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Title: What the Microsoft KB (KB5065083) means for MDM / Intune enrollment — why “ApplicationVersion +1” happens, the risk, and what admins & MDM vendors should do Summary (one sentence) Microsoft confirmed that for certain older Windows 11 devices the enrollment request’s ApplicationVersion value will be incremented by 1 (relative to the BuildVersion pulled from Update Build Revision) so MDM servers can detect “restore-capable” devices; this behavior is documented in KB5065083 (published...

Microsoft will audit and then begin enforcing a block on NTLMv1–derived credentials in Windows 11, version 24H2 and Windows Server 2025: the change is gated by a new registry key (BlockNtlmv1SSO), exposes two new NTLM event IDs for Audit vs Enforce behavior, and will be rolled out in phases starting with auditing in late August/September 2025 and moving to a default Enforce posture for unmanaged devices by October 2026. e what Microsoft changed, why it matters, who is affected, how to detect...

Microsoft’s AI unit has publicly launched two in‑house models — MAI‑Voice‑1 and MAI‑1‑preview — signaling a deliberate shift from purely integrating third‑party frontier models toward building product‑focused models Microsoft can own, tune, and route inside Copilot and Azure. Background Microsoft’s Copilot lineup and broader product strategy have been tightly coupled with OpenAI’s frontier models for several years, underpinned by very large investments and close technical integration. The...

Samsung and Microsoft have taken the next step in bringing conversational AI into the living room: Microsoft Copilot is now integrated directly into Samsung’s 2025 lineup of AI-enabled TVs and smart monitors, enabling voice-first, on-screen conversations, personalized recommendations, and a new, more social way to interact with content on the big screen. Background Samsung and Microsoft first signaled a deeper AI collaboration earlier in the year, and that partnership became more concrete at...

The Pentagon has formally ended the long‑running practice of allowing China‑based Microsoft engineers to support Department of Defense cloud environments, ordering audits and vendor reviews that could reshape how major cloud providers service U.S. government systems. The move follows an investigative exposé into Microsoft’s so‑called “digital escorts” program and a frantic public scramble by the company to assure government customers that China‑based support work has been halted for DoD...

Phison's public rebuttal to mounting reports that a pair of August Windows 11 updates were “bricking” drives marks a turning point in a story that went from localized forum threads to mainstream headlines in days — the company says more than 4,500 hours and 2,200 test cycles produced no reproducible failures, Microsoft has investigated and found no connection to the patches, and independent testing that sparked the alarm may have overstated a pattern that is still not fully explained...

Microsoft’s latest public update on the mid‑August patch storm is straightforward: after investigation, the company says the August 2025 cumulative rollup did not cause a widespread failure mode that “breaks” SSDs, but the episode still exposes fragile cross‑stack dependencies and persistent risks for users who handle large, heavy I/O work on diverse storage hardware. Background / Overview The Windows servicing wave on August 12, 2025 delivered the combined Servicing Stack Update (SSU) plus...

File Explorer is fine for most people — and with six focused PowerToys add‑ons it can be quietly transformed into a faster, smarter, and more forgiving file manager without leaving the familiar Windows shell. Overview Windows File Explorer has improved over the years, but it still leaves gaps that slow day‑to‑day work: limited preview formats in the Preview pane, clumsy bulk renaming, no built‑in “quick look” preview, and cryptic “file in use” errors. Microsoft’s open‑source PowerToys...

RefreshOS 2.5 arrives as a carefully curated Debian-based distro that grafts a KDE Plasma desktop shell onto a deliberately mixed bag of applications — and, in doing so, trades orthodox desktop purity for a pragmatic, user-focused experience that is both attractive and slightly divisive. Background RefreshOS 2.5 is officially built on Debian 12.11, the Bookworm point release, and ships with a Plasma 5 desktop based on the stock KDE versions available in Debian’s stable archive...

Microsoft’s abrupt dismissals of staff tied to a high‑profile Redmond sit‑in have transformed a months‑long ethical dispute into a full‑scale governance crisis — one that spotlights the collision of employee activism, cloud‑era technical opacity, and the reputational risks facing major vendors who sell infrastructure to sovereign security services. Background The immediate flashpoint was an organized occupation of the office of Microsoft President Brad Smith at the company’s Redmond...

Few things interrupt work faster than a mouse pointer that seems to vanish into thin air — but the disappearance of the mouse pointer is almost never supernatural. Whether it’s a program that hides the cursor on purpose, a driver hiccup, a multi-monitor alignment issue, or a power-management setting that puts a USB port to sleep, most causes are identifiable and fixable with a few focused steps. The brief fixes in consumer tech columns are useful, but a deeper, systematic approach will help...

Linuxfx’s latest “NOBLE” refresh promises a fast, Windows‑like desktop that can breathe new life into older PCs — but the story is more complicated than a single download button. The distro’s recent update is reported to be built on Ubuntu’s Noble series with the newer hardware enablement kernel, bundles tools designed to mimic Windows behavior (including Wine and an Android subsystem), and lowers the bar to run a modern desktop on machines Windows 11 leaves behind. At the same time, past...

Microsoft is removing the built‑in Mobile Plans app from Windows and replacing the in‑app storefront with a web‑first flow that uses carrier websites plus the native Settings eSIM provisioning experience, a change that will affect how always‑connected PCs buy and manage cellular data. Background / Overview The Mobile Plans app has long been a small, specialized component in Windows for devices with cellular hardware. Its purpose was simple: provide a consistent in‑OS discovery and purchase...

If your Windows 11 PC stalls or shows a small error window while shutting down, and the culprit in Task Manager is LogTransport2.exe, you’re not alone — that background Adobe component is commonly responsible for shutdown hangs, and the fix is usually to stop Adobe’s telemetry from trying to phone home while Windows is powering off. Background Adobe bundles a small service called LogTransport2.exe with Creative Cloud and Acrobat installations. Official Adobe documentation describes this...

Less than two weeks after Microsoft pushed the August 12, 2025 cumulative update for Windows 11 (commonly tracked as KB5063878 for 24H2), a narrow but alarming failure profile began to circulate among hobbyist test benches and end users: during sustained large file transfers (commonly around 50 GB or more), certain storage devices — primarily NVMe SSDs and, in a few reports, HDDs — would suddenly vanish from Windows and occasionally return corrupted or inaccessible data. The story quickly...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot experiment turns text into talk — and, in early tests, it sounds more like a collaborator than a canned text‑to‑speech bot. The company has quietly introduced MAI‑Voice‑1, a high‑throughput speech generation model surfaced in a new Copilot Labs experience called Audio Expressions, and community hands‑on tests suggest the output is expressive, multi‑speaker, and disturbingly human‑like in places. Background Microsoft has been shifting from an API‑only model...

Microsoft’s quiet rollout of MAI-1-preview and MAI‑Voice‑1 marks the start of a deliberate move to build a first‑party foundation‑model pipeline — one that seeks to reduce Microsoft’s operational dependence on OpenAI while embedding tailored, high‑throughput AI directly into Copilot and Windows surfaces. Early public testing on LMArena, a company blog post, and Microsoft’s product previews show the company is prioritizing efficiency, latency, and product integration over chasing leaderboard...

Microsoft’s AI team has quietly moved from being a heavy consumer of external foundation models to building its own — releasing two in‑house models, MAI‑Voice‑1 (a high‑speed speech generator) and MAI‑1‑preview (a consumer‑focused large language model) — and the move is as much strategic as it is technical, signaling Microsoft’s intent to reduce dependence on OpenAI, tighten product integration across Copilot and Windows, and control inference costs and latency on Azure. Background For years...

Microsoft has begun public testing of MAI-1-preview — a homegrown large language model that Microsoft says was trained on roughly 15,000 NVIDIA H100 GPUs and that will begin powering select Copilot text experiences as part of a phased rollout, marking a clear strategic shift toward reducing dependence on third‑party models. (cnbc.com, theverge.com) Background / Overview Microsoft’s MAI initiative unveiled two models in late August 2025: MAI‑Voice‑1, a high‑throughput speech generation...

Microsoft has quietly moved from partner-dependent experimentation to deploying its own, production‑focused models with the public debut of MAI‑Voice‑1 (a high‑throughput speech generator) and MAI‑1‑preview (an in‑house mixture‑of‑experts language model), rolling both into Copilot experiences and community previews as Microsoft begins to “orchestrate” a mix of proprietary, partner, and open models to balance cost, latency and product fit. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Copilot platform...