Josh Wieder

Microsoft fully ended support for their Windows 7 product in January of last year. The change is primarily administrative: Microsoft will no longer distribute security patches for free with Window 7 or guarantee its functionality. It is not a sudden move by Microsoft: the company has a well-documented support cycle for all versions of Windows, and Windows 7 customers were given plenty of notification, including from pop-ups from within Windows that users have to minimize to continue using the computers. This post is not meant to imply that Microsoft did not make a good faith effort to notify their users.   Also: Windows 7 is not a good product at this point. Windows 7 is fundamentally insecure and unstable with modern applications (and has been for years), regardless of what support cycle it is in. That said, there are many unique situations for which running an out-of-date version of Windows is the only practical option. I've found this to be particularly true in the med...

Someone more cynical than myself might think that Microsoft's sudden 66% decrease of OneDrive storage space is a bait & switch - give away the space for free until users become dependent, than take it away, threaten to delete it, forcing those who have become accustomed to the free service to pony up and pay.

As part of my consulting business I have a number of web servers I take care of. This morning, I woke up to receive a particularly crappy message related to one of those servers: possible DoS attack Awesome, right? Ever notice how you never get these sorts of messages between the hours of 9 AM and 5 PM, Monday through Friday? So I tried to SSH into the target server, and was pleased to find I was able to connect. Relieved that this was likely a false alarm, I found this in the Apache logs: 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 200 146 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 403 5 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500] "GET /robots.txt HTTP/1.1" 403 5 40.77.167.20 - - [19/Jan/2016:19:43:15 -0500...

I am a victim of my nostalgia. Yesterday, I revived a years-old post in which I provided bloggees with some of the latest Windows activation keys to update the data for Windows 10. I figured I might as well dredge up another bit I had let fall by the wayside; Weekly links ! Exciting, I know.    - Yahoo's ad network and Microsoft Azure's web hosting service were abused to circulate an enormous flood of malicious software . Malwarebytes is being credited with the discovery - which is a little amusing because Malwarebytes has for had their own issues with security   for many years. h/t Washington Post     - Planned Parenthood and a variety of other related organizations were brought offline by a sustained series of DDoS attacks .  In what may or may not have been the work of the same group of individuals, someone has claimed they have hacked Planned Parenthood and retrieved an employee list database of some kind or another .      AFAIK, t...

Heres part of the Microsoft's 12,000 word ToS for Windows 10: Finally, we will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to: 1.comply with applicable law or respond to valid legal process, including from law enforcement or other government agencies; 2.protect our customers, for example to prevent spam or attempts to defraud users of the services, or to help prevent the loss of life or serious injury of anyone; 3.operate and maintain the security of our services, including to prevent or stop an attack on our computer systems or networks; or 4.protect the rights or property of Microsoft, including enforcing the terms governing the use of the services – however, if we receive information indicating that someone is using our services to traffic in stolen intellectual or physical property of Microsoft, we ...

A while back I worked for a small hosting firm that focused on Microsoft products. As part of my responsibilities I wrote a great deal of documentation for them for a variety of tasks - some basic, some more advanced and problematic. Anyway I was pleased to see today that these tutorials are still published on their site. Follow this link, for instance, to read an instructional guide on how to enable CLR with MSSQL 2005 .

Clever hacker and all around cool guy Dylan Saccomanni viciously pwn'd the popular messaging application GroupMe last week. The exploit allowed an attacker to signup for a new account while using the phone number of an existing user. The only verification required at that point was a four digit PIN that could be easily brute-forced. To their credit, GroupMe responded rapidly to Saccomanni's notice and the issue appears to have been resolved.

As time goes on, having a knowing how to write in a programming language is becoming less of an odd and obscurantist lifestyle choice and more of a necessity for gainful employment. Already, anyone wanting to pursue a career in the hard scientists will be finding themselves either developing or working with custom applications. But even entry-level and intern positions frequently have a "please help us with our website / CMS / database" component to them. The trouble is, people are terrified of code; even very smart people. It looks like ancient greek. For students of ancient greek it looks like Farsi. For Persian students of the Asiatic classics it looks like, err, English, probably. My point is that going from using the internet for Facebook and using the internet for push requests on Github has a very steep learning curve. So steep that most people fall right the hell off the curve. Enter Scratch . Scratch is an object oriented programming language developed by the Sma...

So I am looking around in one of Microsoft's websites for web development tips when I come across this: D'oh It's really one of the worst possible places to put one of those.

Microsoft has started giving away 90 day free trials of Azure - SQL reporting and media services are included. Its worth giving it a try since the price is right, if for no other reason than to become a bit more familiar with the platform. Whether or not Microsoft comes out a winner in the Cloud Revenue Wars has yet to be seen, but my suspicion is the platform will be here to stay for some time.* * This website is not involved with any affiliate advertising. I do not receive any commissions for click throughs or signups and I was not paid for this post.. 

Fast Company - The Vatican has selected EMC to source roughly 2.8 Petabytes of storage for a project to digitize the Vatican library, home to over 1 million books. Business Week - Skype service in China is actively monitored for certain key phrases that are offensive to the state. When a user inputs these phrases, the conversation is forwarded to Chinese intelligence. Skype is currently owned by Microsoft, and in China is partnered with TOM Online to provide service in the region (like India, China requires foreign entities to be minority stake holders with a domestic corporation in order to do business). Microsoft has not responded to requests to clarify the surveillance features in Skype beyond saying that they adhere to Chinese law when operating there. No word yet on whether American users are monitored as well (at this point, I would be more shocked if they were not) - the Chinese program bears striking similarity to the NSA program that became public shortly after 9/11, ...

Microsoft Access Data Components are usually fairly stable. They tend to be updated with significant OS related updates (I'm looking at you, Service Packs).  That being said, issues do happen. Today I encountered an issue following a P to V migration using Hyper-V for a Windows 2000 server with an ADO connection to a MSSQL database. Somehow MDAC versions become mismatched during this process. Your actual error may vary. Your application may throw an error 429 " Active-X component can't create object", you might get a  IPP_E_MDAC_VERSION error. In the case today, a line in the website's general.asa was mentioned as an invalid object. Download and execute the Microsoft Component Checker to verify a mismatch against your required Component versions - Use this for 2003   and this for 2000 . For Windows Server 2003 and 2008 systems, I would typically advise an in-place upgrade as outlined here . You can try a manual install on these OS' but frankly it is no...