Technology

The real stinker this month, KB 4524244, rolled out the automatic update chute for four full days until Microsoft yanked it & leaving a trail of wounded PCs, primarily HP machines, in its wake. The other big-time bug in this monthpatches, a race condition in the KB 4532693 Win10 version 1903 and 1909 cumulative update installer, hasn&t been officially acknowledged by Microsoft outside of a blog post. But at least itwell known and understood.

Folks running SQL Server and Exchange Server networks need to get patched right away.

Win10 UEFI update KB 4524244 blockages

Patch Tuesday brought KB 4524244 for Windows 10 owners, a bizarre single-purpose patch apparently directed at one specific UEFI bootloader. Italked about it last week.

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Apple is rumored to announce its new, lower end iPhone at the end of March. Modeled after the iPhone 8, the iPhone 9 (or maybe it'll be called the iPhone SE 2) will offer consumers a cheaper alternative to the higher-end iPhone 11 or iPhone 11 Pro. Reintroducing its lower-end phone puts Apple in line with its Android competitors, many of which offer lower-end, high quality phones.. Macworld's Michael Simon joins Juliet and Ken to discuss the pros and cons of buying a cheaper smartphone and what they expect the upcoming iPhone 9 to look like.

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This holding company owns a handful of subsidiaries that all run independently — which keeps things interesting for an IT pilot fish who works there.

&In IT, we are often told to just make it work when one company buys its own software,& fish says. &Websites are one thing that we have managed to unify, except for one company that insists on using its own provider and managing themselves.&

Email for all the companies is also on fishservers, and that works without a hitch — at least until the day fish gets a frantic call from the subsidiary with its own website. The problem: No outside emails are arriving.

After fish sits through the standard chewing-out about how the business can&t function without email, he starts testing. Sure enough, no outside email is reaching the subsidiary. It isn&t even reaching the mail servers.

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Mozilla has started to turn on DNS-over-HTTPS, or DoH, as part of its overall strategy of stressing user privacy.

"We know that unencrypted DNS is not only vulnerable to spying but is being exploited," wrote Selena Deckelmann, Mozilla's new vice president of desktop Firefox, in a Feb. 25 post to a company blog. "We are helpingto make the shift to more secure alternatives [and] do this by performing DNS lookups in an encrypted HTTPS connection. This helps hide your browsing history from attackers on the network, helps prevent data collection by third parties on the network that ties your computer to websites you visit."

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There are important accounts to secure, and then there are important accounts to secure. Your Google account falls into that second category, maybe even with a couple of asterisks and some neon orange highlighting added in for good measure.

I mean, really: When you stop and think about how much stuff is associated with that single sign-in — your email, your documents, your photos, your files, your search history, maybe even your contacts, text messages, and location history, if you use Android — saying it's a "sensitive account" seems like an understatement. Whether you're using Google for business, personal purposes, or some combination of the two, you want to do everything you possibly can to keep all of that information locked down and completely under your control.

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