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Laugh all you want. Google’s new approach to social might be the way forward for brands.

You know that businesses will be able to pay for Win7 security patches after Win7 hits end-of-life on Jan. 14. Many of Microsoft's Extended Security Update program details aren't clear to me — How does a very small business buy ESU? Why is Microsoft releasing Edge on Win7 the day after it goes end-of-life? Will that new full-screen nag keep coming back? — but there’s one loose end that sits in the middle of my confusion.To read this article in full, please click here

Apple CEO Tim Cook frequently makes the claim that his company’s greatest contribution to humankind “will be in the health area.”And it's taking a number of steps to make that effort a reality.When will becomes when Cook likes to point to the ECG function in Apple Watch, the company’s health-related research tools and its software based solutions. (The latter include things like the Health app, Activity Monitor, Cycle Tracking, medical apps and advanced sensor designs.)All these tools are useful, but are they really a great contribution to humanity when such a small percentage of the people on the planet can access them?To read this article in full, please click here

[Disclosure: Companies listed in this article are clients of the author.]At Cisco’s big event this week, they launched a new processor (which I’m sure excited the chip companies), a nice new line of hardware and a new OS. But the biggest announcement – and the one least talked about – was their strategic change allowing customers to mix and match these components and create their own solutions.They weren’t the first, on the processor side. AMD’s differentiator, for instance, was to offer semi-custom parts. They were followed by both Qualcomm and Intel, who created custom parts for Microsoft and their latest Surface X product, as well as their coming dual-screen Surface Neo offering.To read this article in full, please click here

One morning Wilma, the print shop manager at a beer distributor, discovers that her computer has a virus. It’s no big deal — sometimes bad things happen to good computers — so she cleans up the system and gets on with her day.But a few days later the system is infected again.Considerably more annoyed this time, she contacts Betty (the company’s sole IT person) to get some assistance and make sure the system is 100% clean. After disinfecting the system, Betty checks the browser history and finds that someone has been making late-night visits to X-rated websites.The question then becomes, Who is using company resources to watch porn? At most companies, suspicion would immediately fall on the nighttime cleaning crew. But the print shop is located in the warehouse, to which the cleaning crew doesn’t have access.To read this article in full, please click here

Your phone is now essentially your personal assistant — and like any aide, it needs the right set of tools to do its job effectively.The good news? As an Android user, you've got no shortage of efficiency-enhancing options. Unlike other mobile platforms, Android affords you the opportunity to customize and control the core user interface to make it better suited to your needs. And while the more advanced UI-adjusting tools tend to be targeted at the power-user crowd, you don't have to be a card-carrying geek to take advantage of what they offer.Behold: six innovative apps that'll empower your favorite high-tech helper and allow it to reach its full productivity potential.To read this article in full, please click here

It's no big secret that Google has a pesky little habit of, y'know, cold-blooded murder.You know what I'm talking about, right? Everyone's favorite Android keeper has had more than a few instances of giving us some promising new product, selling us wholeheartedly on its commitment to said product and its lofty visions for its future — and then, once we've all become thoroughly invested in adopting said service and integrating it fully into our lives, changing its tune and abandoning the thing entirely.Hell, there are entire websites devoted to memorializing killed Google products — the aptly named Google Cemetery and Killed by Google databases.To read this article in full, please click here

December brings peace and joy – well, maybe – but at least Microsoft has provided us with a relatively easy Patch Tuesday update. There is an urgent update to Microsoft Internet Explorer 11 and three critical updates to the Windows platform that will require some attention this month. In addition, we have cumulative updates for the .NET and SQL server platforms that will require some testing before general deployment. That said, I think that 2020 will bring many interesting Patch Tuesdays with Microsoft’s new “staged” feature releases already included Windows 10 1909. You can find out more here on our Readiness blog infographic.To read this article in full, please click here

Pilot fish takes a job at a big manufacturing plant — one with big IT problems.“It was a mess,” fish says. “No backups, bad networking, you name it.”So he gets to work hammering things into shape. And after two years, backups are well organized, the network is running perfectly, and fish is pretty satisfied with his efforts.And so, apparently, are his bosses.“I got called into HR one afternoon,” fish reports. “I was told, ‘We have to let you go to save money. We’re going to support the plant remotely.“‘But we couldn't have done this without the great work you did.’”Sharky always appreciates receiving your true tales of IT life. Send them to me at sharky@computerworld.com. You can also subscribe to the Daily Shark Newsletter.To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft has begun forcibly upgrading Windows 10 PCs running version 1809 with the latest, the November 2019 Update, aka 1909, which the company launched less than a month ago."We will slowly start the phased process to automatically initiate a feature update for devices running the October 2018 Update (Windows 10, version 1809) Home and Pro editions," Microsoft said in a Dec. 5 message on Windows 10 1909's page of the Windows Release Health Dashboard. "We are starting this rollout process several months in advance of the end of service date to provide adequate time for a smooth update process." To read this article in full, please click here

Microsoft Teams is now available on Linux as a public preview, the first time an Office 365 application has been brought to the open source operating system.A native Linux client has been one of the most requested Teams features on Microsoft’s User Voice forum; plans to introduce were announced at the company’s Ignite conference last month. The app will feature all of the core Teams capabilities available in Windows and MacOS versions. Native Linux packages can be downloaded in .deb and.rpm formats. To read this article in full, please click here

Advertising has become too personal.Modern systems learn too much about your personal life, tastes and aspirations, and while this is manna from heaven for advertisers, it’s an invasion of privacy for many. And Apple is changing the equation.Intelligent Tracking Prevention Apple has built a technology that reduces the quantity of data advertisers can harvest from your online life. It is called Intelligent Tracking Prevention and The Information tells us that since the technology debuted in 2017:To read this article in full, please click here

Patch Tuesday in December rarely brings anything worthwhile — everybody’s on vacation, or wants to be on vacation — and this month’s no exception. We got patches for 36 separately identified security holes and two new advisories, full of sound and fury but covering very little.The one “exploited” security hole — CVE-2019-1458 Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability — shouldn’t cause any heartburn. Microsoft says:To read this article in full, please click here

Three-quarters of companies implementing IoT have already adopted blockchain or plan to use it by the end of 2020, an indicator of the growing connection between the two, according to a survey of 500 U.S. companies by Gartner.While the marriage between the two technologies has been expected to be crucial for  industry digital transformation, the adoption rate is happening at a “much faster pace than expected,” Gartner said.“Among the blockchain adopters, 86% are implementing the two technologies together in various projects,” Avivah Litan, a Gartner vice president and report author,  wrote in a blog. She called IoT integration "a sweet spot" for blockchain, the much-hyped distributed ledger technology.To read this article in full, please click here

This pilot fish wakes up around 1:30 a.m. to go to the bathroom and checks his work cellphone. Lo and behold, there are a lot of emails about a very important filesystem that’s full. This filesystem contains all the user home directories for an entire facility, and according to the emails, even though several people had deleted large numbers of big files they no longer needed, the filesystem filled up again, and rather quickly.Although the emails stopped around 10 p.m., fish knows he’s going to have a rowdy mob of incensed users clamoring at his cubicle in the morning, so he gets dressed and goes to work, arriving at about 2:45 a.m. This particular filesystem lives on a network that cannot be accessible from the internet.To read this article in full, please click here