Reminder: "Most secure version of Windows ever" is setting a very low bar

Closely on the heels of last week's Windows 11 announcement event, we've received a timely reminder of just how riddled with bugs Windows has actually been for a long time, from Tom Warren at The Verge:

Microsoft is warning Windows users about an unpatched critical flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service. The vulnerability, dubbed PrintNightmare, was uncovered earlier this week after security researchers accidentally published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. While Microsoft hasn’t rated the vulnerability, it allows attackers to remotely execute code with system-level privileges, which is as critical and problematic as you can get in Windows.

[...]

Microsoft admits “the code that contains the vulnerability is in all versions of Windows,” but it’s not clear if it’s exploitable beyond server versions of Windows. The Print Spooler service runs by default on Windows, including on client versions of the OS, Domain Controllers, and many Windows Server instances, too.

Microsoft just revealed their next version of Windows, and I have more questions than answers

So, it's official: contrary to what they'd said previously, Windows 10 will not be the last version of Windows that Microsoft releases. Windows 11 is definitely coming, it's definitely called Windows 11, and today we got a look at some of its sexier features.

First, the good ...

Windows 10 is very pretty. A lot of people, myself included, hated the flat, designed-for-touchscreens Windows 8, and while Windows 10 restored the start menu, it didn't fix the ugly look of the thing. Windows 11 was very clearly designed to mimic the much, much prettier Aero Glass UI of Windows Vista and Windows 7, and it's a huge improvement.

Gone, too, is the ugly "live tile" blue void that takes up space next to W10's start menu. Live tiles still exist, but Microsoft has renamed them to Widgets, and banished them to their own sub-menu; those who are interested can call up the Widget menu using the button on the task bar, and ignore it otherwise.

Windows Updates have apparently been improved as well, with smaller updates loading in the background, rather than shoving themselves to the fore and preventing users from doing anything else while the updates happen. They've also finally found a way to get some Android apps into the Windows Store, too, although it's the much, much smaller subset of Android apps that Amazon have on their app store.

... which brings us to the less-than-good ...

Microsoft proves they've learned nothing, start testing full-page ads for Microsoft Edge to roll out in Windows 10

I am surprised only that people are surprised.

As reported by Windows Latest:

In production builds, Microsoft is A/B testing a new ‘feature’ that is designed to nag users with fullscreen window-less Microsoft Edge recommendations in the OOBE screen.

The nag will appear when users set up their PC, sign in to their system after applying updates, or when they click on a new ad banner within the Settings.

[...]

In the Settings app, there’s a new banner that appears to be rolling out to non-Insiders [...] the advert appears across the top of the Settings app window, just above the settings options. The banner states that you can “get even more out of Windows” and it surprisingly launches the OOBE (out of the box experience) screen [where] there’s a new page titled “Use recommended browser settings” that advises users to restore the Microsoft Edge and pin the browser to the desktop and taskbar.

[...] If you try to skip the setup, the pop-up will appear again in future.

Unfortunately, you cannot permanently disable these recommendations in Windows 10.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Windows is malware, and Microsoft should absolutely be facing antitrust action of their own for this shit. Microsoft controls over 80%, and nearly 90%, of the desktop/laptop OS market at a time when COVID-19 has pushed demand for desktop/laptop PCs to heights they haven't enjoyed for nearly ten years, and they've clearly decided to abuse that gatekeeper position to push their own products in the most anti-competitive, anti-consumer manner possible. 

I'm looking for the EU, at least, to bring action against Microsoft for this latest over-reach, but the US Department of Justice should also be scrutinizing the Redmond firm for this sort of behaviour, which was rampant during the Windows 10 rollout, and clearly isn't going to stop anytime soon.

For more details, along with screen shots, click through to Windows Latest's article.

End of an era: NetMarketShare throw in the towel

Confirming something that I'd suspected for some time now, OS and browser tracking site NetMarketShare confirmed the obvious today:

IMPORTANT NOTICE:
After 14 years of service and being used as a primary source in tens of thousands of articles and publications, we are retiring NetMarketShare in its current form. October, 2020 is the last month of data. All billing for existing accounts has been stopped. All outstanding balances are being refunded.

Why? An upcoming change in browsers (https://github.com/WICG/ua-client-hints) will break our device detection technology and will cause inaccuracies for a long period of time.

In addition, we have focused on bot detection and removal as a key part of the quality control process. It is the most complex part of our codebase. As time has gone on, it has become increasingly difficult to manage this process. So, instead of accepting increasing levels of inaccuracy, we thought it would be a good time to call it a day.

Well... That escalated quickly.

Steam continues to confound

If there's one thing about the OS market share numbers which has remained reliable from one month to the next, it's that Steam's numbers almost always move in the opposite direction from the OS market over all, and last month was no different. That's right -- Windows lost overall market share among Steam users, with MacOS and Linux both posting gains, all of which is backwards when compared to the broader OS marketplace.

As expected, Windows 10 continued to gain while other Windows versions lost ground, pretty much as one would expect given that gamers are the one group that continues to buy new PCs, all of which come with Win10 installed. I wasn't expecting MacOS and Linux to be gaining in popularity among Steam users, though; one can't help but wonder if Steam Play/Proton isn't playing a role there.

But I'll be honest: I have no real idea what this might mean, if anything. I'll keep watching, though, in the hope that some sort of clarity emerges from the statistical soup.

Watch this space...

A new normal?

It's the first of a new month, which means that NetMarketShare's new OS market share numbers are out, and the predictable drumbeat of the coverage is all about how Windows 10 is gaining at Windows 7's expense.... even though Windows 10 gained more than Windows 7 lost last month. Never underestimate the extent of tech media's devotion to the pre-established narrative, I guess.

The reality of the current numbers, however, looks a little different to me. To me, it looks like Windows 7 is holding on remarkably well for an OS that's due to officially exit support in only 9 more months, continuing to be the OS of choice on 36.5% of the planets personal computers. That's not 36.5% of Windows PCs, mind, but of PCs overall, a remarkable feat considering that its successor's successor OS was released nearly four years ago, and was free for three and half of those years. To me, the fact that Windows 10 is still only 43.6% of the OS market looks more like a sign foretelling a long, Windows XP-like life for the older OS.

Let's be real, though; "Ten-year-old OS loses market share to four-year-old OS" is basically a dog bites man story. It's expected, and would be dead boring if not for the fact that it's happening a lot more slowly than expected... which is also boring. The more interesting story of the past year has been the movements in the overall OS market.

Statistics are weird

After losing market share for six straight months, Windows managed a very slight uptick last month, gaining 0.03% to 86.23%. This very slight gain appears to have come at the expense of MacOS and Linux, both of which ticked down slightly, by 0.06% and 0.33%, respectively; ChromeOS gained, though, climbing 0.05% to sit at 0.37% overall, its highest point in the last month.

Windows' slight uptick didn't help its 6 month average decline, which actually worsened as last July's 0.55% increase finally moved out of frame:

This month's 0.03% increase is unlikely to have the same salutary effect in Windows' 6mo average, though -- it's just not large enough to have much of an impact, falling below the ±0.05% threshold for actual significance. ChromeOS and MacOS changes this month were right on the significance bubble, too; only Linux' 0.33% drop was large enough to have a long-term depressing effect on its 6mo average tracking.

The picture gets even muddier when you dig into the different OS versions. Sure, Windows 10 gained last month, from 39.22% to 40.90%, but Windows 7 also gained, from 36.90% to 37.19%; these gains were offset by losses by Windows 8 (-0.06% to 0.82%), 8.1 (-0.11% to 4.34%), and XP (-1.78% to 2.76%). On the Linux side, the generic "Linux" category declined 0.28% to 1.72%, but Ubuntu only declined by 0.03% to 0.68%, while the "Unknown" category gained 0.30% to reach a whopping 0.35%, which sure looks like NetMarketShare had trouble detecting peoples' OS versions this time around.

So, with statistical anomalies all over the place this month, I'm going out on a limb to call this a case of sub-optimal data, and putting a great big asterisk next to the whole mess until next month. If this month's numbers truly do represent some sort of inflection point, then we'll see similar changes in coming months, too; if these are just July-like blips in the data, then we should return to the trend lines of the past 6 months.

Either way, I want more data before I even try to guess at what's happening here.

Microsoft gets petty with Windows 7 users

As of the end of December, 36.90% of all desktop and laptop users (not just Windows users, mind, but PC users in general) had spent three and a half years actively rejecting Windows 10. This isn't like OS version transitions of years past, where people on the old version might just be procrastinating; thanks to the egregious excesses of the GWX campaign, all of the people who didn't care enough to actively do something were switched to Windows 10 already. No, current-day Windows 7 users are the ones who did care, and who took steps to remain on their OS of choice.

Not only have Windows 7 users actively rejected Windows 10, but many of them appear to be actively rejecting Windows entirely, with MacOS and Ubuntu Linux gaining market share at Windows' expense for most of the last year: Windows gained user market share only in March and July of last year, losing market share in every other month of 2018 for a total loss of 2.31%,with MacOS gaining 1.63% and Linux gaining 0.66% over the same time period. Microsoft set out to change the paradigm of personal computing with Windows 10, and clearly succeeded, but not in the way they wanted; rather than making Windows 10 into the new paradigm, they seem to be ushering in an era in which Windows no longer dominates on the desktop.

And so Microsoft, being Microsoft, have responded to this slow-motion exodus by giving Windows 7 users yet another reason to dump Windows, without giving them any clear new reason to adopt Windows 10 in place. Because of course they have.

Windows lost more Steam, too

In case you were still thinking that Windows' 0.83% user market share drop in December was some sort of an error, Steam's Software Survey has corroborated the decline, putting Steam in sync with the overall OS market for a second straight month.

Click to enlarge.

Once again, MacOS (a.k.a. OS X) and Linux were the big gainers, with MacOS 10.14 and Ubuntu 18.10 both showing strong results; the newbie-friendly Linux Mint, a distro that doesn't even register among OS users in the broader marketplace, appears to have gained a significant share among Steam users. Weirdly, only Windows 7's 64-bit version lost Steam users, with Win7's 32-bit version gaining ground alongside all other Windows versions except XP; Win7 64-bit's decline was enough to put Windows in the red overall, though, with a 0.58% overall drop which is only slightly slower than the decline seen in the overall OS market.

In isolation, this sort of behaviour among Steam users could be interpreted as resulting from Valve's Steam Play/Proton initiative, but given that Windows' decline among Steam users is actually less than that seen in the larger OS market, it's difficult to describe this as anything other than just a part of the overall trend, with Windows-dependent PC gamers actually lagging slightly behind everyone else. Whether Steam Play/Proton changes those users' decision-making calculus in the coming months is, of course, anyone's guess. It does seem to be making it somewhat easier for gamers to join the shift away from Windows, though, meaning that Microsoft shouldn't be counting too hard on PC gamers to be a backstop against the overall loss of Windows users.

Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7... but it's not the "goods news" story that Microsoft was hoping for

Happy New Year, everybody! 2019 has dawned, and with it, at we already have at least two different posts from sites proclaiming Windows 10's belated ascendancy. Both Thurrott.com (Report: Windows 10 Takes Over Windows 7) and MSPowerUser (NetMarketShare: Windows 10 finally overtakes Windows 7) immediately noticed that Windows 10's usage share is starting the new year at 39.22%, which is finally higher than Windows 7's 36.90% share, according to NetMarketShare.com, and neither could wait to proclaim the future to be smooth sailing for Windows from here on out.

What they've apparently both missed, however, is that Windows has, once again, lost overall market share, with MacOS and Linux gaining at Windows' expense:

Window's share of the market dropped by nearly a full percent in the last month. At that pace, they'll be below 80% by June.

Yes, Windows 10 finally passed Windows 7, and this time WX managed to actually be moving forwards in the process, unlike last month, but Windows overall is still losing users to MacOS, and to Linux. Interestingly, while the Unix-like OSes gained as a group, both BSD and "Unknown" actually lost ground last month; only Linux actually gained, growing by 0.70%.

The other Unix-likes aren't doing as well as Linux is.

Even more interestingly, Ubuntu alone moved from 0.57% to 0.71%, accounting for 0.14% of the Linux's change by itself, and giving this one Linux distro a greater share of the market than Google's ChromeOS... meaning that Linux is not only growing at the expense of Windows, but that most of Linux's gains are coming in the form of a rapidly-emerging leader.

This has enormous potential ramifications for the future.

Microsoft makes it official

After word leaked yesterday that Microsoft was redesigning their Edge browser to use Google's Chromium engine "under the hood," Windows-watchers were left wondering just how long Microsoft would make everyone wait before actually acknowledging this shift publicly. The answer, apparently, was one day.

As reported by VentureBeat:

Microsoft today embraced Google’s Chromium open source project for Edge development on the desktop. The company also announced it is decoupling the browser updates from Windows 10 updates, and that Edge is coming to all supported versions of Windows and to macOS. [...] The first preview builds of the Chromium-powered Edge will arrive in early 2019, according to Microsoft.

[...]

Microsoft hopes moving to Chromium will “create better web compatibility for our customers” and “less fragmentation of the web for all web developers.” The former is certainly true, as the Edge web platform will thus become aligned with web standards and other Chromium-based browsers. The latter is not true in the short term (plenty of testing will be needed to accommodate the switch) but it is likely in the long term, as developers will have one fewer browser to explicitly test against.

Windows is losing Steam

It looks like the downward trend in Windows' overall market share is also being mirrored in Steam's software survey numbers, as reported by Phoronix:

Valve has published their latest monthly Steam survey data, which shows an increase in the Linux gaming population.

For November 2018, Steam's Survey reports a 0.80% marketshare for Linux, which is a 0.08% increase over October, which was on an upward trend following the roll-out of Steam Play late this summer for allowing Windows-only games to run more easily on Linux with their Wine-based Proton software... Earlier this year it was around just 0.5% Linux marketshare and last year there were the lows of around 0.3%.

While 0.80% may not seem like much, it's significant when factoring in the size of Steam's customer base that is reportedly at 125+ million users. 

Not only is Linux up, MacOS is also up, and Windows is down, in a rare case of Steam users actually trending in the same direction as the market overall.

There's a lot of overlap between Steam's user base and the PC gaming community overlap, and their higher Windows 10 adoption rate, and higher PC purchasing rate, were helping to drive Windows 10's numbers upwards. Windows 10 is still pushing out Windows 7 among PC gamers, but with more PC gamers shifting from Windows to Mac OS X and Linux because of Steam Play, this shift among the most active PC purchasers could be a significant driver of the overall market shift away from Linux.

Importantly, MacOS X and Steam are both consumer-driven market segments, which could mean that Microsoft is losing consumers to both Apple and FOSS. Back in July, Microsoft had talked about their desire to win back consumers with Modern Life Services. We've heard nothing about that consumer-focused initiative since, and if this trend in Windows' market share is any indication, Microsoft's time could be starting to run out. Windows has a healthy lead in PC gaming, though, with a 96.00% market share, so there's still time for Microsoft to react... if they start now.

Tick, tock, Microsoft. Your move.

What's next for Windows?

With news from Redmond that the head of their Windows and Devices Group is moving on/being moved on, speculation is swirling about what this might mean for Microsoft's future. Fortune has an interesting take on that question:

The current reality facing Nadella is that Microsoft’s mobile strategy in hardware and software failed and tying everything to Windows for a boost didn’t help. But Microsoft’s Azure cloud business is booming, as is the growing revenue from business software subscriptions like Office 365 and Dynamics 365. In its most recent quarter, the three months ended Dec. 31, revenue from Office 365 increased 41%, Dynamics 365 rose 67% and Azure sales jumped 98%. At the same time, revenue from Windows commercial products dropped 4%, Surface computer sales gained 1%, and Windows sales for PCs rose 4%.

The new idea for 2018 is to tie everything more closely to the cloud and the fast-growing Azure unit. The WDG is being disbanded and band leader Terry Myerson is retiring from Microsoft. When the WDG was formed under Myerson, he took over mobile efforts from Stephen Elop, who left the company. It will be interesting to see if Myerson’s directions are erased as quickly as he moved away from Elop’s failing strategy.

Much of the Windows software effort, called the Windows Platform Team, will move under cloud and enterprise software leader Scott Guthrie’s group, along with several AI initiatives. Guthire also gets charge of AI speech, vision, augmented and virtual reality (what Microsoft calls mixed reality) efforts. Putting those teams, which face fierce competition from the likes of Amazon (amzn, +0.94%), Google (googl, +3.46%), and Apple (aapl, +1.00%), together with Azure could help them catch on as cloud services.

While Fortune make a special point to reassure folks that Windows 10 is doing "just fine," I don't think there are too many ways to read Microsoft's latest moves as anything other than an admission that their prior decades' Windows strategy is a failure. Microsoft have repeatedly tried to leverage Windows' dominant position on desktops and laptops into a dominant market position in, basically, every aspect of our data/information age lifestyles, only to find little to no traction with consumers, and only slow uptake from businesses.

Microsoft are not going to be Apple, or Google, or Amazon, and it looks like they may be tired of trying. Exactly what cutting their losses might look like, or what that might mean for consumers who, let's face it, mostly don't want to and/or can't afford to convert their bought-and-paid-for PCs into expensive-subscription machines. Whether MS are now planning to stop pushing Windows 10 so damn hard, and start adopting a more consumer-friendly stance with Windows, generally, will be interesting to see.

Just remember, folks: Linux is an option here, and ChromeOS is also coming.

Windows 10 can still be had for free, weeks after they claimed to have closed the last free-WX loophole

BTW, I've just decided to start abbreviating Windows 10 to "WX," which is both shorter and consistent with GWX branding already used by Microsoft. For brevity and consistency, I'll also be using "W#" for earlier versions (i.e. W7, W8, W8.1), and simply adding the appropriate suffixes for other flavours of WX when needed for clarity (WX-Home, WX-Pro, WX-Core, WX-S, etc.).

It took Microsoft until two full weeks after their Dec. 31st deadline, and change, to finally close the Assistive Technologies loophole, which allowed users to upgrade to WX for free if they were willing to say that they used any kind of Assistive Technology... up to, and including, hot keys. You might thing that the end of the last of the Microsoft's officially free WX offerings would mean the end of stories about how you can still get WX for free.

Well, you would be wrong. Check out the "most relevant" result that Google News returns for "Windows 10."

Yes, that's Forbes, with yet another piece on how WX can still be had for free, now two weeks after the last free WX window was allegedly closed.

Windows 10 was free for a year after launch for anyone who had an older version of Windows. For those who missed this transition period it was possible to get an upgrade right up until the end of 2017, a loophole Microsoft has now closed - although it wasn't much of a loophole, as the company knew all about it.

However there are other ways to upgrade to Windows 10 that don't involve getting the upgrade assistant from the official site.

Yes, apparently this has always worked... meaning that this also isn't much of a loophole, since Microsoft clearly also knows all about it, i.e. working as intended.

It's unclear as to why this works, but if you have a product code for an old version of Windows 7, 8 or 8.1 you should be able to enter this into a copy of Windows 10 and get an activation. You will be given access to the version of Windows 10 that matches the original product key. So Windows 8 Pro will get Windows 10 Pro, while Windows 8 Home will get, you guessed it, Windows 10 Home.

Hmmm.... so it's possible to upgrade from W7-Pro to WX-Pro? It's a shame the GWX app didn't work the same way; I might have been tempted to switch.

Right about now, you might be wondering why Microsoft would still have a WX upgrade left open that's large enough for an auto-truck to drive through? Well, Microsoft themselves are pretty quiet on the issue, but Forbes' Ian Morris has some ideas:

As I pointed out in my article about the closing of the accessibility loophole, I don't think Microsoft really cares about end users getting free upgrades. It makes more money from OEM sales of Windows 10 on new laptops and revenue from corporate users than the slender pickings of home users. Indeed, Microsoft makes more money - and more margin - on selling cloud offerings these days.

Windows isn't a cash cow when it comes to home users, so I suspect there's a lot of give built into the system.

Which makes a lot of sense, actually. It's just a shame that Microsoft are being so disingenuous about it all. I mean, they could easily partner with PC-OEMs to promote new PC sales ("Get the most out of Windows 10 with the latest AMD/Ryzen hardware!"), while also continuing to let tech-savvier users upgrade for free if they still want to... and without the fucking hard sell, this time. Because, honestly, the hard sell of the GWX campaign was a big part of the continued appeal of W7, which culminated in Microsoft simply switching over users who didn't take active steps to avoid the unwanted "upgrade," even after they'd repeatedly refused Microsoft's malware-laden Home version of WX.

Hell, Microsoft even have a better product to give away than they did a few years ago, with more features and (crucially) better privacy protections, and even better privacy tools due to be added to the platform in a couple of months. And if I can also use my W7 Professional license to upgrade to WX-Pro, rather than the gimped Home version, to gain even more features and even better privacy tools... when, that becomes one hell of a sales pitch, doesn't it?

So, what's the problem?

Barcelona goes Linux

While Munich spends €100M to migrate from Linux to Windows, cities like Barcelona are going in the other direction, as reported by FOSSBytes:

According to a report from Spanish newspaper El País (Via: It’s Foss), the City of Barcelona is moving away from the proprietary software products from Microsoft. This move is important in the wake of Munich’s recent decision to again adopt Microsoft’s products.

As per the report, Barcelona city plans to replace all user applications on its computers with open source alternatives. After finding a proper replacement for all proprietary software, the final step would be to go ahead with replacing the operating system with Linux.

To achieve this goal, the City’s administration has begun the process of commissioning IT projects and hiring developers on software programs. As per the plan, in 2018 about 70 percent of the City’s software budget will be spent on developing open source software. It’s being expected that the transition will be completed before Spring 2019.

[...]

According to Francesca Bria, the City Council’s Commissioner of Technology and Digital Innovation, the taxpayer’s money should be invested in the open source code that could be reused by the public as well.

To start with the same, Exchange Server and Outlook will be replaced by Open-Xchange; Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office will be kicked out in favor of Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice.

Spain is no stranger to this sort of FOSS-migration, , which may may be partly why Barcelona is willing to save money on Microsoft licensing fees, avoid MS's other anti-consumer bullshit, while also taking back control over their own computers and investing in a portfolio of free, open-source software that their taxpayers can then access at no added cost.

With Microsoft seemingly determined to continue pushing Windows-As-A-Service, at a pace of two major updates per year and a monthly update schedule on top of that which corporate IT departments are struggling to keep up with, we may start to see more of these Windows-to-Linux migrations over time, rather than fewer, especially in the taxpayer-funded sphere, where costs can't necessarily be easily recouped from customers, what with raising taxes being an unpopular sort of thing to do. Whether Microsoft's lobbyists salespeople can prevent that from happening, and you know they're working hard to do exactly that... well, I guess only time will tell.

Munich's €100M migration back to Windows

Sometimes, I love The Reg:

Priceless.

From the article itself:

Those supporting the anti-Linux cause claim Windows 10 will solve perceived compatibility issues with applications and hardware drivers. They contend that quitting Linux will remove the need to also run a bank of Windows computers as some kind of backup.

Opponents, however, say it's crazy to pay twice for a costly migration that takes years to complete. Why not just fix the internal IT disorganisation?

What Munich does is defy reliable research. Large organisations successfully deploy free software in far larger numbers than Munich ever did. See here for a list maintained by The Document Foundation, the organisation behind LibreOffice.

"There are many examples. Munich was definitely not the only one," says Italo Vignoli, a founder of The Document Foundation.

[...]

Also consider Rome, which is installing the LibreOffice suite on all of its 14,000 PC workstations across the city. In 2018, Rome will run a pilot to test the use of workstations running Linux.

It would appear that Microsoft's lobbyists in Munich really earned their keep on this one.

The Reg's whole article is pretty good, and there's quite a bit more of it, so go give it a read.

Meltdown and Spectre - much less sexy than the James Bond movies they sound like.

Yesterday, The Reg reported that Intel CPUs going back ten years had a fundamental design flaw which compromised the security of users. At the time, it looked like only Intel chips were affected, but Intel has been quick to claim that AMD and ARM chips have the flaw, too.

Here's the thing about that, funny story.. it's actually not true. Not Pants On Fire, mind you, but still Mostly False, or at best Half True, according to this report from Gizmodo:

Originally, the Register reported, only Intel processors (which dominate the U.S. market) were believed to be subject to the flaw. But it’s become clear that a wide range of processor types could be affected, with Google writing that AMD, ARM, and other devices were also vulnerable—though only partially and with less performance impact following a fix than Intel-based devices.

In a statement to Gizmodo, AMD said that of the three attack variants, one was easily resolved with “negligible performance impact,” while the others have “near zero risk” or “zero risk” due to “architecture differences.”

ARM told Gizmodo that it has been working “together with Intel and AMD to address a side-channel analysis method which exploits speculative execution techniques used in certain high-end processors, including some of our Cortex-A processors. This is not an architectural flaw; this method only works if a certain type of malicious code is already running on a device and could at worst result in small pieces of data being accessed from privileged memory.”

I don't believe Intel's spin on this one; there is currently no evidence that AMD and ARM have anywhere near the same kind of fundamental design issues that Intel have with this, and users of AMD and ARM products will not see the same kind of slowdown post-patch as Core i5 users. Sure, AMD (and ARM) are also engaged in a little PR over this development, but right now, I'm inclined to trust them a lot more than I trust Intel, for whom this is the second such wide-reaching security problem that comes built right in to their Core i5 product line. 

Right now, it looks like AMD and ARM are acting from an abundance of caution, here (better safe than sorry, right?), and not trying to "work the refs" in advance of the inevitable flood of class action lawsuits by which Intel will shortly be besieged. So, yeah... I'm still glad to be an AMD man, at least for one more day.

Did I ever mention how glad I am to be an AMD man?

Because right now, I really, really am, thanks to stories like this one, from The Reg:

A fundamental design flaw in Intel's processor chips has forced a significant redesign of the Linux and Windows kernels to defang the chip-level security bug.

Programmers are scrambling to overhaul the open-source Linux kernel's virtual memory system. Meanwhile, Microsoft is expected to publicly introduce the necessary changes to its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday: these changes were seeded to beta testers running fast-ring Windows Insider builds in November and December.

Crucially, these updates to both Linux and Windows will incur a performance hit on Intel products. The effects are still being benchmarked, however we're looking at a ballpark figure of five to 30 per cent slow down, depending on the task and the processor model. More recent Intel chips have features – such as PCID – to reduce the performance hit. Your milage may vary.

Similar operating systems, such as Apple's 64-bit macOS, will also need to be updated – the flaw is in the Intel x86 hardware, and it appears a microcode update can't address it. It has to be fixed in software at the OS level, or go buy a new processor without the design blunder.

[Emphasis added.]

Yikes.

With a 5% slowdown as the best case, and 30% as the worst, I'm thinking that the modest performance hit that I took by getting an AMD FX-6300 at half the price of an Intel Core i5 is looking like a better and better deal all the time.

Details of the exact nature of this new flaw are naturally embargoed, given that it's a hardware-level security issue affecting everyone who bought an Intel CPU in the last decade, although The Reg's report includes those details of the flaw that have surfaced, if you're interested in what details are available. The fact that this is being described as a "fundamental design flaw," though, the second such flaw to surface in the last few months, seems especially egregious. Intel had been beating AMD in performance benchmarks for years, but it now seems like they were cutting some serious corners along the way.

Cue the class action lawsuits in five.... four... three...

NetMarketShare's new online tools are more powerful than I first suspected... and also confusing...

Of all the ways in which NMS's free stat reports have annoyed me over the years, the most annoying is the way they segregate results. You can compare OS market share across desktop devices, for example, or across mobile devices, but not both at the same time... so you can't compare, say, Windows to Android, to see their growth and trends over time relative to each other.

StatCounter does offer this sort of comparison, but only as an overall picture (i.e. all Windows versions, all Android versions, all iOS and MacOS versions, &c.), which make for simple graphs... but if you do want to drill down a bit, you can only drill into one OS at a time. You can't, for example, compare Windows 10 and Windows 7 to the most popular versions of iOS, MacOS, and/or Android, all at once.

Apparently neither NMS nor StatCounter thought that people would want to do this... or, perhaps they did know that people would want to do this, and simply decided to reserve the more powerful functionality for their paid subscription services. Which is entirely fair; after all, these are businesses and not charities, and they have to make money somehow. I get that. As a dedicated online freeloader, though, I still found it ever so slightly irritating.

But the game has changed, thanks to NetMarketShare's brand new online tools, which were "completely rearchitected [...] to provide more accurate and accessible data," actually do allow you to pull from multiple datasets at once, making possible exactly the kinds of extremely nerdy comparisons that I've been idly wishing I could do, without having to pay to do them.

The results are, to say the least, surprising:

The surprise? According to NMS, Android is still only 33.48% of the market, well behind Windows' 45.41%. This is surprising because, to quote Wikipedia:

According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android.^[307] Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. [It] has become Earth’s dominant computing platform."^[18]

StatCounter disagrees with both assessments, clocking both Android and Windows at about 38% of the market, but with Windows' share of the combined OS market growing in recent months... which makes no sense, since desktop/laptop PC sales have been declining.




I know that NMS revamped their product to remove botnet traffic, but why would that affect Android's numbers? Are Android botnets a widespread thing that nobody knows about, or can detect, except NetMarketShare for some fucking reason? It makes even less sense than the effect on Linux' numbers. And how have Gartner, StatCounter, and NetMarketShare all ended up with such apparently divergent results? Seriously, WTF is going on?

I think I want to see some serious critique of NMS's new product/methodology. Their new online tools look very slick and very powerful, but if their data collection and analytical methology is badly flawed, then their online tools may be useless, no matter how slick or powerful they seem.

Did I ever mention that I'm an AMD man?

For a long time now, I've been an AMD customer, forgoing frankly better performance in exchange for a lower price point. The resulting PCs have always been good enough for me (I'm a gamer, but not a fan of first-person shooters, so "good enough" really was good enough -- my current AMD-based PC is still going strong after nearly six years) and, of course, also slightly cheaper. And man, oh man, I have never in my life been happier to be a cheap-ass bastard than I am today.

As reported by ZDNet:

Thanks to an investigation by third-party researchers into Intel's hidden firmware in certain chips, Intel decided to audit its firmware and on Monday confirmed it had found 11 severe bugs that affect millions of computers and servers.

The flaws affect Management Engine (ME), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE), and Server Platform Services (SPS).

Intel discovered the bugs after Maxim Goryachy and Mark Ermolov from security firm Positive Technologies found a critical vulnerability in the ME firmware that Intel now says would allow an attacker with local access to execute arbitrary code.

[...]

The bugs affect systems using Intel's 6th, 7th, and 8th Generation Core CPUs, a range of Xeon processors, as well the Apollo Lab Atom E3900 series, Apollo Lake Pentium, and Celeron N and J series chips.

Intel says the flaws would allow an attacker to "Impersonate the ME/SPS/TXE, thereby impacting local security feature attestation validity".

The attacker could also load and execute arbitrary code that would be invisible to the user and operating system. 

Yikes.

Intel has released detection tools for both Windows and Linux that can help you determine just how at-risk your system might be, so good on them, but this is still the second time this week that a breaking story reveals a big company's supposed security measures as making users' systems less secure... and the week's not yet over. Hell, the week's only barely beginning. So much for the news lull that I was expecting.