Posts by Mark Dowling

Microsoft's Windows 10 Patch Tuesday update crashes OneDrive

Fixed in KB5020953

Release notes here: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/topic/october-28-2022-kb5020953-os-builds-19042-2194-19043-2194-and-19044-2194-out-of-band-5b0e9c22-6d38-4ffc-9fe1-7cd83b63f7a7

Mozilla wants to seduce BOFHs with button-down Firefox

We sysadmins wanted Mozilla-issued MSI installers and GPOs years ago, instead of the weird customization kits and community-build MSI, and were told "no". So, at least in our shop, we went across the street to Chrome which produced official versions of both. Chrome can be a PITA in some ways but we aren't going back now.

UK.gov: Psst. Belgium. Buy these Typhoon fighter jets from us, will you?

Typhoon and F-35 cost the same? Hasn't MoD been campaigning to not say on the record what 35s cost? Either way that seems like a stretch and especially if you aren't including all that ground based mission support software that takes ages to upload into the aircraft.

Braking news: Nissan Canada hacked, up to 1.1m Canucks exposed

Star Wars

Nissan have been doing Rogue One tie ins with their Rogue model (having been in one of them, an X-Wing it ain't FFS) and now someone took their data - seems ironic

Hot Desk? Sec-tech firm LANDESK to be forged together with HEAT

Another change of ownership for Patchlink/Lumension/HEAT. Will be interesting times watching this unfold...

Microsoft flips Google the bird after Windows kernel bug blurt

If the bug was Apple's

Would "senior leadership" have told P0 to grant a "flexible extension"?

Adobe scrambles to untangle itself from QuickTime after Apple throws it over a cliff

For all that Apple fanboys love to hate Microsoft

Apple's refusal to publish a product lifecycle and stick to it is why sysadmins like me are queasy about it in the enterprise. It is ridiculous to have to guess whether an product will be patched or not, and for the "not" only to become clear when a third party outs them on it.

Facebook, WhatsApp farewell BlackBerry

Competition problem?

Blackberry has BBM, which competes with Facebook's Messenger and Whatsapp.

Next year's Windows 10 auto-upgrade is MSFT's worst idea since Vista

Re: @koswix

To be fair, that's a manufacturer side decision not to install basic drivers from WU which then offer optional advanced functionality/cruft (depending on POV) from installers (glares in HP printing/scanning's direction)

Shocker: Adobe patches critical Shockwave remote hijack hole

Every Shockwave Player patch should be an uninstaller

Surely it must be cheaper for Adobe to push an uninstaller, wait for complaints to come in and hand over an NDA followed by cash than to keep that development line open?

Apple gobbles chunk of CNET, ZDNet – report

Wtf with this headline

they are leasing office space. How does that become "grabbing a chunk of zdnet"? And why would Apple seek direct control over media when most of it bows to their jackboot media policies already?

Windows 10 bombshell: Microsoft to KILL OFF Patch Tuesday

Update for Business

separate to WSUS/SCCM... Don't know what that's about. Like I need another thing to care for and feed.

IETF updates TLS/SSL best practice guidance

Maybe the IETF should visit Redmond

And tell MS to retrofit TLS > 1.0 onto Windows 2008. That would help.

Exchange Server 2016 will be mostly Cloud Exchange ported back on-premises

Why call it EX2016 at all?

Just call it Exchange Server and make SA affordable enough that no-one would be bothered simply buying one time licences and CALs. If the Windows side of the house can get on board with a single rolling product evolution, why can't Exchange.

Wake up! BlackBerry QUIETLY updates BB10

Re: 55 Security holes

"Unpatched 11%" - you left out that that refers to a single notification (out of 9) re OpenSSL. It is stupid of Blackberry not to have updated KB36051 since June to reflect elimination progress though - and it looks like there was progress. http://developer.blackberry.com/native/downloads/releasenotes/#ssl_change

Re: There are still Blackberry users?

check out Settings\Battery Saving Mode and Settings\Advanced Interaction in 10.3.1. Personally I think Location Services should be default OFF in Battery Saving Mode.

Microsoft Outlook comes to Android, iOS: MS email now a bit less painful on mobile

"home use"

seems to me another way for Microsoft to insert another licencing Trojan horse. The "free" Outlook app is for home use (according to the download site). Use of home Word/Excel for iOS on a BYOD device can expose the employer to licencing issues already.

Misty-eyed Ray Ozzie celebrates 25th birthday of Lotus Notes by tweeting about it ...

Re: Still some good things

agreed. Domino was great to administer from the back end and moving to Exchange meant having to find homes for other sorts of data Domino happily served up. Apart from a brief unhappiness running SLES8 which got fixed with kernel tuning, our install (2 Dominos replicating to each other plus one on Win32 to support BES) was pretty solid. Stuff like RSS enabled blogs brought to testing phase in an hour or two from receiving the templates.

Notes client largely a dogs breakfast of course and the failure to support roaming profiles for ages in the 8.5 code stream was a big minus. At least there was something you could do with the database look though, as opposed to Outlook's take it or leave it. Indexing was similar, great at the back end, nicely integrated into the DBs, but horribly at the front end, whereas Outlook/Exchange mostly reversed this paradigm in cached mode with Windows "Search".

Even now we keep one Domino spinning as we never fully trusted the quality of the conversion tools from Domino to Exchange, and it's good to go back to the "source" and see what the original looked like, plus now we have these enormous mail DBs where you largely hope they are in good shape rather than take a group of small ones offline and check them in Domino, or take the whole server down and leave the other machine take the load for a bit without much notice being taken. The other nice thing was the fix lists where you could make decent decisions about whether an upgrade was really worth it.

We had some unhappy meetings with our Dell Exchange 2007 consultant as he explained how replication worked in the MS world. A lot of "it really can't just...?" But we needed a Document Management System and the avalanche towards full support of Outlook/Exchange and a desultory implementation of Notes/Domino if at all had already started by then.

Microsoft dangles carrot at SMEs, eases Windows 8 Enterprise licensing

Microsoft got greedy

And wanted you to be on the Software Assurance treadmill. If EE had been an upgrade earlier we might have gone with MS software encryption rather than FDE (at least on some machines), but it wasn't so we didn't.

Apple's Windows XP moment: OS X Snow Leopard left to DIE

For me, the issue isn't the booting of SL from support

It's KNOWING that it's been booted.

When Apple publish a Lifecycle site like Microsoft does, I'll believe they give a crap about enterprise. Instead they'll keep on doing what they are doing - using users to berate IT staff into supporting their "magic" OSes.

American Idol host's keyboard firm smacks back against BlackBerry in patent spat

Shocked!

Ryan Seacrest is making cash by means of poor quality reproductions of others' work?

UK sitting on top of at least 50 years of shale gas – report

Is that map what ground water in the various areas will look like?

If the UK isn't watching carefully what's going on in the US - using diesel as a drill lubricant, claiming confidentiality about the contents of otther lubricants, where waste water from the process will be treated - there could be some unhappy times for the communities near the drill zones. Careful now.

Microsoft to open Windows Stores inside 600 Best Buy locations

Logical extension of BestBuy's current business track

Judging by the way their website is going (baby beds? cosmetics?) it looks like BB wants to be a general department store now, and lots of those have embedded branded stores.

Hitchhikers' Guide was WRONG, Earth is not in a galactic backwater

Typical Terrans

Always trying to claim exceptionalism.

Qualcomm app 'extends battery life' by analysing fandroids' privates

Hope Blackberry give Qualcomm a holler

Having this baked into the BB10 OS rather than an app would be quite nice, and Z10/Q10 use Snapdragon so there is a business relationship there.

Apple, Samsung and BlackBerry go to WAR... in the Pentagon

How restricted will the devices be?

Certification is one thing but how usable will the phones be in practice? Camera disabled? External storage disabled perhaps? SMS/BBM/iMessage allowed or not?

BlackBerry and Apple pie this summer. Or BBM-onna-Droid

iOS/Android BES10 Secure Work Spaces

I suspect that once the work was done to allow iOS and Android devices talk to Blackberry's SRP infrastructure, it was a trivial issue to slap in a UI on top of the transport stuff and thereby create a BBM app.

Report: BlackBerry BYOD-ware doesn't pass UK.gov security test

Re: I suspect, based on other sources

Why would Blackberry bring out a phone with no camera, when disabling the camera has been a BES policy item for eons?

Apple fixes iOS passcode-bypass hack with 6.1.3 update

Re: Jailbreaking

I'd prefer that Apple brought out an Enterprise version with a Blackberry 10 style boot process (ROM starts signed bootloader etc.) While there is a sort of enforcement via Airwatch or other MDMs, I think *corporate* iPhone buyers should be able to have a higher level of assurance that the phones they bought and pay the bills on can't be rooted.

Microsoft begins automatic Windows 7 SP1 rollout

Got asked to install VPN on a Win7 computer the other day

Windows update was disabled, RTM Windows, RTM Office etc. etc. How is SP1 going to get to people like that?

Not so fast, BlackBerry. Now Samsung wants your tasty biz mobe pie

The more the merrier in the Enterprise space

If Samsung ups its game and especially gets going on some decent management tools, it forces RIM to keep innovating and Apple to do more than pretend they give a toss about corporate.

As for the SAFE models - these ones won't have a world-write driver permission just so the camera works... right?

Former co-CEO Balsillie has cashed out all his BlackBerry stock

""Whatever happens to Jim B from here on out, it won't make any difference to Blackberry."

Fixed.

Ready or not: Microsoft preps early delivery of IE10 for Windows 7

IE10 in corporate

Spellcheck in forms is nice. (Typed on IE10PPR/Win7SP1)

BlackBerry Q10: This quirky QWERTY will keep loyalists perky

Re: HDMI output?

BB presentations on Docs to Go without having to buy a Blackberry Presenter gizmo, for one thing.

Can BlackBerry survive? Well, the woods are still full of bear poo

Don't know how you write a BB vs rest article without using "keyboard"

As a corp admin (140 BBs) if it wasn't for the rest of the "smart"phone world's refusal to recognise USER choice by refusing to look at movable or fixed physical keyboards and given RIM's decision to reinvent the BES wheel with BDS/ActiveSync forcing new expenditure on mobile device management either way, we might have gone to WinMo or iOS already. (Sorry Android, but you let a licencee create world-write permissions to get a camera working for gods sake). While we have kicked the tyres on Z10 the question here is: does Q10 bring it or do we look at some sort of iPhone + other-thing-with-a-keyboard device mix.

The productivity our firm gets from mobile devices is almost completely about email, with calendar and phone after that and the rest trivial. BBM is purely for personal (as demonstrated by it being on the "Personal" side of Balance because RIM didn't want to challenge Enterprise IM partnerships). Keyboards let the email maniacs bang out huge quantities of client contact - i.e. billable stuff. Of the tens of thousands of apps that are in apps stores only tens have any real benefit to a corporation rather than providing warm fuzzies to those who have mingled their personal data into their work environment (thus Blackberry Balance).

BlackBerry 10: Good news, there's still time to fix this disaster

Re: Obviously this is a first look at the handset

funkeygibbon - no BES10 no Balance. I'd think hard before making that call. I had the same thinking as you before going to BEF yesterday but the Security session (Balance operates from AES256 file system, block on data transfer from "Work" to "Personal", BBM considered "Personal" etc.) was thoughtprovoking.

Should be made clear this is a consumer review

Because Balance is not mentioned. I was at Experience Forum yesterday and it was the BB10's biggest sell point for this enterprise admin. The ability to provision apps via BES10/AppWorld

Probably won't make any serious moves until April and Q10's appearance though. We just hired some iPhoners and gave them BB9900s as we never got around to certifying 9860s (they could keep their iPhones and dispose of them as they wished) - reaction of one was "well I do miss my iPhone but have to admit emails are easier on BB9900" - well, we pay you folks to type emails, so... I see the touchscreen evangelists all the time berating those who prefer keyboards and don't understand it - why not just let people use what's most productive for the use case the phone was purchased for?

Microsoft teases IE10 for Win7 with Blocker Toolkit

Which version

The IE10 on Win7 will be the "desktop" version from Win8, but you'll need a Flash plugin rather than the Win8 built-in one. (Have been running the Preview release for a while now)

Not a total bed of roses - every so often I need to fire up Chrome to work around a site that crashes tabs or renders bizarrely.

'Silent but deadly' Java security update breaks legacy apps - dev

Java 6

Oracle could have supported Java 6 indefinitely if they put the code support behind it. They just didn't want to. You can support any number of legacy products if you can be bothered (Windows XP) or not (virtually any consumer wireless router, it seems)

Even before JRE7u11 they had indicated that JRE6 updates would be run down.

Surface left on shelves as world+dog slurps up small slates

maybe they could stop this "only for non-commercial use but there's a separate licence" bunk

Might persuade some corporates to buy a few.

RIM is really in trouble when even Windows Phone 8 looks great

MDM != BES

My BES has pages and pages of policies that can be applied to Blackberry 5-7 devices. The MDMs I've seen offer perhaps one tenth the granularity. Until that changes, BES 10 is still a possibility at our shop.

Microsoft has no plans for a second Windows 7 Service Pack

More rollups then

In the Exchange world there are SPs and rollups. Microsoft hasn't done much about rollups on the OS side, and they should. XP SP3 was basically SP2 with a rollup.

I think the more concerning point is that given the common codebase that means no more SPs for Server 2008R2, right?

I'm not saying Microsoft should issue 6 SPs like the NT days, or even 4 like Windows 2000 but not even 2 is a bit chintzy, especially since Win8 is likely to be as popular in corporate shops as Vista was.

Top admen beg Microsoft to switch off 'Do Not Track' in IE 10

boohoo

"Microsoft appears determined to stop the collection of web viewing data. That is unacceptable."

To you. It is unacceptable to you.

RIM reports more losses, lower sales, lots of cash

Re: Some (looking at you Curve) are too low end

"Mine doesn't even do 3G ffs." - that's what, a 4 year old 8310 or 8900 or something? Everything from 9000 on has done 3G.

Re: No need to wait for the launch

The Reg doesn't do good news when it comes to RIM.

RIM shares bounce on BlackBerry 10 optimism

Blackberry Balance

Is available for BB6/7 as well if you have BES 5.0 SP3. Haven't bothered trying it in our environment as yet though.

Re: RIM hardware is usually good ...

Playbook doesn't run BB10, more like "BB9". Looking forward to actual BB10 with native Twitter, Cisco Anyconnect and so on.

Google declares success for Kansas City gigabit broadband

Very differently phrased article on this subject elsewhere:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/us/in-one-city-signing-up-for-internet-becomes-a-civic-cause.html?_r=2&smid=tw-share

"in July, Google announced a process in which only those areas where enough residents preregistered and paid a $10 deposit would get the service, Google Fiber. While nearly all of the affluent, mostly white neighborhoods here quickly got enough registrants, a broad swath of black communities lagged."

Foxconn: We're not FORCING interns to make iPhone 5

wonder how much cash the universities are getting from Foxconn

I'm guessing quite a bit.

Internet Explorer needs fresh dev infusion for a full recovery

Maybe devs would work more enthusastically on ONE platform

Like IE10. The browser Win 7 is supposed to get but mysteriously MS is not talking about for anything other than Win 8.