Critical Windows Security Flaw and Fix Released

Microsoft has released a major Critical Windows Security Flaw and fix. By critical, I mean they went outside of their normally rigid ‘patch Tuesday’ [twice a month] schedule and released this fix on-the-fly, so to speak.

From Mashable:
“The flaw is in the way the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library handles OpenType fonts. In practical terms, if someone running Windows visits a website that contains embedded OpenType fonts or a specially crafted document, an attacker could execute code on his or her computer.

“An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could take complete control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,” Microsoft wrote in a security bulletin.”

The Windows update tool in modern Windows OS can handle this.

Critical Windows Security Flaw + Fix Article

Internet Explorer 11 Crashes on Windows 8.1

It’s so shocking when you have a brand new ASUS Windows 8.1 hybrid touch, keyboard laptop, but standard web surfing CRASHES continuously. Who expects this? Probably not Apple users.

Anyway, I have Internet Explorer 11 on this Windows 8.1 ASUS. I love it, I really do.

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But one thing I noticed is that if I open up a Word Document off OneDrive, for example, and keep that Word document sitting around for a while, then my Internet Explorer will crash!

If I do NOT have Word Documents opened, no crashes. Weird!

So, a workaround is to close Word documents in order to surf the web without crashed. But is that the best solution? No. Word should be able coexist with … Internet Explorer. For the record I am using Word as part of Office 2010. I may try to edit documents online (using Office 365) as the default – this may resolve the issue long-term. At this point, I still prefer using the locally installed Word but I cannot handle IE crashes and restarts. So, another real fix is this: go into Internet Explorer’s Internet options, into Programs – you can see there is an HTML editing option. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY edits web pages in Word [the default]! Microsoft Word is the king of standard and advanced document editing, but it is not used for editing HTML pages. I do not care what anyone says otherwise ;>

So, do yourself a favor and change this to Notepad. This will not eliminate certain other types of crashes, for example, PISS POOR design on websites – something all too common these days. But it will go a long way to stop many crashes.

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