Microsoft has started testing a new search and filtering system for the Task Manager on Windows 11. It will allow Windows users to easily search for a misbehaving app and end its process or quickly create a dump file, enable efficiency mode, and more. From a report: "This is the top feature request from our users to filter / search for processes," explains the Windows Insider team in a blog post. "You can filter either using the binary name, PID or publisher name. The filter algorithm matches the context keyword with all possible matches and displays them on the current page." You'll be able to use the alt + F keyboard shortcut to jump to the filter box in the Task Manager, and results will be filtered into single or groups of processes that you can monitor or take action on. Alongside the new search and filter functionality, Microsoft is also adding the ability to pick between light or dark themes in the Task Manager. Themes will also be applied fully throughout Task Manager, with some updates to its UI to fit more closely with Microsoft's overall Fluent work.

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Much of the Windows world has yet to adopt Microsoft's latest desktop operating system more than a year after it launched, according to figures for October collated by Statcounter. From a report: Just 15.44 percent of PCs across the globe have installed Windows 11, meaning it gained 1.83 percentage points in a month. This compares to the 71.29 percent running Windows 10, which fell marginally from 71.88 percent in September. Windows 7 is still hanging on with a tenuous grip, in third place with 9.61 percent, Windows 8.1 in fourth with 2.45 percent, plain old Windows 8 with 0.69 percent, and bless its heart, Windows XP with 0.39 percent because of your extended family. In total, Windows has almost 76 percent of the global desktop OS market followed by OS X with 15.7 percent and Linux with 2.6 percent. Android comprised 42.37 percent of total operating system market share, with Windows trailing on 30.11 percent, iOS on 17.6 percent, OS X on 6.24 percent, and Linux on 1.04 percent.

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First released in 1998, the BSD-licensed software Zeek (originally named "Bro") is about to get more widely adopted, writes long-time Slashdot reader skinfaxi: Zeek, the open source network security monitoring platform, is being integrated into Windows and "is now deployed on more than one billion global endpoints," according to an announcement from Corelight. From Corelight's press release: Corelight, the leader in open network detection and response, today announced the integration of Zeek, the world's most popular open source network security monitoring platform, as a component of Microsoft Windows and Defender for Endpoint. The integration will help security teams respond to the most challenging attacks by providing "richer signals for advanced threat hunting, complete and accurate discovery of IoT devices, and more powerful detection and response capabilities." Originally created by Corelight co-founder and chief scientist Dr. Vern Paxson while at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Zeek transforms network traffic into compact and high-fidelity logs, file content, and behavioral analytics to accelerate security operations. Vital funding for Zeek came initially from the National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. As adoption increased, Corelight was founded to provide a financial model and corporate sponsor for the project.... "Microsoft is strongly committed to supporting open source projects and ecosystems," said Rob Lefferts, corporate vice president for Microsoft. "We're proud to be working with Zeek and are thrilled to bring this level of network intelligence and monitoring to our customers." "This is an amazing development for Zeek and its community of contributors and users," said Paxson. "I never imagined that the tool I developed for network monitoring would find broader application in defending endpoints — but that's part of the creative magic of open source development. "We are grateful for Microsoft's contributions and support, and we are excited that the project's impact, and that of the community of contributors, will increase so dramatically."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BetaNews: Slack developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app four years ago, updating it shortly afterwards to allow it to run gaming classics like Doom. Now he rolls out a new version which can run on any Windows, Mac or Linux system. Based on the Electron framework, Rieseberg's Windows 95 is written entirely in JavaScript, so it doesn't run as smoothly as it would if it was a native app, but you shouldn't let that put you off. This is the second update of the year, which brings it up to version 3.1.1 and includes two important changes: - Upgraded from Electron v18 to Electron v21 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (sound is back!) The earlier update (in June) brought the software up to 3.0.0 and introduced the following changes: - Upgraded from Electron v11 Electron v18 (and with it, Chrome and Node.js) - Upgraded v86 (now using WASM) - Upgraded various smaller dependencies - Much better scaling on all platforms - On Windows, the link to OSFMount was broken and is now fixed. - On Windows, you can now see a prettier installation animation. - On Windows, windows95 will have a proper icon in the Programs & Features menu. You can download the latest version of the Windows 95 app for Windows, macOS, and Linux at their respective links.

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Microsoft is working on a PC Manager app that's designed to boost your computer's performance. The Verge reports: Much like CCleaner, a beta version of Microsoft's PC Manager includes storage management and the ability to end tasks quickly and control which apps start up with Windows. Much of this functionality is already baked into Windows, but this PC Manager app puts it all in one useful location. There's even a browser protection section that makes it easier to change default browsers than what exists in Windows right now. The storage manager feature includes the ability to manage apps or remove those that are rarely used, and there's also a full cleanup scan available or a scan to find large files on your drives. The process management feature is a more simplified version of the Task Manager so you can quickly kill processes that might be eating up RAM. Hitting the main "boost" button will clear temporary files and free up memory, which could be useful on older PCs.

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Today, Microsoft and Apple announced a number of deeper integrations of Apple services on both Windows PCs and Xbox game consoles, including Music and TV apps for both platforms and the ability to browse your iCloud Photo Library within the Windows 11 Photos app. Ars Technica reports: The Apple Music app for Xbox is already available. Existing users can download the app and start listening to their playlists and stations, while new users can sign up for a one-month trial. The user interface for Apple Music on the Xbox is almost exactly the same as the one we've used before on Apple TV hardware. It doesn't add any new features we haven't seen before, but it's nice to see parity between the platforms. The Music and TV apps for Windows aren't available yet, but the companies say they'll both be available next year. The Windows iTunes app lets users listen to songs and watch TV and movies purchased through Apple's online store. Even though Apple Music will arrive on Windows, iTunes will continue to be available, and users will still be able to access Podcasts and Books there. While you'll have to wait until next year to download the Music and TV apps in Windows, the iCloud Photo Library integration is available right now. You'll have to download the iCloud Windows app (which is already used to sync a variety of things, like browser bookmarks) and opt into syncing your iCloud Photo Library. After that, both videos and photos should be available within the Windows 11 Photos app.

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Nearly 43 percent of millions of devices studied by asset management provider Lansweeper are unable to upgrade to Windows 11 due to the hardware requirements Microsoft set out for the operating system. The Register reports: Lansweeper said 42.76 percent of the estimated 27 million PCs it tested across 60,000 organizations failed the CPU test, albeit better than the 57.26 percent in its last test a year ago. Altogether 71.5 percent of the PCs failed the RAM test and 14.66 percent the TPM test. "We know that those who can't update to Windows 11... will continue to use Windows 10," said Roel Decneut, chief strategy officer at Lansweeper, whose customers include Sony, Pepsico, Cerner, MiT and Hilton hotels. He said that even if enterprises are prepared to upgrade their PC fleet to meet the system requirements of Microsoft's latest OS, there are "broader issues affecting adoption that are out of Microsoft's control." "Global supply chain disruption has created chip a processor shortage, while many are choosing to stick with what hardware they have at the moment due to the global financial uncertainty." Other findings from Lansweeper show adoption rates for the latest OS are improving, running on 1.44 percent of computers versus 0.52 percent in January. This means the latest incarnation has overtaken Windows 8 in the popularity stakes but remains behind market share for Windows 7, despite that software going end of life in January 2020. Adoption is, unsurprisingly, higher in the consumer space. Some 4.82 percent of the biz devices researched were running an OS that wasn't fully supported and 0.91 percent had servers in their estate that are end of life.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: It's still possible to learn a lot of interesting things about old operating systems. Sometimes, those things are already documented (on a blog post) that miraculously still exist. One such quirk showed up recently when someone noticed how Microsoft made sure that SimCity and other popular apps worked on Windows 95. A recent tweet by @Kalyoshika highlights an excerpt from a blog post by Fog Creek Software co-founder, Stack Overflow co-creator, and longtime software blogger Joel Spolsky. The larger post is about chicken-and-egg OS/software appeal and demand. The part that caught the eye of a Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast co-host is how the Windows 3.1 version of SimCity worked on the Windows 95 system. Windows 95 merged MS-DOS and Windows apps, upgraded APIs from 16 to 32-bit, and was hyper-marketed. A popular app like SimCity, which sold more than 5 million copies, needed to work without a hitch. Spolsky's post summarizes how SimCity became Windows 95-ready, as he heard it, without input from Maxis or user workarounds: "Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here's the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn't working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn't free memory right away. That's the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95." Spolsky (in 2000) considers this a credit to Microsoft and an example of how to break the chicken-and-egg problem: "provide a backwards compatibility mode which either delivers a truckload of chickens, or a truckload of eggs, depending on how you look at it, and sit back and rake in the bucks." Windows developers may have deserved some sit-back time, seeing the extent of the tweaks they often have to make for individual games and apps in Windows 95. Further in @Kalyoshika's replies, you can find another example, pulled from the Compatibility Administrator in Windows' Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK). A screenshot from @code_and_beer shows how Windows NT, upon detecting files typically installed with Final Fantasy VII, will implement a fittingly titled compatibility fix: "Win95VersionLie." Simply telling the game that it's on Windows 95 seems to fix a major issue with its operation, along with a few other emulation and virtualization tweaks. "Mike Perry, former creative director at Sim empire Maxis (and later EA), noted later that there was, technically, a 32-bit Windows 95 version of Sim City available, as shown by the 'Deluxe Edition' bundle of the game," adds Ars. "He also states that Ross worked for Microsoft after leaving Maxis, which would further explain why Microsoft was so keen to ensure people could keep building parks in the perfect grid position to improve resident happiness."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft released a new Windows Terminal version today that adds a long-awaited feature, making it possible to create and use custom themes. For now, users can only create themes by editing the Windows Terminal global JSON settings file to alter the background color of tabs and tab rows and choose between light and dark terminal window themes. After adding a new theme config to the JSON file, it will automatically appear in the app's Settings > Appearance settings page. "themes is a global property that can contain a variety of themes objects, which will appear in the Theme dropdown on the Appearance page of the settings UI," Windows Terminal Program Manager Kayla Cinnamon explained. "Themes are only editable using the JSON file, but they will appear in the Theme dropdown in the settings UI." To add your own custom themes, you will have to install the app's latest version, Windows Terminal Preview 1.16. The new version also adds updated default colors and sets the dark theme as the default theme instead of following the default Windows system theme. "We have modified some of the default colors in Windows Terminal for a more cohesive appearance. Additionally, we are defaulting Terminal to use dark theme, rather than following the system theme," Cinnamon added.

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Windows' "Defender" software is supposed to detect malware. But its Microsoft team is now investigating reports that it's mistakenly flagging Electron-based or Chromium-based applications — as malware. "It's a false positive, and your computer is OK," wites the blog Windows Central: This morning, many people worldwide experienced Microsoft Defender warning them of a recurring virus threat.... People on Reddit are "freaking out" over not just a reported threat from Microsoft Defender but one that keeps popping up and recurring despite the alleged threat being blocked. The threat is revealed in a pop-up message noting that "Behavior:Win32/Hive.ZY" has been detected and is listed as "severe." However, after taking action to rectify the issue, it does not go away, and the user will keep receiving the same prompt. The reminder may return after 20 seconds, with the cycle repeating endlessly. This detection appears to be a false positive, according to a Microsoft Support forum... From DaveM121, an Independent Advisor: [I]t is a bug currently being reported by hundreds of people at the moment, it seems to be related to all Chromium based web browsers and Electron based apps like Whatsapp, Discord, Spotify, etc.... Also affected are Google Chrome and even Microsoft Edge, as well as "anything that runs Visual Studio Code," according to the article. "The problem seems to originate from Defender's Definition/Update Version 1.373.1508.0, meaning Microsoft needs to update that file, and the issue should be resolved."

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ZDNet reports: Microsoft is rolling out a new security default for Windows 11 that will go a long way to preventing ransomware attacks that begin with password-guessing attacks and compromised credentials. The new account security default on account credentials should help thwart ransomware attacks that are initiated after using compromised credentials or brute-force password attacks to access remote desktop protocol (RDP) endpoints, which are often exposed on the internet. RDP remains the top method for initial access in ransomware deployments, with groups specializing in compromising RDP endpoints and selling them to others for access. The new feature is rolling out to Windows 11 in a recent Insider test build, but the feature is also being backported to Windows 10 desktop and server, according to Dave Weston, vice president of OS Security and Enterprise at Microsoft. "Win11 builds now have a DEFAULT account lockout policy to mitigate RDP and other brute force password vectors. This technique is very commonly used in Human Operated Ransomware and other attacks — this control will make brute forcing much harder which is awesome!," Weston tweeted. Weston emphasized "default" because the policy is already an option in Windows 10 but isn't enabled by default. That's big news and is a parallel to Microsoft's default block on internet macros in Office on Windows devices, which is also a major avenue for malware attacks on Windows systems through email attachments and links.... The defaults will be visible in the Windows Local Computer Policy directory "Account Lockout Policy". The default "account lockout duration" is 10 minutes; the "account lockout threshold" is set to a maximum of 10 invalid logon attempts; a setting to "allow administrator account lockout" is enabled; and the "reset account lockout counter after" setting is set to 10 minutes.

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We appear to be entering a period of Windows' development where we can expect new features and tweaks to come to the operating system several times a year. To that end, Microsoft continues to add, remove, and generally experiment with Windows 11's features and user interface via its Insider Preview channels. From a report: The most interesting addition we've seen in a while is rolling out to users on the experimental Dev Channel now: a modified version of the taskbar with much-improved handling of app icon overflow when users have too many apps open at once. Click an ellipsis button on your taskbar, and a new icon overflow menu opens up, allowing you to interact with any of those extra icons the same way you would if they were sitting on the taskbar. This would be a big improvement over the current overflow behavior, which devotes one icon's worth of space to show the icon for the app you last interacted with, leaving the rest inaccessible. That icon will continue to appear on the taskbar alongside the new ellipsis icon. Microsoft says that app icons in the overflow area will be able to show jump lists and other customizable shortcuts the same as any other app icon in the taskbar.

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Microsoft is shifting to a new engineering schedule for Windows which will see the company return to a more traditional three-year release cycle for major versions of the Windows client, while simultaneously increasing the output of new features shipping to the current version of Windows on the market. Zac Bowden writes via Windows Central: The news comes just a year after the company announced it was moving to a yearly release cadence for new versions of Windows. According to my sources, Microsoft now intends to ship "major" versions of the Windows client every three years, with the next release currently scheduled for 2024, three years after Windows 11 shipped in 2021. This means that the originally planned 2023 client release of Windows (codenamed Sun Valley 3) has been scrapped, but that's not the end of the story. I'm told that with the move to this new development schedule, Microsoft is also planning to increase the output of new features rolling out to users on the latest version of Windows. Starting with Windows 11 version 22H2 (Sun Valley 2), Microsoft is kicking off a new "Moments" engineering effort which is designed to allow the company to rollout new features and experiences at key points throughout the year, outside of major OS releases. I hear the company intends to ship new features to the in-market version of Windows every few months, up to four times a year, starting in 2023. Microsoft has already tested this system with the rollout of the Taskbar weather button on Windows 11 earlier this year. That same approach will be used for these Moments, where the company will group together a handful of new features that have been in testing with Insiders and roll them out to everyone on top the latest shipping release of Windows. Many of the features that were planned for the now-scrapped Sun Valley 3 client release will ship as part of one of these Moments on top of Sun Valley 2, instead of in a dedicated new release of the Windows client in the fall of 2023.

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"Microsoft says that a recently spotted Windows worm has been found on the networks of hundreds of organizations from various industry sectors," reports BleepingComputer. The "Raspberry Robin" malware (first spotted in September) spreads through USB devices with a malicious .LNK file Although Microsoft observed the malware connecting to addresses on the Tor network, the threat actors are yet to exploit the access they gained to their victims' networks. This is in spite of the fact that they could easily escalate their attacks given that the malware can bypass User Account Control (UAC) on infected systems using legitimate Windows tools. Microsoft shared this info in a private threat intelligence advisory sent to Microsoft Defender for Endpoint subscribers and seen by BleepingComputer.... Once the USB device is attached and the user clicks the link, the worm spawns a msiexec process using cmd .exe to launch a malicious file stored on the infected drive. It infects new Windows devices, communicates with its command and control servers (C2), and executes malicious payloads... Microsoft has tagged this campaign as high-risk, given that the attackers could download and deploy additional malware within the victims' networks and escalate their privileges at any time.

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The Windows 11 22H2 update is working its way through Microsoft's Windows Insider testing channels, and we'd expect it to begin rolling out to Windows 11 PCs at some point in the next few weeks or months. But Microsoft has had almost nothing to say about the next major update to Windows 10 beyond the fact that the operating system will keep getting yearly updates for the foreseeable future. From a report: And the Windows 10 22H2 update is actually already out there for those who know how to install it. Neowin has published a list of commands that can be typed into the Command Prompt or Windows Terminal to turn a fully updated Windows 10 21H2 install into a 22H2 install. The commands use Microsoft's Deployment Image Servicing and Management (DISM) tool to make tweaks to your Windows install and require the optional KB5014666 update for Windows 10 to be installed first. The catch is that enabling Windows 10 22H2 doesn't actually seem to do much beyond incrementing the version number on the "About Windows" screen.

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Engineers at the European Space Agency (ESA) are getting ready for a Windows 98 upgrade on an orbiter circling Mars. The Verge reports: The Mars Express spacecraft has been operating for more than 19 years, and the Mars Advanced Radar for Subsurface and Ionospheric Sounding (MARSIS) instrument onboard has been using software built using Windows 98. Thankfully for humanity and the Red Planet's sake, the ESA isn't upgrading its systems to Windows ME. The MARSIS instrument on ESA's Mars Express was key to the discovery of a huge underground aquifer of liquid water on the Red Planet in 2018. This major new software upgrade "will allow it to see beneath the surfaces of Mars and its moon Phobos in more detail than ever before," according to the ESA. The agency originally launched the Mars Express into space in 2003 as its first mission to the Red Planet, and it has spent nearly two decades exploring the planet's surface. MARSIS uses low-frequency radio waves that bounce off the surface of Mars to search for water and study the Red Planet's atmosphere. The instrument's 130-foot antenna is capable of searching around three miles below the surface of Mars, and the software upgrades will enhance the signal reception and onboard data processing to improve the quality of data that's sent back to Earth. "We faced a number of challenges to improve the performance of MARSIS," explains Carlo Nenna, a software engineer at Enginium who is helping ESA with the upgrade. "Not least because the MARSIS software was originally designed over 20 years ago, using a development environment based on Microsoft Windows 98!"

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Microsoft is preparing to send reminders to Windows 8.1 users that support will end on January 10th 2023. The software giant will start sending notifications to existing Windows 8.1 devices next month, as a first reminder leading up to the January 2023 support cutoff. From a report: The notifications will be similar to ones Microsoft has used in the past to remind Windows 7 users about end of support dates. Microsoft originally sunset Windows 8 support in 2016, but the Windows 8.1 update will cease support fully in January 2023. Microsoft will not be offering an Extended Security Update (ESU) program for Windows 8.1, so businesses won't be able to pay for additional security patches and will have to upgrade or accept the risk of running software without security updates.

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UnknowingFool writes: In October 2021, PC World reviewed Windows 11 and labeled it as an "unnecessary replacement" to Windows 10 and did not recommend it for Windows 10 users. PC World noted that it was a "mixed bag of improved features and unnecessary changes." Six months later they reviewed it again. While MS has made improvements, PC World does not feel the improvements warrant a recommendation for Windows 10 users to upgrade.

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"A new survey claims Windows 11 adoption is so low it's actually less popular than the 20-year-old Windows XP," reports PC Magazine: The survey comes from an IT management provider called Lansweeper. Through its own software products, the company scanned 10 million Windows devices this month to determine which OS they were using. The results found that only 1.44% of the devices had Windows 11 installed, which is lower than the 1.71% for Windows XP. In contrast, Windows 10 maintains a dominant share at 80.34%. Although Windows 11's adoption is low at 1.44%, the number actually went up almost three times from 0.52% back in January. It's also important to note that other surveys have found much higher Windows 11 adoption numbers. Last month, the app advertising platform AdDuplex found Windows 11 usage was at 19.4%, although this represented a mere 0.1% growth from the previous month. Meanwhile, the Steam hardware survey from Valve estimates Windows 11 usage has reached 16.8%.

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Ars Technica's Andrew Cunningham combed through Steam Hardware & Software Survey data "to see how Windows 11 is fairing with enthusiasts." An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Steam users are migrating to Windows 11 about half as quickly as they moved to Windows 10. Six months after its release, Windows 10 ran on 31 percent of all Steam computers -- nearly one in three. As of March 2022, Windows 11 runs on just under 17 percent of Steam computers -- about one in six. Three-quarters of all Steam computers in 2022 are still running Windows 10. It's easy to interpret these results as an indictment of Windows 11, which generated some controversy with its relatively stringent (and often poorly explained) security-oriented system requirements. At least some of this slow adoption is caused by those system requirements -- many of the PCs surveyed by Steam probably can't install Windows 11. That could be because users have an older unsupported CPU or have one or more of the required security features disabled; Secure Boot and the firmware TPM module were often turned off by default on new motherboards for many years. But there are other compelling explanations. Windows 11's adoption looks slow compared to Windows 10, but Windows 10's adoption was also exceptionally good. Windows 8 and 8.1 were not well-loved, to put it mildly, and Windows 10 was framed as a response to (and a fix for) most of Windows 8's user interface changes. And people who were still on Windows 7 were missing out on some of the nice quality-of-life additions and under-the-hood improvements that Windows 8 added. You can see that pent-up demand in the jump between July 2015 and September 2015. In the first two months of Windows 10's availability, Windows 8 hemorrhaged users, falling from around 35 percent usage to 19 percent. Virtually all of those users -- and a smaller but still notable chunk of Windows 7 users -- were moving to Windows 10. Windows 11 also got a decent early adopter bump in November 2021, but its gains every other month were much smaller. In contrast, Windows 11 was announced with little run-up, and it was replacing what users had been told was the "last version of Windows." Where Windows 10 replaced one new, unloved OS and one well-liked but aging OS, Windows 11 replaced a modern OS that nobody really complained about (Windows 10 ran on over 90 percent of all Steam computers in September 2021 -- even Windows 7 in its heyday couldn't boast that kind of adoption). It's also worth noting that Microsoft didn't try to re-create that initial burst of adoption for Windows 11. Following some turbulence after early Windows 10 servicing updates, Microsoft began rolling updates out more methodically, starting with small numbers of PCs and then expanding availability gradually as problems were discovered and ironed out. Windows 11 only entered "its final phase of availability" in February, ensuring that anyone with a compatible PC could get Windows 11 through Windows Update if they wanted it.

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