Senior Editor
Tom Warren is a Senior Editor and author of Notepad. Tom previously founded WinRumors, a site dedicated to Microsoft news, before joining The Verge. Tom also used to work as an enterprise project manager in a variety of investment banks, and has a background in IT and Windows engineering. Tom has appeared on CNN, CNN International, BBC News, Channel 4, MSNBC, TWiT, and many others over the years.
You can reach Tom confidentially on Signal here.
Believe it or not, there’s another blue screen that’s popping up on some Windows machines. Microsoft says some Windows 11 devices will see a blue BitLocker recovery screen at boot after installing the July 2024 Windows security update. The issue isn’t widespread, but those impacted will have to enter a recovery key to get a PC to boot properly. A fix is on the way.
Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”
The 78 minutes that took down millions of Windows machines
CrowdStrike’s faulty update has kicked off questions about how to avoid a similar tech disaster.