All posts by dogwomble

On Friday, CrowdStrike pushed out a faulty update that caused millions of Windows devices worldwide to suddenly crash with a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) and enter reboot loops. To resolve the fix, admins needed to reboot impacted Windows devices into Safe Mode or the Recovery Environment and manually remove the buggy kernel driver from the C:\Windows\System32\drivers\CrowdStrike folder. To help IT admins and support staff, Microsoft has released a custom recovery tool that automates the removal of the buggy CrowdStrike update from Windows devices so that they can once again boot normally.

The Mountain View firm recently updated its Spam and Minimum Functionality policy to ensure that apps that are currently part of the Play catalog provide users with a quality user experience. Google notes that “apps should provide a stable, responsive, and engaging user experience.” This means apps that crash, lack adequate content to engage the user, and don’t offer utility will be removed from the Play Store.

There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally, potentially one of the biggest global outages ever experienced. Outages were recorded in the US and New Zealand before the Australia-wide shutdown. Reports of the Australian outage began flooding in about 3pm AEST.

Apple has refuted using unethically obtained data to train Apple Intelligence — but it has acknowledged its use for another project. On Tuesday, it was learned that an AI research lab called EleutherAI had harvested subtitles from YouTube videos without express permission from the creators. It also gathered data from Wikipedia, the English Parliament, and Enron staff emails. The data was then added to a dataset called “the Pile.”