Death of the Windows Gadgets?

Details

Category: Industry News

Published on Tuesday, 17 July 2012 09:00

Written by Christian Dunn

Who really liked Windows gadgets?

Admittedly I loved the concepts. I even made a few (there should be one somewhere in this site). I did find however they were a pain to use, had little control over functionality and affected performance so I turned them off most of the time. The sidebar actually worked better than floating gadgets but never was essential either and I couldn't really care if it was there.

... Well it sounds like it doesn't matter anymore anyway.

They want developers to build apps in Metro so who needs gadgets anymore anyway?

Story has it that the security researchers were due to present on Gadget vulnerabilities at the annual Black Hat USA 2012 security industry conference beginning July 21 in Las Vegas and are/were planning to demonstrate some dangerous security holes in the gadget functionality. Effectively because gadgets have system permission so they can do cool stuff such as tell the temperature of your CPU and they are also internet enabled so this opens up the potential for a major security flaw. Now back on Microsoft's case apparently they were aware of the problem and had not included gadgets in Windows 8 but it appears they were caught a bit off guard as they have now rolled out a Microsoft 'Fix-It' tool which effectively disables the gadgets and sidebar and they have issued an adviosry to recommend users stop using it in Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7.

Microsoft issued the following security advisory: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/security/advisory/2719662

Microsoft provide the solution in the following knowledgebase article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2719662

I am a bit suspicious that they have given us the ability to both enable and disable the feature in the knowledgebase article. That says to me that we may get an automatic update apply and turn off gadgets on all our customers. That might come as a shock. Microsoft? At least we have a short term out...