Countdown to End7: Win10 nudges Win7 out of first place, becomes most-used internet platform by a smidgen

Ya’ll know that I don’t trust the statistics from any of the major “network usage” measurement companies. They all rely on arbitrary definitions, sampling methods and/or fudging (er, statistical adjustment) that would make an American pollster blush. Still, if you ignore the two-decimal-place precision in the reported numbers, there’s an obvious and inevitable move from Win7 to Win10.

Duh.

Net Applications reports that in December, Win10 usage share hit 45.5% of all PCs running Windows, while Win7 stood at 42.8%. If you include all of the Netmarketshare-defined “desktop/laptop” computers (screenshot), Win10 was at 39.2%, Win7 at 36.9%, with the most stable version of Windows (8.1) at 4.45% and macOS X 10.13 at 2.84%.

Gregg Keizer has a great summary in his Computerworld article:

Nearly three and a half years after its release, Windows 10 last month surpassed its enterprise predecessor, Windows 7, as the most popular operating system on the planet…

When Windows 7’s support ends, it should be powering slightly more than 36% of all Windows PCs, while Windows 10 will be running 55%.

By comparison, Windows XP accounted for 29% of all Windows PCs when it dropped off the support list.

Countdown to End7: 377 days.

Deanna’s Freeware Spotlight: DiskInternals Linux Reader v3.3

Dual boot Linux? Need to access your Linux partition or drive from Windows?

Need to recover data from a customer’s Ext2/3/4, ReiserFS, Reiser4, HFS, HFS+, FAT, exFAT, NTFS, ReFS or UFS2 formatted drive but all you have with you is your Windows laptop?

This is the tool for you!

The program only allows read-only access so as not to damage the file system. It also ignores file security policies so you can grab anything you need.

Download from OlderGeeks.com:
https://www.oldergeeks.com/downloads/file.php?id=2403

Pictures of 2014 MU69 “Ultima Thule” expected shortly

Right around 17:27 UTC today — about four hours from now — NASA’s New Horizons probe’s pictures of the most-distant object we’ve ever seen should hit earth. They won’t be posted immediately — NASA gets to spruce them up first, then wait for an opportune news dump time — but sometime in the next 24 we’ll get initial shots of the denizen of the Kuiper Belt.

The flyby itself already happened, about eight hours ago, but you know… picture compression, speed of light and all. The New Horizon is just 4.1 billion miles (about 6 light hours) away.

If you’re curious, check out Emily Lakdawalla’s report on the Planetary Society blog.

Then watch Dr. Brian May’s ode to the event. Yes, the lead guitarist of Queen has a PhD in astrophysics from Imperial College London.

There’s a new version of 7-Zip

No indication as yet whether the new version 18.06 has the same security problems as the older versions 18.0 thru 18.05. I expect we’ll hear from Landave shortly.

Günter Born has a detailed description of version 18.06, including a link to the official download site.

Personally, I’ve manually downloaded and installed it on my production machine. I’m expecting a blast from Landave in 3… 2… 1…

Patch Lady – vendors start to shut the doors on Windows 7

CCH or Commerce Clearing House is one one of several major tax software vendors — they just sent me this email this morning …..

CCH will discontinue support of Microsoft® Windows® 7 in our software products as of November 30, 2019. While we expect that many of our products will continue to function on the Windows® 7 operating system, CCH’s ability to sufficiently test products and diagnose software issues for customers using Windows® 7 will officially end November 30, 2019. For tax customers, this means that our first release of the 2019 tax software, scheduled for early December 2019, will not be officially supported on the Windows® 7 operating system, although it is likely to continue working for some period of time. In addition, customers using Windows® 7 who contact CCH Technical Support may be asked to upgrade their Microsoft® software if their issue cannot be reproduced with currently supported software, or if the problem is determined to be linked to the use of Windows® 7.

Much like Windows® XP, the Windows® 7 operating system was very popular. However, Microsoft® has announced that they, too, will discontinue support for Windows® 7 as of January 14, 2020. Here is a link to their Windows 7 Lifecycle page. We are requesting that customers using Windows® 7 begin upgrading following the mid-April filing deadline so we can continue to provide the high level of support you expect from CCH. We are providing advanced notice in an effort to give our clients ample time to upgrade.

Note: This notice regarding discontinued support for Windows® 7 will have no implications on the upcoming 2018 tax filing season. Additional reminders will be sent out post April 15, 2019.

The countdown has started….

OMG North Korea attacked the LA Times… and other nonsensical security stuff

You may have read the articles going around, starting Saturday afternoon, that claimed the LA Times and other current and former Tribune Publishing newspapers were under active attack by a nation state. That explains why your newspaper may have been late on Saturday.

Except, of course, it’s all hogwash. Now it looks like the LA Times was hit by a garden variety Ryuk ransomware attack. Not to cast shade on the problems with a ransomware attack on a large company, which can be considerable, but the rush to blame the Bad Guys du jour for a diabolical attack is disconcerting. The fact that several other news outlets picked up on the Sky is Falling cry should give y’all pause.

Cooler heads will prevail. Although it may take a while.

There’s a great writeup from Robert M. Lee about the incident:

Shortly after Tribune Publishing lost operations and ability to print papers the press highlighted that there was a cyber attack. The attack was highlighted as a targeted attack by a nation-state. This was all related to one anonymous insider at the company telling the media. Thus, early on I, and many others on social media, called for calm and patience while the details became public. The details are still not public and the company hasn’t officially responded but an insider told media sources that the malware used in the attack was Ryuk

So if your Sainted Aunt Martha warns you about them furriners breaking down printing presses in Los Angeleeees, you can smile and go back to sipping egg nog.

Along those same lines… I still haven’t heard of any Internet Explorer-based infections, ones worthy of the way-out-of-band emergency patch on Dec. 19. Remember how the “Windows security experts” were running around in circles, telling people they had to patch IE immediately, or face dire consequences? Yeah. Crickets.

If you were in Auckland it’d be 2019 already

It’s gonna be an interesting year, on many fronts….

EU is going to fund a bug bounty program for 7-Zip, KeePass, Notepad++, VLC Media Player and more

Bug bounty programs — where software bug catchers get rewarded for identifying security holes and disclosing them to the manufacturer — have proven popular and worthwhile, although they do have some downsides.

Bug bounty programs are usually carried out by software manufacturers, who pay to have a chance to fix their mistakes before the bad guys have a chance to clobber their products.

Folks who make open source software don’t have the same presumably-deep pockets as their commercial counterparts. When it comes to bug bounty programs, there’s no bounty to tap.

Enter the European Union. As part of the Free and Open Source Software Audit project, EU will offer bug bounty programs for several Windows products I use all the time — 7-Zip, KeePass, Notepad++, VLC Media Player — and a bunch of products that I may use indirectly, including Apache Kafka, Apache Tomcat, Digital Signature Services (DSS), Drupal, Filezilla, FLUX TL, the GNU C Library (glibc), midPoint, PuTTY, the Symfony PHP framework, and WSO2.

As Catalin Cimpanu explains on ZDNet:

Starting with January, security researchers and security companies can hunt vulnerabilities in these open source projects and report them to the bug bounty programs… in the hopes of a monetary reward, if the bug report is approved and results in a patch.