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We have tens of thousands of new AskWoody accounts and will soon have hundreds of thousands of new posts.

If you’re currently using an email address as your AskWoody account name, please get it changed. To see your username, log in. Open your profile by clicking on the link below your avatar (the picture in the upper right corner, which may just look like a gray watermelon). Click Edit. The username field is under Account, down the page a bit. It’s grayed out. You can’t change it.

You don’t want to use an email address as your username. Lots of reasons why, but the big one is privacy — if you post something, your email address will be hanging out for anyone to see, and for every spider to crawl. It’s a Big Deal.

You won’t be able to change the username yourself – WordPress doesn’t let anybody change usernames. Instead, I have to blast away the old and then you can register a new one. I can step you through the process. It only takes a few minutes. And you won’t lose your Plus membership. Promise.

CustomerSupport@AskWoody.com.

Chag Pesach samech

The Chrome vs Edgemium (Chredge?) wars heat up

With Edge now absorbing the Chromium rendering engine*, I expect all of the Windows-centric bloggers to start explaining, in excruciating detail, why the New Edge is better than the current Google Chrome. The new Edge, it must be noted, is only available in beta preview versions. Even the latest Win10 1903 bits from MSDN contain the old Edge.

Martin Brinkmann has a detailed side-by-side comparison, and come up with eight significant ways in which the beta Edgemium is better than (or at least different to) the shipping Chrome.

In the end, I think this sentence hits the nail on the head:

While you could say that you trade one data-hungry company for another, it boils down to personal preference.

I think it’s great that Microsoft is getting back into the browser wars. (Deja vu all over again, eh?) It’ll be good for Microsoft, for Google, and most of all for us.

I think Edgemium’s greatest foe is its pedigree. In my experience, people just don’t want Microsoft products unless they have to use them. But then again, Google’s had plenty of dirty laundry recently.

Let the best browser win.

*Good explainer by Gregg Keizer in Computerworld.

Yet another conflict acknowledged with this month’s Win7 and 8.1 Monthly Rollups, this time with McAfee Endpoint Security

And the hits keep on rolling…

Last night, Microsoft added a new “Known issues with this update” entry to both KB 4493472, this month’s Win7 and Server 2008 R2 Monthly Rollup, and to KB 4493446, this month’s Win8.1 and Server 2012 R2 Monthly Rollup.

Microsoft and McAfee have identified an issue on devices with McAfee Endpoint Security (ENS) Threat Prevention 10.x or McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention (Host IPS) 8.0 installed. It may cause the system to have slow startup or become unresponsive at restart after installing this update.

We are presently investigating this issue with McAfee.

Guidance for McAfee customers can be found in the following McAfee support articles:

McAfee Security (ENS) Threat Prevention 10.x

McAfee Host Intrusion Prevention (Host IPS) 8.0

Both of those links are to essentially identical pages, which state:

Changes in the Windows April 2019 update for Client Server Runtime Subsystem (CSRSS) introduced a potential deadlock with ENS.

Workaround: Disable any Access Protection rule that protects a service.

The announcement’s strange, not so much for what it contains (we’ve had similar reports for Sophos, Avast and Avira), but for what it doesn’t contain.

First, the corresponding Security-only patches don’t have the same admonition. With Sophos, Avast and Avira we also got warnings for this month’s Win7 and 8.1 Security-only patches.

Second, there’s no announcement for Server 2018.

Third… why did it take so long? The bad patch is ten days old.

The first two points may just be sloppy documentation. Heaven knows we’ve seen a lot of that lately. But the third one has me scratching my well-scratched pate.

I’ll have more on this in Monday morning’s AskWoody Plus Newsletter.

If you have an MSDN account, you can download a clean copy of Win10 1903

Unlike my jury-rigged version (see the next post), this one installs clean.

Per Tero Alhonen, here are the versions that were just posted on MSDN (by subscription only):

Mary Jo Foley has a detailed explanation on ZDNet.

Facebook admits, one hour before the Mueller report press conference, that oh golly “millions” of Instagram users had plain-text passwords exposed

Talk about Friday night news dumps…

Iain Thomson, writing for The Reg, wasn’t distracted by today’s news. Previously, Facebook said that “tens of thousands of Instagram users” had their plain text passwords stored on company servers.

Now the tech goliath has decided to revise that figure, and, well, let’s just say it massively underestimated that number.

“Since this post was published, we discovered additional logs of Instagram passwords being stored in a readable format,” the amendmentreads today.

“We now estimate that this issue impacted millions of Instagram users.”

Win10 version 1903 shaping up to be a real productivity enhancer

I finally got a super-clean copy of Win10 Pro 1903 installed. Local account. No remnants from earlier installs.

Take a look at the new, improved Start menu. Yes, that’s “Seekers Notes: Hidden Mystery” in the Productivity section.

Meh.

To block the latest zero day, instead of removing Internet Explorer, just short-circuit access to MHT files

It’s pretty easy, if you know the tricks.

Step-by-step details in Computerworld.