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ComputerWorld

ComputerWorld Independent 

How the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) will affect you and your business | TECH(talk)

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The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) is, in some ways, similar to Europe's GDPR. This rule, which goes into effect in 2020, gives individual users more ownership over their own data. Users can even refuse to allow companies to sell their online data. As the compliance deadline approaches, CSO Online contributor Maria Kolokov and senior editor Michael Nadeau discuss with Juliet how CCPA may shift business models, change online behavior and reveal where exactly our data has been. Some tech companies, like Google, are even trying to exempt themselves from regulation. Failure to adhere to the rule could be an "extinction level" event.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Time to install the August Windows patches — but watch out for the bugs

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Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 06 Sep 2019 08:16:00 -0700

August brought loads of drama to the Windows and Office patching scene. Microsoft’s first round of patches killed Visual Basic, Visual Basic for Applications and VBScript in certain situations — on all versions of Windows. Fixes for the bugs dribbled out three, four, six and 17 days after the original infection. 

Those Microsoft-introduced bugs were all the more daunting because the August patches are the ones intended to protect us from DejaBlue — the recently announced “wormable” malware infection vector that (thankfully!) has yet to be exploited. The mainstream press picked up the Chicken Little cry to install August patches right away. Then the buggy offal hit the impeller, and the press fell silent.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

FTC fines YouTube, but do fines really encourage change? | TECH(feed)

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The FTC hit yet another tech company with a seemingly massive fine for mishandling user data. This time, YouTube, owned by Google, is forced to pay $170 million for collecting data about children under 13 without parental consent. The Federal Trade Commission slapped Facebook with a $5 billion fine just a few months ago. In this episode of TECH(feed), Juliet asks whether or not these fines are effective in regulating the tech industry.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Why Apple’s little ‘Find My’ Tile competitor is big news

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Credit to Author: Jonny Evans| Date: Thu, 05 Sep 2019 04:42:00 -0700

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Microsoft Patch Alert: Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing

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Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Fri, 30 Aug 2019 10:27:00 -0700

What happens when Microsoft releases eight – count ‘em, eight – concurrent beta test versions of Win10 version 1909 without fixing bugs introduced into 1903 on Patch Tuesday?

Pan. De. Moaaan. Ium.

The VB/VBA/VBScript debacle

No doubt, you recall the first wave of pain inflicted by the August 2019 patching regimen. Microsoft somehow managed to mess up Visual Basic (an old custom programming language), Visual Basic for Applications (for Office macros) and VBScript (a largely forgotten language primarily used inside Internet Explorer). Folks running applications in any of those languages would, on occasion, receive “invalid procedure call error” messages when using apps that had been working for decades.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Hedera Hashgraph launches mainnet, hopes to compete with global business networks

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 05:00:00 -0700

Hedera Hashgraph, an electronic public ledger developed for corporate use, launched its mainnet beta today, allowing developers to create an account and build decentralized applications (dApps) for it.

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a direct competitor to blockchain distributed ledgers such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, and claims it can outperform traditional financial and business networks.

“There is no direct equivalent to Hedera Hashgraph today,” said Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Hedera is potentially competing with public networks and all the enterprise DLT frameworks (such as Hyperledger Fabric & Sawtooth, R3 Corda, and others) and their commercial providers, which include AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Hadera Hashgraph launches mainnet, hopes to compete with global business networks

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Credit to Author: Lucas Mearian| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 05:00:00 -0700

Hedera Hashgraph, an electronic public ledger developed for corporate use, launched its mainnet beta today, allowing developers to create an account and build decentralized applications (dApps) for it.

The distributed ledger technology (DLT) is a direct competitor to blockchain distributed ledgers such as Ethereum and Hyperledger, and claims it can outperform traditional financial and business networks.

“There is no direct equivalent to Hedera Hashgraph today,” said Martha Bennett, a principal analyst at Forrester Research. Hadera is potentially competing with public networks and all the enterprise DLT frameworks (such as Hyperledger Fabric & Sawtooth, R3 Corda, and others) and their commercial providers, which include AWS, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Throwback Thursday: Timing is everything

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Credit to Author: Sharky| Date: Thu, 29 Aug 2019 03:00:00 -0700

It’s many years ago, and this pilot fish regularly travels to company offices around the country, dealing with IT-related problems and running user training sessions.

The big current project is implementing internet filtering after complaints that some workers are viewing inappropriate websites. So fish has to head to a meeting with many directors and managers to demonstrate.

Upon arriving at the meeting site, fish sets up a laptop and projector and connects it to the internal network. Then he tests to make sure the filtering is working, calling up a blocked site that, if it does display, only shows a silhouette of a bunny with a bow tie.

But not to worry: The site is blocked, so everything is ready.

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ComputerWorld Independent 

Microsoft removes August patch block on Win7/2008R2 systems running Norton, Symantec AV

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Credit to Author: Woody Leonhard| Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 06:07:00 -0700

If you’re using Symantec Endpoint Protection or any Norton Antivirus product on a Windows 7 or Server 2008 R2 machine, you didn’t get the August patches. Shortly after the August Monthly Rollup and Security-only patches were released, Microsoft put a freeze on systems running Symantec or Norton antivirus products.

The conflict stemmed from a long-anticipated change in the way Microsoft signed the August patches: Starting in August, all patches are signed using the SHA-2 encryption method. Somehow, Symantec didn’t get the message back in November that the shift was underway, and missed the deadline.

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