Dr. Bill | The Computer Curmudgeon

Good news! Oracle Virtualbox, the popular FREE hypervisor for multiple platforms, including Windows, OS/X, Linux, and Solaris, now supports Windows 10 clients (or VMs!) The latest release is Version 5.0.6 and has fixed a lot of bugs, including latency issues, a LOT of work on bridged networking, which I like because I use that a lot!

VirtualBox FREE Hypervisor

Support is now available for Mac OS/X El Capitan including GUI-related fixes, caturing USB devices, and it now allows the colon character on shared folders.

Windows additions include: fixing shutting down VBoxTray when running with older VirtualBox host versions, fixed video playback with VLC and Windows Media Player when the WDDM driver is used and 3D is not used, and, preventing a possible VLC crash when the WDDM driver is used and 3D is enabled by implementing YV12 surfaces.

You pretty much can’t go wrong with the new version! I test installed Windows 10, and it runs great! I even installed ClassicShell (Release 4.2.4,) and the final product is very snappy and useable under Windows 10 (in other words Windows 10 64-Bit running on top of Windows 10 64-Bit!)

Are you going back to your evil, “all-knowing” ways, Microsoft?

Microsoft Goes Too Far, Automatically Installs Windows 10 In Some Windows 7 And 8.1 PCs

Tech Times – By: Nicole Arce – “Windows 10 may be on a roll, but it is still far from Microsoft’s lofty goal of distributing it to 1 billion devices all over the globe in two to three years. Obviously, Microsoft is eager to get people to install its operating system, or the company wouldn’t have offered it to users for free.

But is Microsoft a bit way too eager for people to install Windows 10? The latest reports say Microsoft is once again earning the ire of some people by automatically installing Windows 10 into PCs still running on Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 without the permission of their owners.

The first reports have appeared on the U.K.-based The Register, whose readers have mailed in their complaints that Microsoft is stealthily changing their update settings to enable what is supposed to be an optional update that then installs Windows 10.

‘In the latest raft of MS updates, the ‘optional’ Windows 10 option on this Windows 7 PC was pre-ticked,’ says one user. ‘Can that be right? If I hadn’t noticed, it would have caused havoc here.’

Other users say going to the Control Panel no longer shows the option to install the latest Patch Tuesday updates. Instead, a message saying the ‘upgrade to Windows 10 is ready’ appears and prompts the user to restart the PC to begin installation. At least one user says the message appears with a one-hour countdown timer, which lets the user reschedule the installation but not cancel it altogether.

In one particularly disturbing instance, one user says his PC suddenly got a blue screen and rebooted. Upon starting his machine as normal, a message appeared asking him if he wanted a solution to his problem. The answer, of course, was yes, so Microsoft showed him a message to download and install Windows 10.

‘I wonder if this blue screen was/is a Microsoft-initiated one, deliberately pushing people to upgrade to Windows 10,’ he says.

The automatic installations were also confirmed by Josh Mayfield, creator of the GWX Control Panel, a tool that gets rid of Windows 10 upgrade messages. In a blog post, Mayfield says his tool can no longer eliminate the message that requires users to reschedule their installation. Neither can his tool run in the background to track what update settings Microsoft is making.

For its part, Microsoft has already responded to the complaints, saying that the automatically checked option to update to Windows 10 was a ‘mistake,’ which it promises to fix right away.

‘As part of our effort to bring Windows 10 to existing genuine Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 customers, the Windows 10 upgrade may appear as an optional update in the Windows Update (WU) control panel,’ says Microsoft in a statement. ‘This is an intuitive and trusted place people go to find Recommended and Optional updates to Windows. In the recent Windows update, this option was checked as default; this was a mistake and we are removing Windows 10 from Windows Update for users that have not reserved a copy of Windows 10.’

Microsoft found itself in a similar situation last month, when it was discovered that it was downloading Windows 10 installation files into users’ PCs, even though they did not reserve a copy of Windows 10.”

Will Yahoo really be able to do away with passwords?

Kill the Password? Yahoo tries it and it Works

The Market Business – By: Donald V. Morris – “Yahoo is trying something new: telling its users to bypass a password entirely in favor of a smartphone app through which a user grants access when a login is attempted. This seems like, in the words of one Twitter wit, two-factor authentication (2FA) with one factor. Is Yahoo’s Account Key offering a strange decision that will poorly affect the security of those with accounts in its network?

My straightforward answer is: No. Yahoo wants to make it easier for its users to have the benefits of authorized logins while reducing the utility of stolen passwords to bad actors, and it chose a method that’s better than passwords in nearly all circumstances. Strong words, I know! I don’t expect other companies to follow immediately, but Yahoo is trying to stand out.

It’s borrowing a page from more sophisticated systems, like Duo Security, which has a more complicated setup and is designed for corporate-scale security, but employs the same basic principles. Yahoo is bringing this idea to the masses who can use existing apps to take advantage.

The key factor is a lack of password

Let’s break down how its new Yahoo Account Key system works. I’ve tested it, and it works just like Yahoo says it should.

First, you install their new iOS app for Yahoo Mail. Account Key works just with this app and logging into Yahoo on the web, but will be rolling out to other apps this year, the company said in a blog post.

Next, log in with your username and password. You’re essentially turning the app into a trusted device—a la Apple’s old two-step and new two-factor systems—and thus you have to present current information. Next, tap the profile icon at the top of the screen and tap Settings. Tap Account Key and you can enable the service. Yahoo wisely walks you through a demo of accepting and rejecting connections so you can practice it. This is important for its target user for this feature.

In my test, I went to Yahoo.com to log into my email account. I entered the address, and it clearly immediately recognized I had Account Key active, as the password field changed to read Click to Use Account Key, and the Sign In button transformed to read Continue. A screen on the website says its waiting for approval, and your iOS device sends a notification that opens to a view that lets you agree to allow the log in or not.

But for most people, the gulf between what Yahoo is offering and a plain password is enormous, and a boost.

I’m looking forward to more straightforward variants on Yahoo’s scheme that shift cracking from global to physical proximity while also making it a better process for people who don’t want to manage their security, while still benefiting from it.”

If you missed the Live Event, you can still see it on the Microsoft web site. Check it out, some of it is pretty amazing!

https://www.microsoft.com/october2015event/en-us/live-event

People just weren’t using it!

Google removes ‘OK Google’ voice search from Chrome

VentureBeat – By: Emil Protalinski – “Google this week released Chrome 46, adding a slew of new developer features and simplifying the page’s security icon. But the biggest change turns out to be the removal of a feature: The ‘OK Google’ hotword to trigger voice search is no more.

Google first launched an ‘OK Google’ voice search Chrome extension in November 2013. The company then built the feature directly into the browser with the release of Chrome 35 in May 2014. Chrome users simply had to visit Google.com, or open a tab if Google was their default search engine, and say ‘Ok Google’ to start searching.

The removal of this feature only affects the desktop version of Chrome: Windows, Mac, and Linux users no longer have the ability to use the ‘OK Google’ voice action. Users of Chrome for mobile, as well as Chromebooks, will still be able to say ‘OK Google’ and start searching.

Furthermore, we want to emphasize that this doesn’t mean voice search in Chrome for desktop is going away. You can still access the functionality on the New Tab Page and on any Google.com page — you’ll just have to click on the mic icon first.

So why was ‘OK Google’ removed on the desktop? As you might have guessed, Google decided to axe it because not many users were taking advantage of the feature ‘on these platforms.’

This is really not a big surprise: Talking to your phone will simply always be easier to wrap your head around than talking to your computer. Not to mention, all phones have microphones, but the same can’t be said for desktops.

Google gave a similar explanation this week when it announced that Chrome for desktop would be losing another feature: The notification center. ‘In practice, few users visit the notification center,’ it said. That removal will occur with the release of Chrome 47, which is slated to arrive in about six weeks.”

New for us Makers!

This new Arduino board is the first product to use Intel’s Curie module

The Verge – By: Sean O’Kane – “This year at CES, Intel introduced Curie — a button-sized system-on-chip module made for low-power wearables — but the company was mum on what would be the first products to use it. Now we know. Intel just announced at Maker Faire Rome that the first product to use the Curie module is a brand new, low-cost Arduino board called Arduino 101. And while that may not be the flashy wearable technology that some expected — Intel CEO Brian Krzanich did bring the CEO of Oakley on stage when he announced Curie to tease an upcoming device — the new Curie-enabled Arduino board can still be a really important piece of technology.

Inside Curie is a Bluetooth LE chip, an accelerator for gesture recognition, and a six-axis combination accelerometer and gyroscope. As Mike Bell, head of Intel’s new devices group told me in January, it gets you ‘pretty far along towards a product, you really just have to add your secret sauce on top of this and you’d have a pretty great wearable product.’ Arduino, an Italian company, has spent most of the last decade making the go-to product for anyone looking to get started with programming, coding, or electronics, particularly in the DIY and maker communities. For both sides, it’s a no-brainer of a match.

‘[Curie] adds this level of connected interactivity to a simple microcontroller board that, we think at least, is something that’s expected for kids and makers these days,’ says Jay Melican, a senior research scientist at Intel. Not only will Arduino bundle the new board with an electronics and coding course full of projects for kids, but the price will remain right around the $30 mark associated with most (new) Arduino boards.

Arduino projects may be targeted at beginners, but the list of things you could do with the boards before Curie was already a mile long. It made everything from lamp dimmers and binary clocks to universal remotes and home breweries possible. Adding Curie to the mix makes it easier to do things like control projects with your phone over Bluetooth, and access to accelerometer and gyroscope data adds totally new possibilities.

Melican’s team, known as the ‘makers and innovators’ group, was just recently spun off from the new devices group, which is where Curie was created. Asked why this was the first project to use Curie, as opposed to something like a Curie-powered smartwatch or sunglasses, he says it wasn’t really a decision. ‘Our team was first to market,’ he says. ‘Not that we’re racing.’

Arduino 101 will be available in the first quarter of 2016 for $30. It will be called Genuino 101 outside the US.“