Thoughts Unboxed

Microsoft is on a chopping spree of late. After chopping off Cortana and Visual Studio for Mac, the latest victim of this trend is WordPad - a program that was part of Windows since Windows 95! In a Blog Post on the official site, the company outlines features that will be deprecated from the future versions of Windows and this time around, WordPad made it to the list. Microsoft will not only stop supporting the unfortunate piece of software, it will actually remove it from the future Windows updates. Microsoft recommends Microsoft Word and NotePad as alternatives depending upon the requirements. Here is the official details and mitigation: WordPad is no longer being updated and will be removed in a future release of Windows. We recommend Microsoft Word for rich text documents like .doc and .rtf and Windows Notepad for plain text documents like .txt   Analysis WordPad began its life almost three decades ago as a replacement to another software - Microsoft Write. It was shipped with W

If you have a burner Google account that you created more than 2 years ago for one-off signups never to be revisited again, you may be up for a surprise coming this holiday period. This is according to the recently updated Inactive Account Policies . Ruth Kricheli, The VP of Product Management at Google recently announced the changes on company's blog. According to Ruth, untouched accounts are at risk of getting compromised despite best security practices. The reason being old or unprotected or common passwords being used for such accounts.Ruth also detailed the approach company is taking to remove inactive accounts. According to Ruth: The policy has taken affect immediately but the account deletion would defer till December 2023 It would be a phased approach where accounts that were created but never used would be cleaned up first For each affected account, the company would try to communicate via the account's email and alternate email addresses before the actual delet