On 12 August Microsoft released 40 updates for Internet Exploder, Windows 7 and Windows 8 Pro.

Very shortly afterwards people began reporting their Windows machines bricking – while others glimpsed something they hadn't seen in a very long time: the Blue Screen of Death.

Sysadmins must decide whether to trust Microsoft one more time or to run the gauntlet of hackers and malware writers, applying patches late and infrequently to save their own sanity and their credibility in the workplace.

Thanks to DRM support with HTML5 and Google's Chrome developers moving quick to implement the support that's backed by Netflix, you can today run Chrome and play Netflix videos.

It's not as easy though right now just firing up Chrome 38 Beta on Linux to play Netflix, but you first need to switch the reported HTTP user-agent string.

"It is about time a formal specification is defined for PHP, though the lack of one has by no means hindered the adoption of this programming language," wrote Al Hilwa, program director of software development research for IT analyst firm IDC.

Thanks to its copious use on the Web, PHP is the seventh most widely used language today, according to the latest monthly estimate of programming language popularity from development tools provider Tiobe.

COSEINC is a Singapore security outfit that has run a critical eye about 17 major antivirus engines and products and found dangerous local and remotely-exploitable vulnerabilities in 14.

"AV engines make your computer more vulnerable with a varying degree of performance penalty [and] is as vulnerable to zero day attacks as the applications it tries to protect from. [It] can even lower the operating system exploiting mitigations."

As Oracle Linux 7 is based on RHEL 7, it inherits many of the same new features, though Oracle is not simply cloning RHEL and putting the company's name on it.

Full compiled versions of Oracle Linux 7 are available to anyone to use as they please and do not require that organizations pay Oracle anything to use, he said.

Red Hat today announced the Inktank Ceph Enterprise 1.2 storage platform, the first Ceph Enterprise release since Red Hat acquired Inktank.

Among the major new features in Ceph Enterprise 1.2 are erasure-coding and cache-tiering capabilities. Erasure coding is a technology that provides forward error correction for storage, giving users a higher degree of storage stability and resilience.

"The most common cause of a call to the service desk after the mailbox migration has been to request help to follow the process for logging into the new mail box for the first time," he said.

"For example, Office 365 seems to require people to have 20:20 vision, and the average age of a member of this House is 55. It is proving extremely difficult," she said.

"Why is it that so many men are employed in PICT? There are hardly any women at all. What's going on in recruitment here? Surely we believe that women can do this kind of task in a way that is equal to, if not better than, men," said the leftist firebrand.

Adobe Flash Player was the most insecure program installed on UK computer users PCs throughout the second quarter of 2014, according to stats from vulnerability management firm Secunia.

The report reveals that Microsoft XML Core Services 4 (MSXML) is another security weak spot.

What it is, is an entirely new syntax that – in the words of Apple senior VP Craig Federighi, who unveiled it during the Monday morning WWDC keynote – aims to be "Objective-C without the baggage of C."

Like scripting languages but unlike C, Swift lets you get straight to the point. The single line println("Hello, world") is a complete program in Swift. Note, also, that you don't even have to end the statement with a semicolon, as you do in C. Those are optional, unless you're combining multiple statements on a single line.

Several readers sent word that the website for TrueCrypt, the popular disk encryption system, says that development has ended, and Windows users should switch to BitLocker.

A source code diff of the two versions has been posted, and the new release appears to simply remove much of what the software was designed to do. It also warns users away from relying on it for security.