Quick take based on reading of others’ work, but unless you’re a datacenter operator, there is really no need to go into full bore panic and scrap your plans in the wake of the new disclosure of hardwired flaws in Intel and other CPUs.
Windows
Securing the Windows operating system.
Leaving Windows for Linux on my Primary System
Few outside the technology business may be fully aware that Windows 10 arrives in the context of a major strategy shift at Microsoft. Feeling the heat from Google, Apple, and others, Microsoft needs to mutate and evolve its business models to compete in the end user computing marketplace. Selling Windows and Office licenses for whatever number of cents OEMs pay them for the right to ship these products on newly purchased machines is no longer cutting it in an age of falling PC sales. There’s new business out there, a pie they’re hungry for a big piece of.
Process Explorer 16.0 Adds VirusTotal Integration
Author Mark Russinovich just dropped version 16.0 of Sysinternals procexp, an indispensable utility that displays a tree view of every process on a Windows system along with its resource consumption. Procexp’s visual representation of the activity on a system is so useful for performance tuning that I not only keep an instance in my toolkit, but also place one right smack on the desktop of pretty much every machine I’m responsible for. Version 16.0 is a big feature update boasting newly added integration with cloud antivirus service VirusTotal.
Windows XP End Of Support Life Coming Soon
As a reminder, Windows XP will officially reach EOSL (End Of Support Life) on April 8, 2014, a milestone in the making for over a decade, finally coming up a little over eight months from now. On this date, Microsoft will stop publishing new fixes for security holes and bugs in XP. It will no longer be possible to use XP securely, and the degree of exposure and danger will begin to ramp up thereafter, like a proverbial ticking timebomb.
Recommended Practices for Browser Security and Privacy
Historically, advertisements were limited to operating in one direction: from your newspaper, radio, or television screen to you. Enter the full duplex, bidirectional intertubes, and now advertisers have a slew of lucrative new methods to target the awful nuisance of advertisements to you. The history of sites you visit and your search history (behavioral targeting), the content of the page you’re browsing at the time (contextual advertising), and potentially all sorts of demographic and personally characterizing information may be in scope depending on the application (think e.g. Facebook).