The next big feature update for Windows 10 is right around the corner, which means it's decision time for businesses that are still planning their upgrade strategy. Here's why this update might be different from its predecessors.

Windows 10 is nearly four years old. In a bygone era, its replacement would have been delivered last year, and early adopters would be eagerly awaiting Windows 11 Service Pack 1.

But those old days are gone for good. In the Windows-as-a-Service era, those every-three-years "big bang" releases have vanished, replaced by a rolling succession of smaller but still significant feature updates that now arrive every six months.

Since the launch of Windows 10 in July 2015, Microsoft has released six feature updates, each of which is the equivalent of a full Windows upgrade. A seventh, version 1903, is due for release any day. But this one is different from the rest.

Windows 10 version 1903 is the first update since Microsoft changed its support lifecycle late last year. The version 1903 update will have an 18-month support cycle for all editions, whereas the version 1909 release, due in October, will get a longer, 30-month support cycle for Enterprise and Education editions. (All Windows 10 Pro installations will be supported for 18 months, and Windows 10 Home cannot defer updates.)

The upshot of this new release cadence is that enterprise customers who want to minimize the disruption of Windows 10 feature updates will target those end-of-year releases. And if Microsoft is smart, they'll treat the H1 version as a significant update, with the H2 release smoothing the rough edges in its immediate predecessor and introducing minimal new features.

That strategy should make the fall 2019 update more appealing to enterprise customers, especially given that it will be the last Windows 10 update before the end of Windows 7 supportin January 2020.

So, what's new in version 1903? Here’s a list of a few of the most interesting new features:

          •  Windows Sandbox uses built-in virtualization to create a "safe" desktop where you can try out an
             untrusted program or visit a suspicious website without risking the integrity of your PC. When you
             close the sandbox, every trace of those actions is wiped out, and the next session starts fresh.

          • The default Start menu layout has been made cleaner, Cortana and Windows Search are now
​            separated, and there's a shiny new Windows Light theme.

        •  Several old-style management controls have now been moved into new Settings pages. Most notable  
           is the addition of a drag-and-drop interface for installing new fonts, but you'll also find improvements
           in the Search Indexing interface and the modern printing dialog box, as well as options for setting a
           manual IP address and DNS server settings for a wired Ethernet adapter.

But that list focuses mostly on visible parts of the user experience and doesn't include some of the equally substantive under-the-hood improvements.

For example, Microsoft has moved Start to its own process, called StartMenuExperienceHost.exe, and also changed the process, so it no longer suspends. Separating this process from the rest of the shell should make it faster and more reliable. If this change works as expected, you'll notice much snappier performance.
Microsoft continues to polish the update process, adding more notifications and, reportedly, giving you the option to postpone updates for up to 35 days on a PC running Windows 10 Home edition. 

One longstanding annoyance is reportedly fixed in this update. In current Windows 10 builds, if you adjust the display brightness and then plug in (or unplug) the charger, the brightness changes back to the default setting; as of version 1903, Windows now remembers your custom brightness setting as preferred, regardless of whether you're running on battery or AC power.

In sum, version 1903 contains enough new stuff to earn its status as a major feature update. As always, you can manually update immediately, or you can wait till Microsoft releases the update to your PC, a process that might take a month or two. And, of course, you always have the option to watch and wait as Microsoft fixes the inevitable glitches and hiccups in those first few months. For more details, click here.

For those organizations that have already made the move to Windows 10, there's plenty of time to refine the strategy for dealing with these updates. For those who are yet to begin the upgrade from Windows 7, the alarms are starting to sound in earnest.

Networks today are subject to many threats including ransomware, cryptocurrency-miner threats, or state-sponsored hackers.

In line with other security industry pros, Microsoft has confirmed in its 24th annual security intelligence report that ransomware has taken a backseat to pesky cryptocurrency miners. 

But the company also warns that supply-chain attacks are on the rise. These are where an attacker uses a supplier or business partner to spread an infection. 

Past examples include the NotPetya not-ransomware outbreakthat caused over a billion dollars in losses for global firms and the Dofoil BitTorrent attacks. 
    
"Supply-chain attacks are insidious because they take advantage of the trust that users and IT departments place in the software they use," Microsoft warns in the report. 

"The compromised software is often signed and certified by the vendor, and may give no indication that anything is wrong, which makes it significantly more difficult to detect the infection. They can damage the relationship between supply chains and their customers, whether the latter are corporate or home users.

"By poisoning software and undermining delivery or update infrastructures, supply-chain attacks can affect the integrity and security of goods and services that organizations provide."

While attacks are changing and Windows 10 built-in security is improving, the company's advice to customers remains the same. However, there are conflicting data about the best approach to staying secure.  
Microsoft recommends only using software from trusted sources, though this 'security hygiene' measure could be undermined in a supply-chain attack. 

The company also recommends "rapidly applying the latest updates to your operating systems and applications, and immediately deploying critical security updates for OS, browsers, and email."

Deploying patches quickly is generally a good idea. However, Microsoft recently revealed that vulnerabilities in its software are most likely to be exploited as a zero-daybefore the company has even had a chance to release a patch. 

However, its other tips don't present obvious security conflicts.  

"Deploy a secure email gateway that has advanced threat protection capabilities for defending against modern phishing variants," Microsoft warns, adding that businesses should "Enable host anti-malware and network defenses to get near real-time blocking responses from the cloud (if available in your solution)." 

The other important measures organizations should take include implementing access controls, and teaching employees to be suspect of messages that ask them to divulge sensitive information. 

Microsoft also recommends keeping "destruction-resistant backups of your critical systems and data" and using cloud storage services for online backups. 
​
"For data that is on premises, regularly back up important data using the 3-2-1 rule. Keep three backups of your data, on two different storage types, and at least one backup offsite," says Microsoft.

For years, IBM has offered corporate customers its Watson data-crunching technology – but only if they used it on IBM’s cloud computing service. Now, to expand Watson’s reach, IBM is also making it available on competing cloud services.

IBM said recently that it would allow businesses to use some of IBM’s Watson-related software with underlying data that is stored in rival cloud data centers like Microsoft’s Azure and Amazon Web Services. Customers will also be able to use Watson with data stored in their own data centers.

“It is enabling a level of openness that hasn’t been available to date,” said Rob Thomas, IBM general manager of data and AI.

The move marks a departure for IBM, which, until now, hasn’t seemed anything but open with its cloud computing service and Watson technologies. In 2016, for example, then-IBM CFO and current IBM senior vice president of global markets Martin Schroeter told analysts during an earnings call, “Watson runs on our cloud, and our technology will run on IBM’s cloud.”

But IBM is now shaking up its strategy to broaden Watson’s appeal. The change of heart comes as IBM’s public cloud languishes in third place, at best, in terms of market share behind AWS and Microsoft Azure.

Dan Kirsch, a research analyst at Hurwitz & Associates, called IBM’s new service “really significant” because businesses are increasingly seeking technology that’s not dependent on a single vendor.

Nick Patience, a founder and research vice president for 451 Research, said the move is “an acknowledgment by IBM that it’s a hybrid cloud world,” referring to firms wanting to use more than one cloud computing vendor as well as keeping some software running in their internal data centers.

 “We are confident in the IBM cloud that if clients try our products anywhere, they will eventually be drawn to IBM cloud and the uniqueness it provides,” said Thomas.

Although companies are concerned about being locked into a specific company’s cloud infrastructure when it comes to particular software and IT products, Patience said they are currently in the early stages of using AI and are still willing to upload their corporate data to cloud services like AWS and rely on them for machine learning software. Being locked into a particular vendor when it comes to machine learning projects isn’t yet much of a concern, but IBM is betting that will change.

He continued: “You could say IBM is trying to take back the initiative in machine learning here. The Watson brand has lost a little bit of luster over the years as others have come along. They are trying to take it back.”

A lot of people have become bored with SMS messaging, and the tech industry is very aware of it. While services such as Apple’s iMessage, Facebook Messenger, and the WhatsApp app allow you to add photos, GIFs and videos to your messages, they are not universal solutions – for example, you can’t send a WhatsApp message if your correspondent uses Facebook Messenger. The answer – or so Google and other companies are hoping – is Rich Communications Services or RCS.

What is it? RCS is a new online protocol that was chosen for adoption by the GSM Association(CSMA) in 2008 and is meant to replace the current texting standard SMS (Short Message Service), which has been around since the 1990s. The GMSA represents a wide variety of organizations in the mobile industry, including device, software, and Internet companies. Naturally, given all those players, it took a while to come to an agreement, and so it wasn’t until 2016 that the GSMA was able to come up with something resembling a standard.

How is RCS better than SMS? RCS will add a lot more multimedia capabilities to your messaging. Besides the usual texts (plain and fancy), it will make it simple to send GIFs, high-resolution still photos, and videos. It will let you know if the person you’re texting is available and can send you a receipt to prove they received your message. It will allow you to create longer messages and attach larger files. It also enables much better group messaging than SMS can handle. In other words, it can make standard text messaging look and work a lot like iMessage.

As of this writing, support for RCS has been promised by 55 carriers including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and a slew of secondary companies; 11 hardware manufacturers such as Samsung, Lenovo, and LG (but not Apple), and both Microsoft and Google.

Is anyone using RCS yet? Google has been a significant backer of RCS and even offers back-end services to carriers to help them quickly spin up support for it. But at the end of the day, it’s the carriers that are responsible for launching and supporting it. The big recent news is that Verizon is beginning its rollout of the service, but only in a minimal way to start. Currently, Verizon only offers it on Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL phones – and even then, it hasn’t hit all those customers yet. But because Verizon is supporting the standard, it will work with any other phone that supports it.

Why are people saying it’s not secure? One issue that a lot of security specialists are pointing out is that RCS – and, therefore, apps such as Chat – lack the end-to-end encryption available in some current messaging tools such as WhatsApp. End-to-end encryption means that the message is impenetrable to everyone – including the app vendor and the network provider – except the message sender and receiver. If you want to text someone with no chance that the authorities will ever see it, Chat / RCS is not the way. 
On the other hand, RCS does have all the standard security protocols, including Transport Layer Security (the underlying tech behind HTTPS), and IPsec (Internet Protocol Security), which is used in VPNs. So, for the most part, it’s pretty secure. Whether you’re comfortable using Chat / RCS depends on your security needs.

What’s next? Right now, support for RCS is limited to only a few carriers and even fewer devices, which means that most people can’t yet take advantage of it. Stay tuned to see what – and who – follows.

Sirius XM’s recent all-stock $3.5-billion purchase of the music-streaming service Pandoraraised a lot of eyebrows. A big question was why Sirius paid so much. Is Pandora’s music library and customer base worth that amount? The answer is that this was a strategic move by Sirius in a battle that is far bigger than radio. The real fight, which will become much more visible in the coming years, is over the driving experience.

People spend a lot of time commuting in their cars. That time is fixed and won’t likely change. However, what is changing is the way we drive. We’re already seeing many new vehicles with driver-assist features, and automakers (and tech companies) are working hard to bring fully autonomous cars to the market as quickly as possible. New vehicles today already contain an average of 100 million lines of code that can be updated to increase driver-assist options, and some automakers like Tesla already offer an “autonomous” mode on highways.

Even conservative estimates predict that we are likely to see significant changes in autonomous driving in the next ten years.

These changes will impact the driving experience. As cars become more autonomous, we can do more than just listen to music or podcasts. We may be able to watch videos, surf the web and more. The value of car real estate is already valuable, but it’s going to skyrocket as we change the way people consume media while driving. 

The Pandora acquisition was a strategic move by Sirius to gain the necessary assets so that it won’t fall behind in this space – and to get into the fast-growing music-streaming business, where users consume music at home, work and play. While Pandora’s music library is arguably second-tier, it’s also good enough that it can provide pretty much every artist most people want. This is often how high-priced mergers happen – one party is concerned about falling behind and pays a premium to purchase the other company’s assets. It’s also a bet by Sirius about the driving experience of the future.

For now, Sirius probably doesn’t need to worry about competition from startups. They won’t be able to grow big enough, fast enough to get a sizable share of the market. A more likely scenario is that startups will work on software that offers unique functionality, making it an attractive acquisition target by a larger company.
​
This is going to be an interesting battle to watch in the coming years, as cars essentially become software with four wheels attached. Companies like Sirius know this is a valuable space and that the battle over the driving experience will be won in software. The acquisition of Pandora is only the beginning.

Artificial intelligence has the potential to bring a select set of advanced techniques to the table when it comes to cyber offense, researchers say.

Last week, researchers from Darktracesaid that the current threat landscape is full of everything from opportunistic attacks from teen hackers to advanced, state-sponsored assaults, and in the latter sense, attacks continue to evolve.

However, for each sophisticated attack currently in use, there is the potential for further development through the future use of AI.

Within the report, the cybersecurity firm documented three active threats in the wild which have been detected within the past 12 months. Analysis of these attacks – and a little imagination – has led the team to create scenarios using AI which could one day become reality.

"We expect AI-driven malware to start mimicking behavior that is usually attributed to human operators by leveraging contextualization," said Max Heinemeyer, Director of Threat Hunting at Darktrace. "But we also anticipate the opposite; advanced human attacker groups utilizing AI-driven implants to improve their attacks and enable them to scale better."

Trickbot. The first attack relates to an employee at a law firm who fell victim to a phishing campaign leading to a Trickbot infection.

Trickbot is a financial Trojan which uses the Windows vulnerability EternalBluein order to target banks and other institutions. The malware continues to evolve and is currently equipped with injectors, obfuscation, data-stealing modules, and locking mechanisms.

In this example, Trickbot was able to infect a further 20 devices on the network, leading to a costly clean-up process. Empire Powershell modules were also uncovered which are typically used in remote, keyboard-based infiltration post-infection.

AI's Future Role.Darktrace believes that in the future, malware bolstered through artificial intelligence will be able to self-propagate and use every vulnerability on offer to compromise a network.

"Imagine a worm-style attack, like WannaCry, which, instead of relying on one form of lateral movement (e.g., the EternalBlue exploit), could understand the target environment and choose lateral movement techniques accordingly," the company says.

If chosen vulnerabilities are patched, for example, the malware could then switch to brute-force attacks, keylogging, and other techniques which have proven to be successful in the past in similar target environments.

As the AI could sit, learn, and 'decide' on an attack technique, no traditional command-and-control (C2) servers would be necessary.

AI's Future Role.It is possible that AI could be used to further adapt to its environment. In the same manner, as before, contextualization can be used to blend in, but AI could also be used to mimic trusted system elements, improving stealth.

"Instead of guessing during which times normal business operations are conducted, it will learn it," the report suggests. "Rather than guessing if an environment is using mostly Windows machines or Linux machines, or if Twitter or Instagram would be a better channel, it will be able to gain an understanding of what communication is dominant in the target's network and blend in with it."

Take It Slow. In the final example, Darktrace uncovered malware from a medical technology company. What made the findings special was that data was being stolen at such a slow pace and in tiny packages that it avoided triggering data volume thresholds in security tools.

Multiple connections were made to an external IP address, but each connection contained less than 1MB. Despite the small packets, it did not take long before over 15GB of information was stolen.

By fading into the background of daily network activity, the attackers behind the data breach were able to steal patient names, addresses, and medical histories.

AI's Future Role. AI could not only provide a conduit for incredibly fast attacks but also "low and slow" assaults. It can also be used as a tool to learn what data transfer rates would flag suspicion to security solutions.

Instead of relying on a hard-coded threshold, for example, AI-driven malware would be able to dynamically adapt data theft rates and times to exfiltrate information without detection.
​
"Defensive cyber AI is the only chance to prepare for the next paradigm shift in the threat landscape when AI-driven malware becomes a reality," the company added. "Once the genie is out of the bottle, it cannot be put back in again."

It's not a secret that Microsoft hasn't been winning the hearts and minds of consumers lately.
Killing off products like the Groove Music service, Microsoft Band fitness tracker, and Windows Phone have left many questioning whether Microsoft's grand plan is to focus on business users and leave consumers to its competitors.

But at the company's recent Inspire conference, Microsoft execs told their partners that Redmond isn't giving up on consumers.

Yusuf Mehdi – whose new title as of June 2018 became corporate vice president of Modern Life and Devices – led a session at the partner show in Las Vegas, Nev., where he outlined the company's vision for what officials plan to christen "Modern Life Services."

"Modern Life” and "Gaming" are the two new additions to Microsoft's core digital solution areas that its sales force and its partners are meant to target in fiscal 2019 and beyond. The others, which Microsoft announced a year ago at Inspire, are “Modern Workplace,” “Business Applications,” “Applications and Infrastructure,” and “Data and AI.”

In teeing up his presentation, Mehdi acknowledged that "in the last couple of years, we've lost a little of that magic with consumers," according to attendees who asked not to be named.

Most consumer companies are laser-focused on one thing, Mehdi said. Amazon is focused on shopping; Spotify, on music; Netflix, on movies. Microsoft's core value proposition is productivity, he said. The company's job is to try to make productivity sexier.

Microsoft is targeting so-called "professional consumers" with these services, Mehdi said. These are people who already know how to use technology but need to figure out how to use it better to make them more productive. The goal of these services will be to give users back time and help them focus on what matters to them.

Microsoft officials believe because the company already "owns the work calendar with Outlook," that it has a foothold in working to blur the line between consumer and commercial activities.

What, exactly, will qualify as a Modern Life Service? Mostly they will be apps, services, and features that Microsoft already makes available or soon will in Windows, Outlook, and PowerPoint, but which officials will attempt to position as well suited to the needs of professional consumers on Windows PCs, iPhones, and Android phones.
​
One example is the Microsoft "Your Phone" app, which Microsoft execs first showed off at the Build 2018 developer conference earlier this year. Your Phone on Windows 10 will allow users to respond to text messages on their Windows desktops, as well as drag and drop photos from their desktops and send them via their phones without actually having to access the phones. Microsoft believes that by not having to interrupt their workflow, users will save time and be more productive.

Forget stumbling through a customer-support page – the future of commerce won't be found by surfing the World Wide Web. 

Soon many of the tasks we now do via websites and brand-specific apps will be handled through messaging and voice platforms like iMessage, WhatsApp, and Amazon's Alexa, according to Alex Spinelli, the chief technology officer at LivePerson.

Today, companies like Home Depot, T-Mobile, and Discover manage customer-service chats with LivePerson. Though chat technology is seeing a resurgence thanks to the proliferation of smartphones, LivePerson was founded in 1995 as a web-chat alternative to 1-800 numbers and call centers. 

LivePerson's new vision means no more awkward drop-down menus, no more shopping carts, and definitely no more URLs. 

"Our thesis is that conversation is a more natural way of interacting with brand services," Spinelli said. "It will become the dominant way that people interact in their digital lives."

It may seem like a big leap from the present day, but Spinelli envisions a world five years from now in which there are no websites and very few apps. 

"The whole app catastrophe that lives on your phone is overwhelming," Spinelli said. "On my iPhone, I have 127 apps that need updating. You can't keep up." 

Meanwhile, people will continue to interact with screens. In Spinelli's vision, the e-commerce shopping experience of the future starts when a carousel of items pops up at the bottom of the screen. The shopper browses the carousel, clicks the item they want, and instantly pays through a system like Apple Pay. All of that happens within a chat window. 

And that vision isn't too far off from what's already on the market today. 

Apple and Google are prepared for this future.  Earlier this month, LivePerson announced a new offering called LiveEngage for Voice Assistants, which lets customers start interacting with a brand through a voice assistant like Alexa while hanging out at home and then move that conversation over to chat on a mobile device when they leave the house. 

The big idea behind LiveEngage is that customers can have one continuous conversation across multiple modes of communication – something that dovetails with the bigger vision of LivePerson. 

Spinelli joined LivePerson in March after five years at Amazon — first as director of Amazon Search, and later as global head of Alexa OS, the operating system behind Amazon's famed voice assistant. 

When he learned that both Apple and Google added conversational commerce products directly into their smartphone operating systems, he decided to make the move to LivePerson, where he could embrace the trend head-on. 

Apple Business Chatlaunched in beta mode with select brands last year. It's designed to let customers find brands on iMessage and interact with them using dynamic features that manage everything from scheduling an appointment to making a purchase. 
​
Google's Android has a similar option with its business-focused Rich Communication Services, currently in beta.

Visa and Mastercard have chips embedded in hundreds of millions of credit and debit cards around the world. They're used in more than 200 countries and process billions of payments each year. And they both intend to create bank cards that use your fingerprint instead of a PIN. 

Early trials of cards with fingerprint scanners built-in are underway, and success could eventually result in the death of the humble PIN. "A four-digit PIN is pretty good security – obviously, six, seven or eight digits are better, but it is very hard for people to remember," says Bob Reany, an executive vice president at Mastercard, who is working on the firm's biometric cards. "[This] security is going to be better than a PIN."

In April 2017, Mastercard started testing a biometric card in South Africa. The new card looks the same as any other bank card but has a small biometric scanner in the top right-hand corner. When a finger is placed on the sensor, it can recognize if it is a match with stored data and then authorize the payment.

Mastercard now has more trials running in Bulgaria, and Reany says thousands of fingerprint-detecting cards will be tested elsewhere in the world later this year. "We've gotten the algorithms in great shape, now we're doing matching on the native device where the template is captured, and we're ready to go to market at some scale," he says. Crucially, in the coming months, banks will be issuing them to regular customers for the first time. Reany won't reveal exactly where the cards will be given to people, but he says more announcements are coming. "I think you're going to see pockets of Europe go pretty quickly," Reany says of potential adoption. 

Rival Visa is also testing biometric cards in Cyprus with the country's national bank and security company Gemalto, which has been creating the cards for both of the major payment companies, says it has produced "tens of thousands" of biometric cards for tests. 
​
Ultimately, payment companies are continuing to develop biometric bank cards, and trials are getting bigger. At their very least, biometric cards will offer a slightly more convenient way to pay, but they may also evolve with increasing use of fingerprint technology in other areas of people's lives. As Berg says: "People forget their PINs but very rarely do you go out without your fingers."

Since Microsoft and Amazon announced plans to integrate their respective personal digital assistantslast summer, there's been almost no official update on the status of the partnership.

It seems, however, like there's finally movement happening.

An April 27 update to the Cortana support page actually mentions Alexa. "Cortana and Alexa are still getting to know each other. Soon you'll be able to ask Alexa to buy things, add items to your shopping list, access your Alexa skills, and more," says the brief update on the page. Yes, "soon" is vague. But it's something.

Typing "Alexa" into the search box in Windows 10 (on the Fall Creators Update version, at least) yields a message saying "I'll be able to connect you to Alexa soon. Stay tuned!"

Last summer, Amazon and Microsoft announced that their respective personal assistants would be able to talk to one another, so customers could opt to use the assistant most suited to a particular task. Amazon and Microsoft officials said last year that they'd make Cortana-Alexa integration available before the end of calendar 2017. Since then, there's been no update on when this might arrive.

In early March 2018, Cortana team members told Windows Insiders that the Cortana-Alexa integration was in "internal self-hosting" at Microsoftat the moment. Microsoft is working to "make sure it's (the integration) a great experience," the team said, noting that bringing together the two different speech stacks is "non-trivial."

Recently, Cortana's new boss, Javier Soltero, admitted that "skills for the sake of skills won't fly." He told PC World that skills usage isn't "quite as deep as most people think it is." He also acknowledged Microsoft's in total catch-up mode on this front. (That's for sure, with Alexa at 40,000-plus third-party skillsat last count.)
Given Cortana is set to access Alexa skills via this integration partnership, maybe Cortana's skills shortage is less horrible than meets the eye.
​
Soltero also declined to say whether there are any other Cortana-powered speakers in the works. Currently, there's one from Harman-Kardon. I think speakers might not be where Microsoft is focusing; perhaps it's more about conferencing systems, microphones or other more business-centric peripherals.