Despite that there are still a shocking number of Windows 7 users spread around the world, Microsoft has kept with its previously published end of support schedule, and is no longer supporting the venerable product.

The company has also begun quietly pulling the plug on applications that were central to the Windows 7 user experience, including (according to updated support documents) Windows Media Player and the Windows Media Center from versions 7 and 8.1 of the OS.

One of the most notable changes from a user’s perspective is the fact that audio and video meta data will no longer be updated.

A company spokesman had this to say about the recent change:

“Going forward, you may be unable to view information (metadata) such as the title, genre, and artist for songs, and the director, actors, cover art and TV guide for movies in Windows Media Center and Windows Media Player. After looking at customer feedback and usage data, Microsoft decided to discontinue this service. This means that new metadata won’t be updated on media players that are installed on your Windows device. However, any information that’s already been downloaded will still be available.”

The most important detail to make note of, however, is this: If you’re currently using Windows Media Player on Windows 10, your metadata will not be impacted by this change. It will continue to be updated normally.

While the older versions of Media Player will still function, this is the latest in a series of gradual steps to move the company completely away from the oldest products in its lineup, in preference for the latest version of the OS.

Industry insiders generally regard it as the right call and a positive development. Although if you are one of the people still relying on your old Windows 7 machine, you may not share that view. Time, however, marches on, and it’s well past time to start making plans to migrate away from Windows 7.

At one point or another, everybody has done it. You open a browser and type in the URL of a site you visit frequently. In doing so, your finger slips and you mistype it. Sometimes, nothing comes of it except that you get an error message. Knowing that, increasing numbers of hackers have gotten into the habit of buying up domains that are slight misspellings of popular, mainstream brands.

Invariably, the hackers will then create a site that looks identical to the real site. A careless user won't notice the difference. From there, it's as simple as generating a popup message asking the user to update an app (Flash player or the like) so they can properly view the site's' content, and the user is doomed.

Fortunately for users, big tech companies are actively looking for ways to curtail hacking activities, and the latest change Google is making to its Chrome browser seeks to address the exact phenomenon described above.

The company has been testing a new redirect feature since version 70 of the browser and it's now ready for prime time. In the latest build, you can enable it as an "experimental feature" if you want to give it a test drive.

The new feature is self-explanatory. Chrome has an extensive database of likely typos. When you make one, a drop-down panel will appear under the URL bar, which is a visual cue that you may be about to visit a site you hadn't intended to. Getting yourself redirected to the destination you intended from there is as simple as clicking.

Ultimately, this is destined to become a standard feature of Chrome, although there's no set timetable for that. For now, it's easy to begin experimenting with the feature if you like.

One of the unfortunate truths about apps is that many developers use deceptive practices to try and confuse consumers.

They try to mislead them about how much custom features cost and when in-app purchases occur.

Many attempt to hide or obfuscate the particulars of subscription details.

The thinking here is pretty simple: First of all, a customer might not notice the charges on their payment card right away. If the amounts aren't excessive, they may not be in a huge rush to shut them down. In both cases, the result is more money in the developer's pocket, which is of course what they're hoping for.

Apple, however, isn't having it. The company made some important revisions to its App Store guidelines that specify in clear, unmistakable terms exactly how in-app subscriptions and opt-ins should be presented to users. The new rules can be found in the company's "Human Interface Guidelines" document, which is part of the App Store's library of developer resources.

The changes include straightforward, common sense things like:

Developers must clearly present the true cost of any subscriptions offered, with the true cost being defined as the actual amount to be billed.
Auto-renewable subscriptions must be opt-in, with no hidden or potentially deceptive clauses
In cases where an app is free during a trial period and then to be billed when the trial period expires, the developer must prominently display the price to be paid and all of the other terms for renewal.
It's unfortunate that the company had to take steps to spell these kinds of things out explicitly. One would hope that developers would play fair in the name of their own brand image, but historically this simply hasn't been the case.

This is a good step, but how effective it will be remains to be seen. Changing a policy is one thing. Effectively enforcing it is a completely different challenge, but it's a beginning.

In the world of hacking, steganography ranks as one of the most difficult methodologies to detect.

If you're not familiar with the term, it is the practice of embedding executable code inside images, which makes it virtually impossible to detect.

The reason is simple: Virus scanners are built around the idea of searching for text strings with identifiable malicious characteristics and markers, but images aren't that at all. However, if carefully crafted, they can deliver the same poisoned payloads.

Recently, Apple users have been experiencing this firsthand, courtesy of a group calling themselves 'VeryMal,' which has been targeting Apple users in exactly this way. They've been using code embedded in ad images to redirect users browsing the web away from legitimate sites and onto malicious ones, which serve as hosts for a variety of malware.

Here's a quick rundown of how it works:

Hackers purchase ad space on a legitimate website
The ad image they load contains code embedded in the image itself
The embedded code runs a JavaScript, which checks to see if Apple fonts are supported, and verifies that the device is an Apple of some kind
If the result of that query is positive, the script extracts the rest of the code from the image, which forces the user's browser to navigate to a new URL as defined by the command code
The user arrives at a page displaying popup ads, most commonly urging the installation of an update for software, in most cases Adobe Flash Player
Of course, it's not a Flash update at all, but whatever malware the hackers have seen fit to put in its place. It's a nasty bit of trickery that so far, has managed to hijack more than five million web sessions, siphoning them away from legitimate sites. This is based on the latest research into the group's activities, and worse, there's no good way to guard against it except to be vigilant and watch the behavior of your web browser closely.

If your company uses Apple equipment, make sure your people are aware. VeryMal has been stepping up their activities in recent weeks.

Google has kept no secret of their plan to eventually put an end to their social media experiment, Google+. In case you haven't been keeping abreast of the company's announcements where the service is concerned, be aware that it will be shutting down on April 2nd of 2019.

The closer we've gotten to that deadline, the more details we've gotten from the company about how the shutdown will go.

Just so you're aware, this won't be a simple matter of turning off access and freezing posts as they are, or essentially preserving them for all time. No, this is going to be an internet-wide absolute deletion of any and everything related to Google Plus.

That means your posts, your comments to other people's posts and your Google+ powered comments on Blogger and other blogging sites will all ultimately be deleted. If you want to preserve any of your materials, it's long past time to start archiving. You've still got time of course, but the clock is ticking more loudly than ever now, and depending on how much content you've got, you'll want to be quick about it.

Google+ never enjoyed the kind of popular success that Facebook and the other heavy hitters in the social media ecosystem enjoyed. It was more of a panicked reaction to the meteoric rise of Facebook, with the fear being that Facebook might kill search if everybody simply gravitated to asking their friends for recommendations.

Obviously nothing like that happened, but it was of genuine concern when the company launched the service, and it's what prompted them to inject Google+ into every aspect of their product ecosystem, even in cases where it didn't make much sense to do so.

Given this deep integration, shutting down Google+ and deleting all traces of it won't be a quick or easy process, but it's coming, and that starts on April 2nd. Note: The shutdown applies to consumers only. Enterprise users will still have access to Google+ functionality via the G Suite.

On paper, UltraViolet seemed like a great idea. It was (and still is, for the moment) a service that stored your license information for various digital media you purchased.

You could buy a movie from Amazon Prime, buy something else from some other online vendor, and watch them on any number of devices without having to log into individual services.

You could even use the service to redeem digital copies of movies that are sometimes made available when you buy a physical copy of a movie.

Unfortunately, the Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem (DECE), the group of companies that created UltraViolet, has now decided to end their experiment and is in the process of closing down the service due to changes in the marketplace.

As Wendy Aylsworth, the head of the DECE explained:

"The marketplace for collecting entertainment content was very small when UltraViolet started. It was siloed into walled gardens at the time."

That's clearly no longer the case. A variety of companies have now launched similar services including industry heavyweights like Disney with their Movies Anywhere service.

From now until July 31st, you'll be able to continue to use UltraViolet to watch movies you have in your library and to redeem digital copies of physical purchases you've made if (and as) they are offered. After July 31st, however, the only way you'll be able to access your movies is to log onto the site or service you purchased them from, or link those accounts to some other comparable service.

In many ways, UltraViolet was ahead of its time and it enjoyed a good run, making the lives of digital consumers of media much simpler than it otherwise would have been. Unfortunately, all good things eventually come to and end, and for UltraViolet, the end is July 31st, 2019.

The first browser update of 2019 is officially out. Both Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox browsers are getting a raft of security fixes that will help make Mac, Linux and Windows users safer and more secure.

The latest build of Chrome addresses nearly sixty CVE-level flaws, seventeen of which are rated as being "high" severity, and one rated as 'critical.'

In addition to simply shoring up security, however, this latest Chrome build has a new experimental feature on offer.

You'll need to enable it to test it out, but Google is now experimenting with a feature that will give you a visual warning in the event that you mis-type a URL. Hackers are in the habit of buying up popular misspellings of mainstream URLs, creating clones of legitimate sites then loading them with malware. So, the new feature is generally seen as a very good thing.

Eventually you can expect to see it become a standard feature of Google's browser, but for the moment, it's entirely opt-in. If you enable it and mistype a web address, you'll get a dropdown box that displays several possibilities you may have meant instead, allowing you to correct on the fly.

Where Mozilla is concerned, the latest Firefox build patches seven CVEs, three of which are listed as critical with another two listed as high.

While software security is always a big deal, the latest updates for these two browsers address such a wide range of issues that they belong on the must-have list. Even if you're prone to waiting a bit to install, these two should be given a higher priority if you use either Chrome or Firefox at your company. The new redirect feature in Chrome is well worth testing out. You'll be impressed.

It's been the better part of two years since the outbreak of the Wannacry ransomware epidemic. Unfortunately, all this time later, some companies are still dealing with the fallout. According to the latest research, Wannacry is still infecting hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe.

As grim as that sounds, it's not all bad news. After all, the malware has been rendered harmless by the now famous "kill switch" discovered by Kryptos Logic security researcher Marcus Hutchins, who found a glaring flaw in the design of the software. The flaw allowed him to register a domain and encode it with instructions that would keep the ransomware component of Wannacry from activating and actually encrypting files.

That, however, did nothing to get rid of the malicious code infecting legions of PCs around the world. Sadly, much of the code remains in place on infected machines, silently lurking in the background. Kryptos Logic is uniquely positioned to know, since they control the kill switch domain and have continued to monitor traffic to it since building the kill switch on it. To this day, their site continues to be pinged by new IP addresses as the now toothless infection continues to spread.

It's not hard to see why the removal of a piece of malware that has been rendered suddenly toothless takes a lower priority for busy, and often harried IT security professionals. Leaving the code in place on infected machines is not without risk, however.

It is possible, however unlikely, that the hackers who built the program to begin with could find a way to get around the kill switch. If that should happen, then we'll be facing the full fury of the epidemic all over again, something no one in the field of digital security wants to contemplate.

The bottom line is simply this: If you were impacted by Wannacry when the outbreak initially occurred, it's worth double checking to make sure that all traces of the malicious code are gone from your network. Better safe than sorry.

Are you still using Internet Explorer? Now you have a new reason to consider switching to a more up to date browser.

As most people know, Microsoft essentially gave up on Explorer after it failed to gain ground against its major competitors in the browser ecosystem. They started fresh, with Microsoft Edge, designed as a modern replacement.

Unfortunately, there are still legions of faithful IE users hanging on, and they are at risk. The company recently received a notification from Google's Threat Analysis Group alerting them to the presence of the flaw, which centers around the way the software's scripting engine handles objects in memory.

Worse, although the company did not provide any details, a separately published advisory on the topic made clear that this flaw has been seen in the wild and is actively being used by hackers.

The issue is so severe that Microsoft broke with its own policy and issued an emergency update to fix the flaw for IE holdout users. If, for whatever reason, you have yet to switch to some other browser, this is one security update you won't want to miss. You'll find it on the company's website indexed as CVE-2018-8653. The company has also made clear that there are no known workarounds for this issue, except to install the latest patch.

Ultimately, of course, the best solution would be to seriously consider migrating away from the use of Internet Explorer. Microsoft will likely continue to issue emergency patches as other issues are discovered. Unfortunately though, they have formally ended support for the product, so there's no guarantee. Every day you continue using the outdated browser, you put yourself at unnecessary and entirely avoidable risk.

If you haven't already got firm plans in place to migrate to some other browser, this is one more in a long list of compelling reasons to make it a priority.