Sometimes a digital thumbs up just isn’t enough to express your gratitude, so YouTube is offering a new and premium way to say thank you to creators called Super Thanks.
Formerly known as the viewer applause experiment, Super Thanks is available with four price options—$2, $5, $10, and $50 (or your local currency equivalent). Each time you give financial thanks, you’ll be greeted with a celebratory GIF and earn a distinct color-coded comment to which creators can directly respond.
NBN Co hit a hurdle in its bid to rein in competition from 5G operators late yesterday, with Australia’s competition watchdog more clearly defining when it will consider 5G “substitutable” for fixed-line services.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) late yesterday confirmed a December draft decision to extend a set of regulations imposed on fixed-line rivals to NBN Co by a further five years.
CyberArk researchers tricked Windows Hello, the passwordless authentication system built into Windows 10 and Windows 11, using a single infrared image accompanied by an all-black frame.
Windows Hello encompasses three authentication methods: a user-generated PIN, a fingerprint scanner, and a facial-recognition tool. CyberArk researchers specifically targeted its facial-recognition capabilities, but issues have also been discovered in other aspects of the system.
Microsoft hit yet another snag in its efforts to lock down the Windows print spooler, as the software maker warned customers on Thursday to disable the service to contain a new vulnerability that helps attackers execute malicious code on fully patched machines.
The vulnerability is the third printer-related flaw in Windows to come to light in the past five weeks. A patch Microsoft released in June for a remote code-execution flaw failed to fix a similar but distinct flaw dubbed PrintNightmare, which also made it possible for attackers to run malicious code on fully patched machines. Microsoft released an unscheduled patch for PrintNightmare, but the fix failed to prevent exploits on machines using certain configurations.
The rumors were true: Valve’s handheld gaming PC is real.
On Thursday, the company debuted Steam Deck, which is launching this December for $399. The product promises to run all your favorite games from Steam, including AAA titles, but from a portable device.
To pull this off, the hardware uses an AMD APU chip, which includes both a CPU and dedicated graphics built into the silicon. The chip itself features a four-core/eight-thread CPU built with AMD’s older Zen 2 architecture that can achieve a 3.5GHz max clock speed.
Microsoft’s “Office Assistant,” commonly known as Clippy, was a talking paperclip with googly eyes that nobody liked. We recently cited its debut appearance in Office 97 as one of the most famous times that Windows sucked, saying that it was often wrong and always irritating. Clippy was so unpopular that even Microsoft itself joined in with the hate, in the form of a series of Office XP ads in 2003 celebrating Clippy’s demise. (You can see them on YouTube if you don’t want to horse around with archives and Flash animations.) In 2007, Clippy was excised from Microsoft Office completely.
The funny thing about the passage of time is that it can make things that objectively sucked seem not so bad in hindsight. For instance, I somehow have fond memories of waking up at 5 am so I could dress in a sticky rain suit and pick tobacco from sodden fields as a teenager; and in a similar vein, Clippy appears to be enjoying a nostalgia-powered uptick in popularity. Microsoft recently released some blast-from-the-past backgrounds for Microsoft Teams that included a loving portrait of the mascot, and now it’s threatening to bring its jaunty anthropomorphised stationary back for real.
Facebook is rolling out a new feature that’ll let certain users become “experts” in their Facebook groups.
The function is designed to help knowledgeable experts stand out in a Facebook group. “After accepting this role, group experts will receive a badge next to their names in the group, making it easier for group members to spot informative posts and comments from designated experts,” the social network said.
You’ll soon be able to run Windows on any device, including a Mac, Android/iOS smartphone or Linux machine, thanks to Microsoft’s new cloud PC platform: Windows 365.
The service can stream a Windows 10 session and the upcoming Windows 11 over the internet. The company plans on launching it on August 2nd to businesses and organizations of all sizes.
I’ve been a little bit quiet the last few days. But there has been a reason!
I’ve been working on getting GeekJabber up and running and writing content for it. It’s basically a site I’ve set up as a casual gaming news/reviews site. It’s (mostly) working, just have to deal with a particular weirdness with some Google search results that I’m trying to work out how to fix.
If that’s your thing, feel free to have a look at the site, follow on Twitter and join the Discord server.
An emergency patch Microsoft issued on Tuesday fails to fully fix a critical security vulnerability in all supported versions of Windows that allows attackers to take control of infected systems and run code of their choice, researchers said.
The threat, colloquially known as PrintNightmare, stems from bugs in the Windows print spooler, which provides printing functionality inside local networks. Proof-of-concept exploit code was publicly released and then pulled back, but not before others had copied it. Researchers track the vulnerability as CVE-2021-34527
