Forum Top Ten lists!

FROM THE FORUMS

The forums are a centerpiece of AskWoody, allowing our community to engage with one another to solve problems, share insights, offer feedback, and add to our collective knowledge. (Not to mention keeping us in line.)

We appreciate both the questions and the ongoing willingness of forum members to participate.

Here’s a quick summary of posts from the first half of this year. We look forward to seeing what happens in the second half.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.32.0, 2024-08-05).
This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

Can we align human interests with robots, so they don’t turn on us?

PUBLIC DEFENDER

By Brian Livingston

Robots in human-like forms are already starting to assume jobs that have been performed for centuries by ordinary workers in manufacturing, logistics, and other industries.

This is my second column in a two-part series. The first installment described humanoid bots that are faster than humans at certain tasks, much stronger in moving heavy objects, and far lower in cost than the labor force in most industrialized nations. Employers are currently paying only $10 to $12 per hour for bots when averaged over the useful lives of the mechanical workers.

The outlay is expected to fall into the $2 to $3 per hour range, plus software costs, as soon as mass-production scale is achieved, which is projected to occur as early as 2025.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.32.0, 2024-08-05).

Email authentication and older clients don’t mix

ON SECURITY

By Susan Bradley

For many years, email was the standard way to communicate.

I still remember a business study from long ago about how plain old email was used on a car manufacturer’s shop floor to keep track of the inventory. It was fast, it was immediate, and everyone used it.

What happened to that “just works” platform?

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.32.0, 2024-08-05).

Use Chrome and Ublock Origin?

You may have seen the news about Chrome not supporting uBlock Origin in the future. As this post indicates, “Starting with Google Chrome 127, there will be a warning for uBlock Origin (uBO) in your chrome://extensions/ page:”

The reason is that Chrome is phasing out support for Manifest v2 in favor of Manifest v3.

Firefox will continue to support it, so if you rely on it and are a fan, plan accordingly.  You can move to uBlock lite as another option.

So, do you use uBlock Origin? Will you be impacted?

MS-DEFCON 3: Secure Boot triggers recovery keys

By Susan Bradley

It’s time to check whether your boot drive is encrypted.

As I predicted, Microsoft’s July 2024 security update may trigger a request for recovery keys among those who enabled BitLocker or drive encryption. That’s because the update included a change to Secure Boot.

This is problematic enough that I’m lowering the MS-DEFCON level to just 3, rather than the more common level 4 I usually suggest at the end of the month. I think you should install updates, but don’t install and then review. Instead, understand this problem ahead of time, prepare as needed, and then update.

Anyone can read the full MS-DEFCON Alert (21.31.1, 2024-07-31.

Lessons learned from CrowdStrike

ON SECURITY

By Susan Bradley

It’s been over a week since the technology meltdown that impacted airlines, some banks, and even my sister’s Starbucks order through Uber Eats on Friday morning.

Despite the carnage, only a very small segment of computer systems was impacted. In the Official Microsoft Blog, the post Helping our customers through the CrowdStrike outage pointed out that less than one percent of all Windows machines were affected.

So why was this so impactful? More important, what lessons have we learned from this event? Is there anything we can do better next time?

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.31.0, 2024-07-29).
This story also appears in our public Newsletter.

What cheeses me off: Microsoft Office edition

MICROSOFT 365

By Peter Deegan

Having endured and written about Microsoft Office for more than two decades, I offer my list of annoyances and timewasters in Microsoft Office, especially Word.

I came up with my top ten annoyances without breaking a sweat. Some are deliberate choices made by Microsoft to advance its own agenda or save money. Others have appeared over time as Microsoft has ignored the changing reality for its customers.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.31.0, 2024-07-29).

Microsoft PowerToys aren’t just for power users

WINDOWS 11

By Mary Branscombe

Microsoft keeps adding useful tools to the free PowerToys set and improving what’s already there.

Back in the Windows 95 days, system tweaking and cleaning utilities were so common — and so likely to change system settings that stopped Windows features from working properly — that the Windows shell and kernel teams came out with their own tools, known as PowerToys.

These were refreshed for Windows XP. A few other Microsoft teams joined in. Engineers on the OneNote development team created multiple power toys, including one that eventually became the Onetastic add-on.

There were so many changes in Windows Vista and Windows 7 that many PowerToys stopped working. Microsoft didn’t update them. And some just turned into Windows features. It wasn’t until 2019 that PowerToys returned for Windows 10, and with a slightly different approach.

Read the full story in our Plus Newsletter (21.31.0, 2024-07-29).