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Microsoft has begun rolling out three new lightweight Microsoft 365 “companion” apps — People, File Search, and Calendar — that sit in the Windows 11 taskbar and promise to shave micro‑interruptions out of the modern workday by surfacing contacts, documents, and meetings in a compact, fast interface. These mini‑apps install automatically on Windows 11 devices with Microsoft 365 desktop apps and launch at startup by default, while administrators retain controls to prevent automatic installs...

A Southern California resident has filed a lawsuit seeking to force Microsoft to continue issuing free security updates for Windows 10 beyond the company’s published end‑of‑support date of October 14, 2025, arguing the vendor’s lifecycle decision amounts to forced obsolescence and an anticompetitive push toward Windows 11 and Microsoft’s AI‑centered device ecosystem. rview Microsoft’s official lifecycle schedule sets October 14, 2025 as the date when routine support for consumer editions of...

Global cloud capital expenditures are entering a new, accelerated phase: analysts now expect hyperscale providers to push annual data-center CapEx from hundreds of billions into the low‑trillions over the next half decade, led by Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Microsoft — a concentrated spending wave powered largely by artificial intelligence compute demand. Background The latest industry forecasts show a dramatic jump in data‑center investment driven by the need to host and serve large AI...

Epic Games and Qualcomm have closed one of the most stubborn compatibility gaps for Windows on ARM: Epic’s Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) and the Epic Online Services (EOS) SDK now include Windows-on-Arm support, a move that clears the way for Fortnite and other EAC‑protected multiplayer titles to run on Snapdragon‑powered Windows PCs — and that is being pushed into developers’ hands via an updated EOS SDK release. Background Windows on ARM has come a long way in the last two years. Microsoft’s Prism...

Windows 11 ships with a lot of conveniences—but also with telemetry and cloud‑connected features that quietly phone home by default, and three third‑party tools (O&O ShutUp10++, Spybot Anti‑Beacon, and a VPN) are frequently recommended as a practical toolkit to seriously limit that data flow without converting a daily driver into a brick. This article examines precisely what each tool does, when and how to use them together, the real limits you’ll hit, and a cautious, step‑by‑step plan to...

Sure’s Channel Islands data-centre arm has added Microsoft’s Azure Stack Hub to its managed portfolio, giving local organisations the ability to run Azure-consistent infrastructure-as-a-service workloads inside on-island facilities while keeping data, compliance controls and support physically close to home. This hybrid-cloud service blends the Azure management plane and APIs with validated, integrated hardware in Sure’s facilities, promising data sovereignty, 24/7 local support, and the...

iManage’s latest announcement tightens the scaffolding around AI for law firms: the company has added support for the Model Context Protocol (MCP), upgraded its Insight+ search and knowledge-discovery engine, and expanded Ask iManage’s conversational and evidence features — all intended to let legal professionals run AI assistants against their documents and matter data without sacrificing governance or traceability. The move is explicitly engineered to let third‑party, MCP‑compatible AI...

OpenAI’s decision to run ChatGPT and its API on Google Cloud — alongside Microsoft Azure, CoreWeave, and Oracle — marks a decisive shift from single-provider reliance to a multi-cloud infrastructure designed to relieve crushing compute demand, reduce vendor risk, and squeeze performance and cost advantages from specialized hardware and regional capacity. Background OpenAI’s rapid growth since the public launch of ChatGPT created an unprecedented appetite for GPUs and high‑performance...

Arkane Studios union members have joined a high-profile call for Microsoft to sever ties with the Israeli military, saying the parent company’s cloud and AI services “have no place being accomplice of a genocide,” and aligning their demands with the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement’s campaign targeting Microsoft and Xbox. This escalation — a union-backed public letter aimed directly at Microsoft’s Azure and AI contracts with Israeli agencies — lands amid broader investigative...

If you’re thinking about leaving Windows 10 behind, KDE Plasma is the gentlest, most familiar-looking way to land — and for a growing number of Windows escapees it’s the practical, sensible first step into Linux. The desktop environment recreates the Start menu + taskbar workflow most Windows users know, gives exceptionally deep customization controls, and can be tried or removed with minimal commitment — exactly the attributes that make it an excellent choice for older machines and cautious...

Microsoft is standardizing how it prices online services purchased through its volume licensing programs, expanding a single, consistent price across Price Levels A–D to all Online Services sold under Enterprise Agreement (EA) and Microsoft Products and Services Agreement (MPSA), with the change aligning list prices to the pricing shown on Microsoft.com and taking effect for renewals and new purchases beginning November 1, 2025. Background Microsoft has pursued pricing alignment and...

I asked Microsoft’s Copilot to book a dinner reservation for me so it could prove the central promise of modern AI agents: act on my behalf, not just answer questions—and it mostly worked, but with enough caveats to make clear this technology is still in its experimental phase. Background Microsoft’s Copilot Actions is the consumer-facing implementation of what the industry calls an AI agent: a system that navigates the web, fills forms, and completes multi-step tasks for a user. Microsoft...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday delivered a heavy-duty security package this month — industry tallies vary between 107 and 111 vulnerabilities, including a publicly disclosed Kerberos elevation-of-privilege issue (CVE‑2025‑53779) and roughly a dozen other critical remote‑code‑execution (RCE) flaws that should be at the top of every administrator’s patch list. Background Patch Tuesday remains the single most important recurring event for Windows administrators: Microsoft aggregates security...

Bria’s collaboration with Microsoft for Startups has done more than add a logo to a partner page — it has plugged a responsible, developer-first visual generative AI into Azure’s ecosystem, giving startups a practical path to scale image generation, editing, and brand-safe visual pipelines while leaning on Microsoft’s GPU infrastructure and go-to-market channels. Background Bria began life as a focused effort to resolve one of generative AI’s thorniest commercial problems: how to produce...

Epic Games’ Easy Anti-Cheat has finally been ported to Windows 11 on Arm, clearing one of the last major technical roadblocks that has kept mainstream multiplayer titles — most notably Fortnite — off Snapdragon-powered Copilot+ laptops and other Windows-on-Arm PCs. Background / Overview The move comes after a collaboration between Epic Games and Qualcomm to bring the Epic Online Services Anti-Cheat (Easy Anti-Cheat) to Windows on Snapdragon devices. Epic’s announcement frames this as both a...

Microsoft’s August Patch Tuesday landed as a heavy-duty maintenance window for Windows environments, with the vendor listing more than a hundred fixes across its product portfolio — including a clutch of high-profile remote code execution (RCE) and elevation-of-privilege flaws that demand immediate attention from sysadmins and security teams. The batch includes a publicly known Kerberos elevation-of-privilege issue, a pair of near–top-score RCE defects affecting the Windows graphics stack...

Microsoft’s August 2025 Patch Tuesday quietly included a small but consequential update for Windows 10: KB5063709, a mandatory cumulative security rollup that doesn’t add consumer-facing features but does lay groundwork for the Extended Security Updates (ESU) experience and fixes a handful of stability and input-related bugs. The patch raises Windows 10 22H2 systems to Build 19045.6216 (and 21H2 systems to Build 19041.6216) while enabling — and in some cases repairing — the ESU enrollment...

Zenity Labs’ Black Hat presentation unveiled a dramatic new class of threats to enterprise AI: “zero‑click” hijacking techniques that can silently compromise widely used agents and assistants — from ChatGPT to Microsoft Copilot, Salesforce Einstein, and Google Gemini — allowing attackers to exfiltrate data, alter workflows, impersonate users, and even maintain persistent control inside an organization’s AI surface. (prnewswire.com, cybersecuritydive.com) Background AI agents — conversational...

Epic Games has started closing a long-standing gap for Arm-based Windows gaming by making its Easy Anti-Cheat (EAC) system compatible with Windows 11 on Arm devices powered by Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X family — a change that paves the way for Fortnite and other EAC-protected multiplayer titles to run on Copilot+ Arm laptops and notebooks. (theverge.com, arstechnica.com) Background: why anti-cheat matters for Windows on Arm Windows on Arm has come a long way from the early days of poor...

Microsoft’s Gaming Copilot has arrived in the Windows 11 Game Bar preview — an AI-powered, in-game assistant that promises real-time, context-aware help to players — and the reaction has been immediate and polarized, with excitement from accessibility advocates and convenience-seekers clashing with outright rejection from purists who worry about spoilers, privacy, and performance. Background Microsoft’s Copilot brand has steadily expanded across Windows, Edge, Office, and Xbox, and Gaming...