Tag Archives: New Technology

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

New Windows 10 Update Shows App Warnings For Malware

A great many malware strains are designed to engage quietly during a PC’s startup process and then idle in the background.

They are in the system logging keystrokes, taking screen shots at periodic intervals and uploading them to a command and control server, or doing other nefarious things.

Microsoft wants to limit malware’s ability to do that, which is part of the reason why the company introduced a new alert to the latest Windows 10 build that will let users know anytime an app registers itself to run automatically at startup.

It’s not just malware, by the way. There are all sorts of perfectly legitimate apps that are designed to run at startup. While it might not matter if you’ve got two or three apps churning quietly in the background, over time it can begin to get a little out of control and the net effect of all those apps running will invariably begin to degrade the performance of your system.

The new alert system is designed to work hand in hand with the company’s Potentially Unwanted App feature. So now when you get an alert, if you click on it, you’ll be taken to a screen that shows you what the app is, and you’ll have an option to block both unwanted apps and unnecessary downloads.

This is a really good, surprisingly simple fix. Microsoft has been known to over-engineer solutions to problems, but this one is simple and elegant. In addition to that, it addresses an issue that impacts a tremendous percentage of users, but mostly manages to stay below the radar. In our book that’s amazing.

While the Redmond Giant has certainly had their share of stumbles and PR gaffes, this isn’t one of them. It’s a great new addition. Kudos to Microsoft for making the change.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Microsoft Image AI Increases Accuracy To Rival Humans

Skynet just took a step closer to becoming a reality. The word, of course, refers back to the hit movie, ‘Terminator,’ in which a computer network gained sentience and decided to do away with the human race.

While Microsoft’s latest advances in AI aren’t Skynet, their new, and recently touted AI image description routine is so good that it’s scary.

Describing an image accurately is a really tough problem for a computer, because of course, humans have a vast, rich body of experience to draw from when defining and ultimately describing what we see. Codifying that so a computer can draw on it has proven to be a daunting task.

It hasn’t stopped companies from trying though, and in 2016, Google was the first company to make a big breakthrough, reporting that their AI could caption images nearly as well as humans, with a shocking 94 percent accuracy. This is big news.

In the words of Eric Boyd, the CVP of Azure AI:

“Image captioning is one of the hardest problems in AI. It represents not only understanding the objects in a scene, but how they’re interacting, and how to describe them.”

Now, Microsoft has upped the ante with their ‘Seeing AI’ app, built for visually impaired users, which creates a real time, running narrative of the world around the person using the app. According to a recent Microsoft blog post, their new routine is nearly 99 percent accurate, and the new app will make it easier than ever for visually impaired users to navigate the web.

This is big, exciting news, and it’s interesting that the company is rushing the product to market. Beating a benchmark is one thing, but it remains to be seen how effective the new app will be. One thing’s for sure though, we’re anxious to find out, and also, possibly a shade nervous too.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Intel Adding Additional Security To Future Processors

Intel has had more than its share of challenges over the last couple of years.

Not the least of which included a whole family of new attack vectors that made headlines and caused panic around the world.

This happened as hackers discovered new ways to attack machines with ‘Intel Inside,’ which globally, is a lot of machines.

The company responded slowly and somewhat haphazardly to the initial onslaught, but ultimately, they released some viable fixes. It’s clear that Meltdown and Spectre attacks left a scar on the company’s psyche. Since then, security has been front and center for the company, and recently, this point was underscored when they released details about their next generation of chip, code-named Ice Lake.

The new Ice Lake chips will feature improved Intel SGX, which is a processor-based security feature that allows applications to run in virtually walled-off enclaves that provide robust hardware-based encryption, which provides rock solid security for the app and the data it is utilizing, while running, with the goal being to minimize code injection style attacks and any unwanted snooping.

To this, the company is also adding Intel TME, which stands for Total Memory Encryption, which is a new feature designed to protect the data accessed from the CPU, specifically including stored login credentials and encryption keys, by keeping it encrypted at all times and protecting against hardware attacks.

Finally, the new Ice Lake chips will introduce Intel Platform Firmware Resilience (Intel PFR), which is a new system that automatically detects for firmware corruption and restores from a previous backup if there’s a problem detected.

We’ll have to wait and see the new chips in action to know how successful these new additions will be. No doubt, some hacker, somewhere in the world will find a hole in the armor, but the changes do indeed sound fantastic. It will be interesting to see them in action. Kudos to Intel for continuing to innovate with safety and security in mind.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Analytics Gains Additional Features

Since Google introduced Google Analytics back in 2005, it has become the industry standard. A simple, free method of getting a bird’s eye view into who’s searching for what on the internet. Millions of business owners around the world rely on Google Analytics to make informed decisions about how to position and present the products and services they make available on the web. It is, simply put, an invaluable marketing tool.

Unfortunately, it’s also a bit long in the tooth. Not only is the design of the analytics dashboard more than a little dated, the information it contains is of increasingly less immediate value.

Google isn’t blind to this, of course, and recently, the company announced a major overhaul to their analytics platform that will lean heavily on recent advances in machine learning. Additionally, the coming changes will present a unified app and web reporting feature that will provide improved integration, in addition to making the analytics platform easier to use.

Vidhya Srinivasan is the VP of Measurement, Analytics, and Buying Platforms at Google.

Vidhya had this to say about the recent changes in a blog post:

“The new Analytics is designed to adapt to a future with or without cookies or identifiers. It uses a flexible approach to measurement, and in the future, will include modeling to fill in the gaps where the data may be incomplete. This means that you can rely on Google Analytics to help you measure your marketing results and meet customer needs now as you navigate the recovery and as you face uncertainty in the future.”

Perhaps the most significant improvement though, comes in the form of the new alert system, that notifies Analytics users about significant trends in their data that can help greatly when attempting to calculate purchasing probability and churn.

The coming changes are exciting indeed. The company introduced the foundations of the change last year in beta and so far, they’ve been well-received. People who use the new, more robust platform are simply better able to manage their data, and that’s a very good thing. There’s no word yet on when the changes will move out of beta and into the mainstream, but stay tuned, and prepare to be impressed.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Microsoft Testing User Based Windows Setup For Performance Optimization

What do you primarily use your PC for? It’s a more important question than you might think, because different use cases for your PC require it to be configured in different ways to optimize your user experience. Until now, that’s something that each individual user has attended to, making tweaks as necessary to the core Windows setup to make the machine work better. It is all based on how each person uses their machine.

Microsoft wants to start changing that in a bid further enhance user experience. To that end, the company is adding a “customize your device” screen to the Windows setup routine. If you select one of the categories Microsoft has defined, the setup routine will automatically make tweaks and adjustments behind the scenes, leaving you with less to do to optimize your rig.

The following information is based on a recent screen shared by the company’s “Windows Insiders” group.

The predefined categories are:

  • Gaming
  • Family
  • Creativity
  • Schoolwork
  • Entertainment
  • Business

These are generally good options, and it’s easy to see how the company could feather in the automatic installation of any number of apps, based on the selection made. Notably absent from the list, however, is a “Developer” option. Sorry developers, you’re on your own. Although once we know more about what each of these options is and does, it may be the case that the “Business” option covers the needs of developers reasonably well, too.

Overall, it’s a good addition, available to a select group of Windows Insiders right now, in build 20231. Based on their feedback, it will be rolled out to the general public in the months ahead.

Kudos to Microsoft for putting user experience front and center with the change. The company hasn’t always been perfect in that regard, but it’s clear that they’re trying hard to reform, and there’s something to be said for that.

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