Security through obscurity1 is not working. This is not an allegation, it is a proven fact. Today’s proof has a particularly large impact on worldwide Microsoft Windows installations. The Windows Security Centre (WSC) API2 has been made to accept any program as an anti-virus solution. The WSC works as follows: If a manufacturer of an AV security solution wants to install his snakeoil, he/she first has to be able to switch off the anti-tempering mechanisms so that it is not identified as malware. Read more

Today, shortly before weekend, I felt that pain again when seeing a PowerShell script. Somebody has literally raped the System.IO.DirectoryInfo across several pages and eternalised himself beyond anything related to aesthetics, technology or rationality. The aim of the script was to zip all the subdirectories of given folder one by one and push them to another drive with an ISO 8601-compliant timestamp prefix. Read more

Crashed services of a business software are inconvenient. If they occur more than once, it becomes annoying. If there is also a software supplier who is unwilling or unable to solve the problem, it gets complicated. A quick and pragmatic solution was needed shortly before the Easter holidays. Read more

Even measured by Microsoft’s own standards, the half-life of promises is astonishing. Since 2015 it has been said that Windows no longer follows the classic licensing and version scheme. Windows 10 is the “last Windows”1. Six years later, everything has changed. That roughly corresponds to the lifespan of a PC office desktop. Read more