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Today’s topics include Microsoft’s plans to release its Windows 10 Anniversary Update on Aug. 2, a federal judge’s ruling that home computers are not private if they are connected to the Internet, the hacker group OurMine’s campaign to break into the social media accounts of big-name high-tech executives to prove that no one is safe and Oracle’s launch of its SPARC S7 chip.
Microsoft has announced that it will release its feature-packed Windows 10 Anniversary Update on Aug. 2.
Windows 10 was originally released on July 29, 2015, meaning that the update will technically miss the operating system’s anniversary by a few days. Nonetheless, Microsoft is betting that users, particularly enterprise customers, won’t mind the delay.
Microsoft used the opportunity to reveal that two new security features will be included with the update, Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection and Windows Information Protection, formerly called enterprise data protection, which is Microsoft’s take on OS-based data leak prevention.
A federal judge for the Eastern District of Virginia has ruled that the user of any computer that connects to the Internet should not have an expectation of privacy because computer security is ineffectual at stopping hackers.
The June 23 ruling came in one of the many cases resulting from the FBI’s infiltration of PlayPen, a hidden service on the Tor network that acted as a hub for child exploitation which resulted in the prosecution of hundreds of individuals. To identify suspects, the FBI took control of PlayPen for two weeks and used what it calls a “network investigative technique,” which essentially is a simple program that runs on visitors’ computers and identifies their Internet addresses.
Such mass hacking using a single warrant has riled privacy and digital-rights advocates. However, Senior U.S. District Judge Henry Coke Morgan Jr. upheld the use of the warrant and even stated that the warrant is unnecessary because of the type of crime being investigated and because users should have no “objectively reasonable expectation of privacy.”
Google CEO Sundar Pichai is among the latest members of an unhappy club: public figures who have been hacked by OurMine, a group of hackers who profess to be doing the world a favor by revealing how vulnerable most of us are online. They hack into accounts and leave public messages, as well as a suggestion to buy their own security services.
“Hey, it’s OurMine, we are just testing your security, please visit OurMine to upgrade it,” they tweeted from Pichai’s account.
The group told Wired and TechCrunch that they’re a trio of teenagers. They deny being based in Russia or Saudi Arabia—which is where one hacker says their IP address and Twitter handle originate from.
Oracle wants latest edition of its SPARC chip architecture to take over computing workloads that currently are run on systems powered by Intel’s x86 processors.
At the Oracle OpenWorld 2016 show in Brazil June 29, company executives introduced the new SPARC S7, a less-powerful and lower-cost version of Oracle’s SPARC M7 chip that is designed to run on private and hybrid cloud environments where Intel’s chips have long been dominant.
Oracle asserts the new SPARC chip can compete with Intel on a per-core price basis and will bring more capabilities that exceed what the competition can offer.