speeds addresses one of the two main problems with DNA storage (the other being cost). With the minimum write speed threshold within grasp, Microsoft is already pushing ahead with the next phase. "A natural next step is to embed digital logic in the chip to allow individual control of millions of electrode spots to write kilobytes per second of data in DNA, and we foresee the technology reaching arrays containing billions of electrodes capable of storing megabytes per second of data in DNA. This will bring DNA data storage performance and cost significantly closer to tape," Microsoft told TechRadar.

Microsoft is starting to roll out its new Office UI to all users this week. The visual update was originally announced earlier this year and went into testing over the summer. Now it's starting to roll out to all Office 365 and Office 2021 users. From a report: This new Office UI is designed to match the visual changes in Windows 11, and it includes a more rounded look to the Office ribbon bar, with some subtle tweaks to the buttons throughout Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It's a relatively simple refresh, and Office will now match the dark or light theme that you set inside Windows. The new look can be toggled on or off using the Coming Soon megaphone icon in the top right-hand corner of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or OneNote.

Microsoft has never been a fan of Windows users downloading Chrome instead of using Edge, but the company has now stepped up its campaign to keep people using its built-in browser. From a report: Windows 10 and Windows 11 have both started displaying new prompts when people navigate to the Chrome download page, in an effort to discourage people from installing Google's rival browser. These new prompts, spotted by Neowin, include messages like:

"Microsoft Edge runs on the same technology as Chrome, with the added trust of Microsoft."
"That browser is so 2008! Do you know what's new? Microsoft Edge."
"'I hate saving money,' said no one ever. Microsoft Edge is the best browser for online shopping."

Windows 11's taskbar is a giant step back in usability compared to Windows 10, and now Microsoft is starting to make improvements. A new update that's currently being tested by Windows Insiders brings the clock and date back to the taskbar on secondary or multiple monitors. From a report: It's a change that multiple monitor users will appreciate, as many have had to install third-party apps like ElevenClock just to get this basic functionality in Windows 11. I've not been shy about criticizing the changes made to the taskbar in Windows 11. I hate the new taskbar, so I'm happy to see Microsoft make this initial change. There's still much more to be improved, and hopefully we see the return of being able to drag and drop files onto taskbar apps and the general customization options. Elsewhere, Microsoft is also making some improvements to the Start menu in Windows 11. The latest 22509 Insider build includes the ability to configure the Start menu to show more pins or more recommendations instead. That makes the Start menu a little more customizable, although many Windows 11 users are also opting for third-party apps here, too.

Microsoft has decided to add "Buy Now, Pay Later" financing options to its Edge browser in the U.S. -- and the overwhelming response has been negative. The Register reports: The Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) option pops up at the browser level (rather than on checkout at an ecommerce site) and permits users to split any purchase between $35 and $1,000 made via Edge into four instalments spread over six weeks. The system is powered by Zip, previously Quadpay, and offers a Chrome extension for users who want to split their payments (interest-free if you make the payments on time, although Zip charges $1 per installment). Microsoft has now bundled the platform into Edge.

Feedback could charitably be described as negative so far, as demonstrated by the tags assigned to the post on Microsoft's Tech Community site. Comments (numbering 119 at time of writing) posted by visitors to the site can be pretty much summed up thusly: "This [is] a cheap and disgusting move from Microsoft and edge team to the browser users. You should be ashamed for pushing such crap to users. Listening to the users checkout flows, suggesting third party services. Bloating the browser. Seriously, be better and more responsible." "It's deeply shocking this is built into the base Windows OS on billions of devices," writes cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont in a tweet. "I feel like I should start a GoFundMe for Microsoft, or teach them how to beg bounty, as clearly they need the money."