Removing all shortcuts and apps will leave your PC more secure, albeit at the expense of usefulness. It leaves the elephant in the room of the Windows OS.
Posts by petef
230 publicly visible posts • joined 13 Sep 2010
Microsoft Defender ASR rules strip icons, app shortcuts from Taskbar, Start Menu
Non-binary DDR5 is finally coming to save your wallet
University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?
openSUSE makes baseline CPU requirements a little friendlier than feared
Zoom adds email and calendar to its apps, to relieve the crushing burden of ALT-TAB
Multi-factor auth fatigue is real – and it's why you may be in the headlines next
Alert: 15-year-old Python tarfile flaw lurks in 'over 350,000' code projects
It is not always that obvious. I had a real instance of that happening some years ago (the resulting system restore involved fifteen 5¼" floppies). A colleague had asked me to release my storage on their machine. I deleted my home directory but then modified my home to be / so that I could still log in. I informed the machine owner that I had cleared my disk usage. Unfortunately they then opted to remove my user account. Part of that procedure was to remove the user's home directory. Tears ensued.
I raised an issue with Sun who at that stage had become the owner of Interactive UNIX. They declined to put protections in place. I wonder what became of them?
Critical hole in Atlassian Bitbucket allows any miscreant to hijack servers
Meta proposes doing away with leap seconds
Tuxedo Pulse G2: Linux in your lap
I agree that PCS offer a good route to Linux. Skipping Windows saves of the order of £100. But there is a difference between supplying a PC with LInux that is certified to have working drivers and a barebone delivery that is the end user's responsibility to manage.
Not all PCS machines are Clevo. I've been happy with that but my more recent Akstron purchase has had recurring problems.
The new generation of CentOS replacements – plus the daddy of them all: RHEL 8.6
Researchers find 134 flaws in the way Word, PDFs, handle scripts
John Deere tractors 'bricked' after Russia steals machinery from Ukraine
Why the Linux desktop is the best desktop
Re: One reason to stay with Windows - Outlook
I've had no problems with WhatsApp on Linux. It is one of the message integrations in Opera though I'm sure that there will be other implementations.
Outlook works fine in the browser, Teams less so the last few times I tried. Those, of course, are just for work.
Microsoft brings Cloud PCs and local desktops together in Windows 365
Epson payments snafu leaves subscribers unable to print
New York Times outlays seven-figure sum for 1,900 lines of JavaScript – yes, we mean Wordle
Re: Does not have to be a time sink
I think of my program as a helper rather than a solver. For my word list I started with /usr/share/dict/american-english. There are some diacritics in there that need to be stripped. Be aware that there are 266 words in the 2315 canned wordle answers missing from that dict. I took pains to avoid looking at those, just counting them. A bigger dict derived from SCOWL was only missing one of the wordle answers.
Never mind the Panic button – there's a key to Compose yourself
What a Mesh: Microsoft puts Office in the Loop, adds mixed reality tech to Teams
How not to train your Dragon: What happens when you teach an AI game sex-abuse stories then blame players
Google to auto-enroll 150m users, 2m YouTubers with two-factor authentication
Sir Tim Berners-Lee and the BBC stage a very British coup to rescue our data from Facebook and friends
Works both ways
This idea would get more traction if Facebook and co. see the benefits too rather than relying on regulation being forced upon them. Users marking up their own preferences should be more valuable than what algorithms alone can glean.
I cannot be alone in being hit with "targeted" messages in the vein of "you have just bought a washing machine, here are other washing machines that may interest you". Those are irritating and it would be commercially useful to improve.
Apple tried to patch this security hole in macOS Finder but didn't consider upper and lowercase characters
I would drive 100 miles and I would drive 100 more just to be the man that drove 200 miles to... hit the enter key
It's time to delete that hunter2 password from your Microsoft account, says IT giant
Good while Authenticator works
This afternoon my broadband dropped out twice for a few minutes at a time. Openreach are rewiring the cabinet round the corner from me. On both occasions I could not reconnect to my company VPN because Authenticator failed to respond. I reset the phone which seemed to jolt it back into life.
So the data centre's 'getting a little hot' – at 57°C, that's quite the understatement
Google Groups kills RSS support without notice
Google News
Despite using RSS for many years I will not miss Google Groups. I rarely use that directly but it remains the prime source of spam into mailing lists that I read using RSS via gmane.
I do however have a couple of RSS feeds from Google News searches. I wonder how long those will survive?
Google says Pixel 6, 6 Pro coming this year with custom AI acceleration
On this most auspicious of days, we ask: How many sysadmins does it take to change a lightbulb?
Windows 11 comes bearing THAAS, Trojan Horse as a service
Linux Foundation celebrates 30 years of Torvalds' kernel with a dry T-shirt contest
The phantom of the Opera is here... unveil R5 (just don't let the boss see)
First Forth, C and Python, now comp.lang.tcl latest Usenet programming forum nuked by Google Groups
Google to revive RSS support in Chrome for Android
Show me the money
I am a long time consumer of RSS (and indeed NNTP). The abandonment of Google Reader was a shock but I found that Feedly filled the gap.
RSS/Atom is a great way to disseminate content. It is poor at tracking personal user data and delivering ads. I genuinely wonder why Google choose to reinvest in it now.
Big red buttons and very bad language: A primer for life in the IT world
Half of Q1's malware traffic observed by Sophos was TLS encrypted, hiding inside legit requests to legit services
Opera loses Touch with iOS app: Browser maker locks and loads the rebrandogun
What could possibly go wrong? Sublet your home broadband to strangers who totally won't commit crimes
GitLab scans its customers' source code, finds it's as fragile as you'd expect
What a Hancock-up: Excel spreadsheet blunder blamed after England under-reports 16,000 COVID-19 cases
It's Google's hardware launch day, and what do we get? A few Pixel phones, Nest kit, and another Chromecast
Hold For Me?
I wonder how well Hold For Me performs. I have had too much experience recently of contacting utilities, etc on behalf of an elderly relative. The general pattern is to play muzak for a bit and then tell you how important your call is to them. I had my hopes raised the first few times, I don't think a bot would fare much better. The worst was AA insurance who I gave up on after 45 minutes on hold. Their repeated message was "we are here for you 24/7", patently not. They eventually responded to my earlier email after two days. I say the worst but I am into my third month of waiting for BT to switch to the Basic account we are entitled to.
UK mobile network EE plumps for Nokia to provide that all-important 5G RAN equipment
NHS COVID-19 launch: Risk-scoring algorithm criticised, the downloads, plus public told to 'upgrade their phones'
BlueFrag
Leaving aside support for Android 5 and earlier, Android 6 to 9 are vulnerable to click-free exploitation by BlueFrag if you turn on Bluetooth as required by the app. Android 10 can only be DOSed.
Security patches may be available, a security update of March 2020 addresses the issue. Unfortunately my Moto G5s is two years old and security updates stopped at August 2019. Customer support told me that no more security updates will be released. YMMV.
I have no other need to enable Bluetooth so I am left with a dilemma. Risk infection of my phone or myself and others. Proof of concept code for BlueFrag is publicly available so even skiddies can write exploits.
The app will not allow me to scan a QR code if Bluetooth is disabled, dumb logic.