Author Archives: pappp

Source: OSNews

An upcoming feature of WordPad has been discovered by enthusiasts, revealing in-app ads that promote Microsoft Office. The change is hidden in recent Insider Preview builds, and not activated for most users. WordPad is a very simple text editor, more powerful than Notepad, but still less feature rich than Microsoft Word or LibreOffice Writer. It is good for creating a simple text document without complicated formatting. The more advertisements and preinstalled junkware Microsoft shoves into Windows 10, the more the otherwise decent operating system turns into a user-hostile joke. Apple is going down the same route with iOS, and everything about it just feels disgusting and sleazy. One of the many reasons I transitioned all my machines away from Windows and to Linux.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News

Source: Ars Technica

Enlarge / The NSA says to patch now. (credit: National Security Agency)

Microsoft's scheduled security update for Windows includes a fix to a potentially dangerous bug that would allow an attacker to spoof a certificate, making it look like it came from a trusted source. The vulnerability, reported to Microsoft by the National Security Agency, affects Windows 10, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2019, and Windows Server version 1803.

Microsoft has rated the update as "important" rather than critical. But in a blog post, Mechele Gruhn, the Principal Security Program Manager for Microsoft Security Response Center, explained that this was because "we have not seen it used in active attacks."

However, researchers outside Microsoft—including Google's Tavis Ormandy—have a much more dire assessment of the vulnerability and urge users to patch quickly before an active exploit appears.

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Source: Slashdot

The last decade was a big one for artificial intelligence but researchers in the field believe that the industry is about to enter a new phase . From a report: Hype surrounding AI has peaked and troughed over the years as the abilities of the technology get overestimated and then re-evaluated. The peaks are known as AI summers, and the troughs AI winters. The 10s were arguably the hottest AI summer on record with tech giants repeatedly touting AI's abilities. AI pioneer Yoshua Bengio, sometimes called one of the "godfathers of AI", told the BBC that AI's abilities were somewhat overhyped in the 10s by certain companies with an interest in doing so. There are signs, however, that the hype might be about to start cooling off. "I have the sense that AI is transitioning to a new phase," said Katja Hofmann, a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in Cambridge. Given the billions being invested in AI and the fact that there are likely to be more breakthroughs ahead, some researchers believe it would be wrong to call this new phase an AI winter. Robot Wars judge Noel Sharkey, who is also a professor of AI and robotics at Sheffield University, told the BBC that he likes the term "AI autumn" -- and several others agree.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Hacker News

Source: Hacker News