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Microsoft has opened a formal inquiry after fresh reports allege that Israel’s elite intelligence unit used Microsoft Azure to store and analyse vast volumes of intercepted Palestinian communications, raising urgent questions about cloud governance, corporate responsibility, and the role of big tech in modern conflict. Background The allegations originate from a joint investigative reporting project that documents how Unit 8200 — Israel’s signals‑intelligence arm — reportedly moved large...

Microsoft's vision for Windows is no longer limited to desktops or a single input device — it's a multi-layered strategy that stitches cloud-first hardware, on-device AI accelerators, and richer multimodal interactions into a single computing continuum meant to be more ambient, private, and useful. Overview Over the past year Microsoft has articulated a clear roadmap for making Windows both a cloud endpoint and a locally intelligent operating system. That roadmap centers on three connected...

Microsoft’s behavior toward rival browsers has become a steady drumbeat in tech headlines: from rewriting how Windows 11 handles defaults to quietly routing certain system links into Microsoft Edge, the company has repeatedly taken steps that critics call anti-competitive and that many users experience as irritating. At the same time, a separate shockwave is rippling across the browser landscape: AI search startup Perplexity has publicly offered roughly $34.5 billion to buy Google’s Chrome...

OpenAI’s latest model rollout and a disturbing medical case this month make for a cautionary, consequential moment: GPT‑5 promises sharper reasoning, faster answers, and fewer hallucinations, yet an ordinary user following AI diet guidance was hospitalized with a rare form of poisoning after substituting table salt with sodium bromide. That collision — between subtly improved AI capability and persistent gaps in safety, context, and human judgment — is the defining story for anyone who uses...

OpenAI’s GPT‑5, Microsoft’s fresh wave of Windows 11 AI features, and ByteDance’s decision to open‑source Coze together mark one of the busiest weeks yet in consumer and developer AI—an abrupt convergence of model unification, desktop intelligence, and enterprise‑grade agent tooling that will reshape how Windows users work, how developers build agents, and how privacy debates evolve. The podcast episode summarized these three headlines and their implications: OpenAI’s GPT‑5 claims a unified...

A single‑plaintiff lawsuit filed in California has turned what many expected to be a routine operating‑system lifecycle event into a live legal test of forced obsolescence, corporate market strategy, and the practical limits of vendor control over security for hundreds of millions of PCs. The complaint asks a state court to stop Microsoft from ending free security updates for Windows 10 on October 14, 2025 and instead force the company to continue issuing no‑cost updates until Windows 10’s...

Flyoobe 1.2 arrives as a focused, pragmatic tool that folds the original Flyby11 upgrade bypass into a broader Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) customization suite — and with that consolidation comes both useful capabilities for hobbyists and admins and significant security, support, and compliance caveats that every Windows power user should weigh carefully. drdware requirements — TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, newer CPU families and minimum memory — were sold as safeguards for modern security features...

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Title: Should .NET Developers Learn Azure or AWS in 2025? By: [Your Name], Senior IT Reporter — WindowsForum.com Lead Short answer: It depends. For .NET developers entrenched in Microsoft shops and regulated industries, Azure remains the most pragmatic first move. For those aiming for broad cloud roles, startups, or data/AI-heavy work, AWS (and sometimes GCP) still offer the widest set of opportunities. The smartest long-term play in 2025 is a focused “primary cloud + cloud‑agnostic core”...

Microsoft has confirmed that Windows PowerShell 2.0 — the legacy engine introduced with Windows 7 and officially deprecated in 2017 — will be removed from the Windows OS image in upcoming releases: it will be absent from Windows 11, version 24H2 beginning in August 2025 and from Windows Server 2025 beginning in September 2025, with Insider builds already reflecting that removal as of July 2025. (support.microsoft.com, blogs.windows.com) Background A short history of PowerShell 2.0 PowerShell...

Windows 11 ships with a far stronger security baseline than its predecessors, but real-world attackers and configuration gaps still find workarounds—meaning Defender and Windows Security are necessary, not sufficient, for modern threat defense. Background Windows 11’s built-in protections—Microsoft Defender Antivirus, SmartScreen, Core Isolation (VBS), HVCI, Controlled Folder Access, BitLocker, and hardware requirements like TPM 2.0 and Secure Boot—raise the overall security floor for...

If your Windows 11 laptop runs hot, fans spin up frequently, or battery life feels worse than it should, the built‑in Windows Search Indexer — also known as searchindexer.exe or the Windows Search (WSearch) service — is one of the single background features that can meaningfully affect power draw; disabling or tuning it can reduce CPU and disk activity and extend run time when you’re away from a charger. (learn.microsoft.com, helpdeskgeek.com) Background / Overview Windows 11’s search...

OpenAI’s ChatGPT‑5 has arrived as a clear pivot from incremental “smarter chat” upgrades toward models built to reason—and the shift is already reshaping how Microsoft, developers, and everyday Windows users experience AI assistants on the desktop and in the cloud. Background: what landed and why it matters OpenAI unveiled GPT‑5 as a family of models—full, mini, and nano variants—designed to trade off latency, cost, and reasoning depth depending on the task. The company positions GPT‑5 as...

Microsoft has set a firm date to excise a long‑running compatibility relic: Windows PowerShell 2.0 will be removed from shipping Windows images beginning with Windows 11, version 24H2 (rollout starting August 2025) and will follow in Windows Server 2025 (September 2025) — a change already visible in Windows Insider builds and documented by Microsoft in a formal support bulletin (KB 5065506). Background PowerShell 2.0 first shipped in 2009 and for many years represented a quantum leap for...

Microsoft pushed a targeted re-release and mitigation for the August 2025 Windows 11 24H2 cumulative update (KB5063878) after enterprise customers reported widespread WSUS/SCCM delivery failures that surfaced as error code 0x80240069 — Microsoft acknowledged the problem and rolled a containment the weekend following the Patch Tuesday release while preparing a corrected servicing package. Background / Overview KB5063878 was published on August 12, 2025 as the monthly combined Servicing Stack...

Windows 11’s dark mode just got noticeably less embarrassing — Microsoft has started rolling dark themes into file-operation dialogs in recent preview builds, and that fix finally addresses one of the most frequently-complained-about “flashbang” moments users hit when copying, moving, or encountering file-access prompts. (blogs.windows.com, xda-developers.com) What happened (short version) Microsoft released Windows 11 build 26100.5061 (KB5064081) to the Release Preview channel on August...

Microsoft has quietly shipped matching Dev and Beta channel updates for Windows 11 this week — both delivered as cumulative update KB5064071 — bringing Dev builds to 26200.5751 (25H2 track) and Beta builds to 26120.5751 (24H2 track), along with focused refinements to Click to Do, File Explorer, Taskbar behavior and Snipping Tool recording. Background Microsoft’s Insider cadence has grown more complex as it prepares the Windows 11 25H2/24H2 servicing streams. Over the last year the company...

Microsoft’s staged rollout that lets Arm-based Windows 11 PCs download and run compatible games locally marks a decisive inflection point for the platform: it’s the first time Microsoft has tied visible storefront changes to deep platform work — a modernized x86→Arm translation layer, OS-level upscaling, and coordinated anti‑cheat vendor ports — to make local PC gaming on Snapdragon and other Arm silicon a practical, long‑term proposition for many users. t of Windows has traded raw x86...

Windows 11 hides a surprising amount of useful functionality behind simple toggles and keyboard combos — the kind of small discoveries that turn a pleasant OS into a genuinely efficient workspace. Background / Overview Windows 11’s design refresh brought a centered Taskbar, rounded corners, and tighter integration with Microsoft services, but it also layered in dozens of lesser-known settings that can boost productivity, privacy, and accessibility. Many of the most impactful options live in...

Microsoft’s announced retirement of Windows 10 and a single‑plaintiff lawsuit filed in California have ignited a debate that spans consumer rights, corporate lifecycle policy, and the broader environmental costs of forced hardware turnover. Microsoft has publicly set October 14, 2025 as the end of mainstream support for Windows 10. After that date, consumer editions (Windows 10 Home and Pro) will no longer receive routine feature updates, monthly quality fixes, or standard security patches...