[German]Owners of a Microsoft Surface Book 3 should be careful installing a Feb. 2022 firmware update on these devices at the moment. I have information that the combination of certain firmware updates can lead to real issues and bricks a device (device no longer boots, drives disappear).
Microsoft has sent me a mail with various revisions of security updates as of February 17, 2022. These revisions are only informal, as the classification of certain vulnerabilities has changed. Here is the uncommented overview, which relates to Microsoft Office for Macs.
[German]The developers of the Chrome and Firefox browsers are currently worrying about whether there will soon be problems with web pages that can then no longer be displayed properly. The background is that the major version of these browsers will soon reach three digits (100) due to the fast update cycles. Websites that check the browser agent string for the browser version could then cause trouble.
[German]22 years ago, on February 17, 2000, Microsoft released the further development of Windows NT under the name Windows 2000 – internally the part was called Windows NT 5.0. Brings tears to my eyes when I look at the system requirements: Pentium processor with 133 MHz, 64 MB RAM, a 2 GB hard disk with at least 650 MB free space and a CD-ROM drive. And with that part we could somehow just work – no need for online accounts, a start menu that worked, and, and, and. Long time ago. Details have been collected by the guys and gals at Wikipedia.
[German]Microsoft has released a new Windows 11 Insider Preview build 22557 in the Dev Channel on February 16, 2022. Normally, I don't discuss Insider Preview builds here anymore. But this new build promises a number of new features, but is not available for ARM64 PCs. When the announcement of the new features was made, I started to wonder. Because it is promised a handful of new features for insiders, including folders in the pinned apps area in the Start menu or new touch gestures. So I put some thoughts together in a blog post.
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[German]The U.S. civil liberties organization Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has just made public another case of lockin for printer consumables. Printer manufacturer Dymo has equipped its latest generations of thermal direct printers with a new ruse to force the use of the manufacturer's consumables. Rolls of thermal paper for these printers will be equipped with RFID chips for identification. This prevents users from using third-party thermal paper or labels in these devices. Dymo touts the benefits of automatic detection of label types and automatic counting of remaining labels. The pleasant side effect is that the customer has to buy the thermal papers from Dymo, regardless of the price.
[German]In January 2022, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) announced a cyberattack on its IT system. The attack stole confidential information on more than 515,000 vulnerable people. Now the ICRC has released more details of its internal investigation. The attack was carried out via an (unpatched) Zoho vulnerability, using specially designed attack methods. This suggests that the attack was carried out by state actors to obtain confidential information on vulnerable individuals. The attackers were able to move around the system undetected for 70 days. The case is one of the rare occasions where more details about the attack came to my attention, so I'm reposting that here for review.
[German]Microsoft has updated the Chromium Edge browser to version 98.0.1108.55 as of February 16, 2022 (thanks to the reader for pointing this out). This is a maintenance update that fixes vulnerability CVE-2022-0609, according to the release notes. In addition, the vulnerabilities listed in the blog post Chrome 98.0.4758.102 fixes 0-day vulnerabilities. The browser should update automatically, but can also be downloaded here.
[German]VMware has released security updates for various products. These should close vulnerabilities that are rated as critical. It affects the products VMware ESXi, VMware Workstation, VMware Fusion and VMware Cloud Foundation. The vulnerabilities could be exploited to execute arbitrary code and cause a denial of service (DoS) condition.
[German]Microsoft has released the update KB5001716 for machines with older Windows 10 versions. The update updates the Update Service components so that the machine can be updated to a newer Windows 10 build. Here's a brief overview of what the update does and how it gets onto machines.
MVP:
2013 – 2016
WIMVP:
2017 – 2020
