Microsoft Aggressive Updates

In several of Microsoft's recent updates, e.g. Windows 10 21H1 update, when the system reboots the user is presented with aggressive fullscreen dialogs.

Here is what I saw on one of my systems and how I recommend that you respond.

"Your device needs to connect to a few more Microsoft services ..."

No, it doesn't "need" to connect. Ignore everything and click on "Continue".

"Use recommended browser settings"

No. Click on "Don't update your browser settings" and then click on "Apply Settings".

"Sign in with Microsoft"

Again, no. Click on "Cancel".

Give it up, Microsoft.

Saleforce's Circular Dependency

I follow cloud vendors' outages. Broadly, I believe that cloud vendors can deliver higher availability than most SMBs can do themselves. Enterprises are a different discussion.

But I always get a kick of looking at various cloud vendors post mortem reports (archive.is).

Recently Salesforce had a DNS outage. Like other vendors, e.g. Microsoft, the Salesforce outage even took down their status page!

And look at the spin they tried to put on it.

"We're not blaming one employee," said Chief Availability Officer Darryn Dieken.

And then they threw him under the bus.

"For whatever reason that we don't understand, the employee decided to do a global deployment," Dieken went on.

They don't understand?

But wait, there's more...

"In this case," he went on, "we found a circular dependency where the tool that we use to get into production had a dependency on the DNS servers being active."

 

If you're going to run a cloud service, you've GOT to design to avoid these kinds of problems.

Amazon Photos

Sorry, but this is just a rant. I'm an Amazon Prime user. I have several Amazon Echos. On the Echos, I have the display set to play a slideshow of photos from Amazon Photos.

That has been working fine until 05/11/21. The Echo Show 5 started only displaying the weather, no photos. I poked around in the settings and confirmed that I had the display set to show my photos, the weather, and upcoming calendar events.

Amazon has a tacky habit of silently turning on other features but this time that hadn't happened. So I navigated to re-select the Amazon Photos album to use as a slideshow.

I got a screen that prompted me to sign up for Amazon Photos. But, I already had that capability with Amazon Prime.

I went to my Echo Show 8 HD. It was showing the slideshow. Just for fun, I navigated to re-select the Amazon Photos album to use as a slideshow.

BINGO, I got a screen that prompted me to sign up for Amazon Photos in spite of the slideshow working just fine.

Ok, so I went an logged into the web interface of Amazon Photos. Every time I tried to access an album I got a message that there had been an error and I should try again later.

By then, I was really confused. My next 2 routes were to 1) factory reset my Echo Show 5 or 2) call Amazon for support. Neither seemed particularly likely to resolve the problem.

So I ignored it for a couple of days.

Then on 05/13/21 I got an e-mail from Amazon saying:

Putting that ANYWHERE earlier would have been very valuable to me.

Reload Windows on Your New PCs

Now, Dell is not my favorite PC vendor. It probably has something to do with the smoke that came out of my coworker's office as her new Dell laptop burned up.

But I'm not going to jump on Dell in this post. You can do whatever you want.

This post is about what you should do as soon as you buy a new PC.

But first, I will mention what cranked me up on this.

Since 2009, Dell has been distributing "nice" utilities on all of its PCs that updated their firmware. These packages were variously called Dell Command Update, Dell Update, Alienware Update, Dell System Inventory Agent, or Dell Platform Tags.

The problem is that these packages installed Dell's DBUtil.

In December 2020, SentinelOne notified Dell of five vulnerabilities in this utility.

DARKReading described it:

The bugs give adversaries a way to bypass security products, wipe a hard drive, or install a malicious driver on a domain controller. "The attacker is effectively the system administrator."

What I don't want to do is suggest that this is exclusive to Dell. Lenovo has had similar issues on its products.

So, what should you do?

Format and reload Windows on ANY PC you get before you do ANYTHING with it. Get the bits from Microsoft here. Don't worry. Windows Update will install all the drivers that you need. You'll save significant disk space and won't have any bloat-ware the vendor installed.

You can thank me later.

iOS 14.5 Fake News

Now that I've got your attention, iOS 14.5 really isn't "Fake News." It's just that the news around it was so over-hyped.

Here are a few headlines from early April:

iOS 14.5 is making the biggest change to apps in years - here's how
Apple Now Rejecting App Updates That Defy iOS 14.5 App Tracking Transparency Rules
Apple reminds developers to prepare for App Tracking Transparency ahead of iOS 14.5 release

Then iOS 14.5 was released on 04/26/21.

I approached it cautiously. First on my iPhone, then my iPad, then my iPad Mini, ...

But I haven't seen any of these predicted pop-ups.

Why?

Business Insider has a good explanation here.

However, some people who've updated to iOS 14.5 haven't seen any permission pop-ups.

Mobile-advertising experts suggested three possible reasons. 

1. The 'allow apps to request to track' privacy setting is toggled off

2. Some users might not have the option to toggle 'allow apps to request to track' on

3. Some apps haven't rolled out the prompt yet

What should YOU do?

Go ahead and install iOS 14.5. Then go to Settings, then Privacy, then Tracking. Make sure the slide for "Allow Apps to Request to Track" is to the left.

That'll turn off all of those pop-ups.