Top IT stories this week: Windows 10 review, Council adopts Chromebooks and 'don't fix our glitches' says Oracle
Computing's most-read stories from the past seven days
Here they are again, Computing’s top seven stories from the past week.
7. 'A very small number of passwords may not have been encrypted' - TalkTalk's damning admission
Communications company TalkTalk has admitted that customer details were lost in a recent cyber attack. Not only that, it said that some customers' current account and credit card details were stolen in the attack and, perhaps most damning of all, that "a very small number of passwords may not have been encrypted".
It seems that tech companies just can’t resist lacing their offerings with a little bit of spyware (see Windows 10) and so techies were not too surprised to find that Lenovo is apparently using rootkit-style techniques to put its own software onto clean Windows installs by programming the BIOS of its machines to overwrite Windows system files every time the hardware boots.
Lenovo was quick to say that this was an error and that it has now been corrected but after the furore that greeted the discovery earlier this year that Lenovo was pre-installing Superfish adware this is another damaging revelation that will not help the company’s waning fortunes. But could the real fault be Microsoft’s for building into Windows the capability for OEMs to surreptitiously introduce their own firmware?
5. Mike Bracken’s successor revealed as three key members of GDS quit
Stephen Foreshew-Cain has been chosen to succeed Mike Bracken as the new head of the Government Digital Service (GDS), but his life will not have been made easier by the fact that three key members of Bracken’s former team have also decided to leave.
4. Microsoft and Salesforce pool resources to buy Informatica for $5.l 3bn
Microsoft and Salesforce have snapped up data integration specialist Informatica Corporation. The fact they have chosen to do so together has caused some scratching of heads, not least because a possible takeover of Salesforce by Microsoft has been a persistent industry rumour for a few months now.
3. London Borough claims it will save £400k by moving to Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes
The London Borough of Barking and Dagenham has claimed that it will save in the region of £400,000 by moving from Windows XP desktops to Google Chromebooks and Chromeboxes: £200,000 on the cost of deploying new Windows desktops, and a further £200,000 on electricity.
In an extraordinary blog post Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson warned customers, many of whom pay millions of pounds in licensing fees for the privilege of using her company’s software, that attempting to reverse engineer the software to discover security flaws might put customers in breach of the Ts&Cs.
"A customer can't analyse the code to see whether there is a control that prevents the attack the scanning tool is screaming about", she said, adding they "can't produce a patch for the problem" and that the practice is "almost certainly violating the license agreement by using a tool that does static analysis".
The blog post has now been taken down.
1. Windows 10: What I love and hate about Microsoft's new operating system
Peter Gothard’s two-weeks-in review of Windows 10 is our top story this week. While Microsoft’s new operating system gets a guarded thumbs up, there are questions to be answered about the privacy settings and the new Edge browser still needs a bit of work. Overall, however, there are plenty of reasons to make the upgrade (not least that it’s free, in monetary terms at least), and only a few reasons not to.