Enlarge / The Settings app is gaining new powers to control your PC’s settings. (credit: Thurrott.com ) The Windows user interface has a certain archaeological quality to it. While the upper layers tend to be new—using the styling and conventions of the day—dig a little deeper and you can find elements that are decades old. With each Windows release, Microsoft has heaped new stuff onto the pile, but it hasn’t spent much time going back and revamping the old bits. Very occasionally, the relics of yesteryear are identified and excised, but more often than not, they’re left alone. One area where this is particularly plain is Control Panel. Control Panel spans many eras of Windows development, and so Windows’ settings are spread across three different styles of interface. The very oldest are the individual Control Panel applets in their tabbed dialog boxes; more recent are the Explorer-based Control Panels. The very newest is the Settings app. With Windows 10, the company has, for the first time ever, taken serious strides toward modernizing even old parts of the operating system. With each new update, more and more settings are being moved from Control Panel into the Settings app. This creates the possibility that perhaps one day Windows will have a single application that is used for all its major settings and configurations. Read 4 remaining paragraphs | Comments
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The Windows 10 control panel modernization continues: Fonts get some love
An anonymous reader writes: “Mobile applications that open ports on Android smartphones are opening those devices to remote hacking, claims a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, ” reports Bleeping Computer. Researchers say they’ve identified 410 popular mobile apps that open ports on people’s smartphones. They claim that an attacker could connect to these ports, which in turn grant access to various phone features, such as photos, contacts, the camera, and more. This access could be leveraged to steal photos, contacts, or execute commands on the target’s phone. Researchers recorded various demos to prove their attacks. Of these 410 apps, there were many that had between 10 and 50 million downloads on the official Google Play Store and even an app that came pre-installed on an OEMs smartphones. “Research on the mobile open port problem started after researchers read a Trend Micro report from 2015 about a vulnerability in the Baidu SDK, which opened a port on user devices, providing an attacker with a way to access the phone of a user who installed an app that used the Baidu SDK, ” reports Bleeping Computer. “That particular vulnerability affected over 100 million smartphones, but Baidu moved quickly to release an update. The paper detailing the team’s work is entitled Open Doors for Bob and Mallory: Open Port Usage in Android Apps and Security Implications, and was presented Wednesday, April 26, at the 2nd IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy that took place this week in Paris, France.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
HP has agreed to a deal with Samsung to acquire their printer business for $1.05 billion, a deal that will be the largest print acquisition in HP’s history. USA Today reports: “The acquisition of Samsung’s printer business allows us to deliver print innovation and create entirely new business opportunities with far better efficiency, security, and economics for customers, ” said HP president and CEO Dion Weisler in a statement. The Samsung deal would give HP access to 6, 500 printing patents as well as 1, 300 researchers and engineers “with advanced expertise in laser printer technology.” While this deal is being negotiated, Samsung’s mobile phone business has been navigating a recall of its Galaxy Note 7 smartphones over issues with batteries catching fire and exploding. One of the most recent accidents reported involved a six-year-old boy in New York, who was using the device when it “suddenly burst into flames.” Read more of this story at Slashdot. 
Apple’s recently released iOS 8.3 update prevents desktop file explorers like iFunBox, iExplorer, iTools, and others from accessing the app directories on your devices. A few have updated with temporary fixes, but it might take a little while before everything’s working again. Read more…