Proprietary Failures and Plunges

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 11, 2023,
updated Apr 11, 2023

• Ibex Global Solutions closing San Antonio call center, affecting 227 employees

  Tech giants that have offices in Central and South Texas also have announced downsizing since the start of the new year: Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook parent Meta have all said they would lay off employees.

• Microsoft finally gets around to fixing half-decade-old Firefox CPU bug [Ed: There's no valid reason for using Windows in 2023; the users are besieged, not served]

  Better late than never, I guess, but Microsoft finally got around to fixing a five-year-old high-CPU usage bug in Mozilla Firefox.

  The bug, which is tied to Windows Defender's Antimalware Service Executable process, has been known to produce high-CPU usage when running Firefox compared to Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Fortunately, the issue looks like it is resolved at long last.

• Apple patches vulnerabilities used to target iPhones, iPads and Macs

  Apple Inc. has released patches for two unpatched vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild that target Apple devices, including iPhones, iPads and Mac computers. The first vulnerability, designated CVE-2023-28205, is described by Apple as an issue in WebKit that allowed for the processing of maliciously crafted web content that could lead to arbitrary code execution.

• Global PC shipments suffer fourth quarter of double-digit decline

  Another analyst firm, IDC, put the drop at 29%, with shipments for the period coming in at 56.1 million units.

  Canalys said notebook shipments suffered a decline of 34% to 41.8 million units, with desktop PC shipments fell by 28% to 12.1 million units.

• PC Sales Dropped Nearly 30% in Q1 With Apple the Biggest Loser

  Apple loses 40% of sales year-over-year, market share drops too.

• IDC: Worldwide PC shipments fell 29% in the first quarter as Apple’s Mac sales plunge 40%

  Worldwide demand for personal computers dropped 29% year-over-year in the first quarter, according to new International Data Corp. research. In a preliminary market report released Sunday, IDC estimates that consumers and organizations bought 56.9 million PCs last quarter. That’s down from 80.2 million units the same time a year earlier.

• Outlook users face email issues as Microsoft starts using OneDrive cloud storage space for email attachments [Ed: More intensive surveillance]

  If you are having trouble sending and receiving email via your Outlook.com account, you are not alone. Problems have started to surface following a recent policy change by Microsoft that means email attachments now eat into OneDrive storage limits -- as we reported previously.

• Latitude Financial rejects ransom demand after [cr]ack [Ed: Microsoft Windows TCO]

  Consumer finance company Latitude Financial is refusing to pay a ransom to cyber criminals after millions of customers had their personal records stolen. Latitude Financial on Tuesday said it would not reward criminal behaviour, nor did it believe coughing up ransom money would see customers' stolen information returned or destroyed.

• LLMs and Phishing

  Here's an experiment being run by undergraduate computer science students everywhere: Ask ChatGPT to generate phishing emails, and test whether these are better at persuading victims to respond or click on the link than the usual spam. It's an interesting experiment, and the results are likely to vary wildly based on the details of the experiment.

• CYBER: Uber's April Fools Glitch

  This week on Cyber we’re talking about Uber’s glitch screwing drivers, tenants in California unionizing to fight a giant investment firm, and what a public bank might look like.