Today is Sunday, October 30th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week!

The Good

Samsung has rolled-out a ‘maintenance mode’ feature on their Galaxy S22 phones (other models will get this feature next year). Before handing over their phone to a tech for repairs, the owner will activate Maintenance Mode. This will create a temporary user account for the tech to be able to install diagnostic apps and have full access to the phone. However, the user’s personal information (contacts, photos, etc.) are inaccessible to the tech. Once the owner gets their device back from the repair shop, they enter a PIN code and the temporary account and all installed apps on that account are removed from the phone. I would hope in a couple years, we could see this as a native feature with Android.

The Bad

For those of us in the United States we’ve seen those pharmaceutical commercials which at the end rattle off at least a dozen ‘possible side effects’ which likely is going to require another drug to counteract. Microsoft seems to be taking lessons from these from Big Phrama when it comes to Windows 10 updates. This past Friday (October 28th) Microsoft pushed out an ‘Out-of-band’ update to fix an issue with One Drive crashing in older builds (October 2020 and April/October 2021) of Windows 10 after users had installed the updates from October Patch Tuesday. Kudos to Microsoft for fixing this issue and pushing out a patch in a little over two-weeks. However, it is not good when an update that fixes several other issues, causes new ones…oh wait Windows 11 2022 Feature Update (22H2) did just that….

The Ugly

It’s official, Elon Musk has bought Twitter for $44B after six-months of back-and-forth ‘negations’ (and law suits) between him and Twitter. What does this mean for Twitter? We’ve already seen Musk fire four members of the executive board as soon as the purchase was complete. We’ve seen the trolls come out of the wood work with a coordinated targeted campaign to trash Twitter with abusive and hateful content soon after the purchase/merger was completed. The worse is yet to come…Musk had already talked about gutting 75% of the Twitter staff (though he has walked this back) and we’re likely to see some type of mass layoffs happing extremely soon. Meanwhile some advertisers are suspending their campaigns on Twitter to see how this all plays out. One has to wonder if Twitter will still be around in the next year and if it is, will it still be the same?