Today is Sunday, November 13th: time for the weekly roundup of the good, the bad and the ugly tech news of the week!

The Good

In a rare instance Microsoft has made it into ‘The Good’ category this week. Microsoft’s newly released tablet computer, Surface 9 Pro has been found to be much easier to repair than previous models. Furthermore, Microsoft is providing repair manuals and expect to have a large availability of parts on the market in the first half of 2023.

The Bad

Most people are not aware Flash is dead (replaced by HTML 5) and Adobe Flash Player was end of life by Adobe at the end of 2020. Because of this hackers are creating websites which when visited warn the user their Flash player is out-of-date and needs to be updated. This seems to be target Chromium based browsers (Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge) users which is ironic since Chrome had its own built-in Flash Player plugin which was automatically updated and Edge never supported Flash. So users are installing a fake plugin, a Botnet called Cloud9 and it is capable of doing some nasty things. Just another reason why extensions and plugins should not be downloaded outside the Play Store.

The Ugly

WTF is going on with Twitter! Just when we thought it could not get any crazier than the past couple weeks, we were proven wrong. More high-profile executives have left over fears Elon Musk is going to violate an FTC decree from 2011 with how quickly he is trying to push out new features.  Some laid-off Twitter employees were called back after being let go in error.  However, Twitter employees were informed they were no longer allowed to work remotely. Then there is the Twitter Blue verification mess which resulted in several celebrities and other people impersonating Musk with their own verified accounts and many fake accounts easily passing Twitter Blue’s ‘verification’ checks. To (sort of) fix this Twitter introduced a Grey Checkmark to designate ‘Official’ high profile accounts (government agencies and corporations) as legitimate. To top it all off, Musk warned the remaining employees at a recent all-hands meeting, Twitter could be on the verge of bankruptcy and tweeting out “Twitter will do lots of dumb things in coming months.”