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Marlink’s move to deliver Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 access over dedicated, privately managed ExpressRoute circuits is a pragmatic, technically significant step toward making cloud-first workflows reliable for truly remote operations — from merchant vessels and offshore platforms to humanitarian sites and expeditionary bases. Background Marlink, the Oslo- and Paris-headquartered managed-service provider, announced on 18 February 2026 that it will offer Microsoft ExpressRoute...

Mozilla has drawn a firm line under one of the last mainstream lifelines for legacy Windows desktops: Firefox 115 (ESR) will be the final Firefox release that runs with official security updates on Windows 7, Windows 8, and Windows 8.1, and Mozilla has said that security updates delivered through the ESR channel will stop around the end of February 2026. ([support.mozilla.orzilla.org/kb/firefox-users-windows-7-8-and-81-moving-extended-support) Background For years, Firefox has been the...

Microsoft’s Copilot Chat briefly summarized emails that organizations had explicitly labeled as confidential — a failure Microsoft attributes to a server‑side code error that allowed items in users’ Sent Items and Drafts to be picked up and summarized by the Copilot “Work” chat experience, and one that has put enterprise DLP and label enforcement squarely back under scrutiny...

Microsoft’s cloud and AI relationship with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has erupted into a renewed ethical and practical showdown for the company — and for the wider cloud industry — after leaked procurement files and investigative reporting showed a dramatic expansion of ICE’s use of Microsoft Azure during a recent enforcement surge. The revelations have prompted worker-led advocacy groups to call for an immediate end to Microsoft’s ties with ICE, while the company insists...

Fortude’s announcement that it has earned the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions designation on February 18, 2026 marks a deliberate deepening of the company’s Microsoft cloud credentials — extending its capabilities from analytics and AI into the foundational layer of enterprise cloud architecture. This is not simply a marketing badge: the designation signals Microsoft’s validation that Fortude can design, deploy, and operate resilient, secure, and scalable Azure infrastructure that...

NexComputer’s NexPhone resurrects the idea of “Windows on a phone” — but it’s not the comeback of the old Windows Phone; it’s a pragmatic, niche-minded attempt to put a full Windows 11 on Arm desktop into a rugged smartphone chassis alongside Android and a Debian Linux environment. The headline is simple: NexPhone can boot into three separate operating systems — Android (the everyday phone), a containerized Debian Linux, and an optional Windows 11 on Arm image that turns the handset into a...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly moved from a sidebar experiment into the places most users open every day: the Windows 11 taskbar and File Explorer, where it can run long‑running “agent” tasks from the search field and summarize or answer questions about files with a single click. This change is small on the surface — a new button here, an @ trigger there — but it signals a deliberate push to make AI an unobtrusive, always‑available productivity layer in the OS rather than a separate app you...

Microsoft’s Copilot Studio now offers xAI’s Grok 4.1 Fast in preview, opening a new lane in the multi‑model ecosystem for enterprise agent builders. The addition—available today in early access environments for United States‑based makers and off by default until an organization administrator opts in—promises a low‑latency, tool‑oriented text model optimized for very large context windows and deep tool integrations. At the same time, Microsoft and xAI emphasize that Grok runs outside...

Windows 11’s new Drag Tray—Microsoft’s gesture-style shortcut for sharing and moving files—has become an unexpected irritant for many desktop users, popping into view every time they lift a file toward the top of the screen and interrupting mundane but muscle-memory-driven workflows like reorganizing a cluttered desktop or dropping files into folders along the upper row. Background: what Microsoft added, and when Microsoft began shipping Drag Tray as part of the ongoing Windows 11 feature...

Fisherman in inflatable boat fishing from a pothole on a rainy highway.

Microsoft has moved Copilot from the margins of Windows 11 into its busiest work surfaces: the taskbar search composer and File Explorer, turning what was an optional sidebar into an array of always‑available, agentic tools that can run in the background, report status on the taskbar, and summarize or act on files without launching full apps. osoft’s Copilot effort has evolved rapidly from a chat-style assistant to a system-level productivity layer across Microsoft 365 and Windows. The...

Discord’s latest safety pivot has detonated into one of the service’s biggest community crises — a global “Teen‑by‑Default” setting that funnels every account into a restricted experience unless the platform’s age‑assurance systems say otherwise, and a verification flow that can include on‑device facial age estimation or the submission of government ID to third‑party vendors. Background Discord announced the global rollout of its teen‑by‑default safety architecture on February 9, 2026...

I started by uninstalling six familiar third‑party utilities and trying to live entirely on Windows’ built‑in tools for screenshots, archive handling, media playback, notes, system cleanup, and antivirus — and, over several weeks of real use, I didn’t miss them. What began as a minimalist experiment quickly turned into a practical audit: for many everyday tasks, the native Windows alternatives are now good enough — and in a few cases they offer safer, less noisy, and more integrated...

Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer content to live in a sidebar — recent Windows 11 Insider builds tuck it into File Explorer and even add a floating “Share with Copilot” affordance to the taskbar, making the assistant a one‑click presence inside the places most users visit daily. The changes are currently rolling through the Insider channels as experiments and inert UI hooks, but the implications are clear: Microsoft is moving Copilot from an optional helper to a system‑level assistant...

Microsoft’s quietly relentless push to make Copilot an ever‑present assistant on Windows 11 just accelerated: demos and preview builds now show Copilot surfacing directly in the taskbar as an “Ask Copilot” entry with agent support, and adding inline Copilot affordances inside File Explorer so the assistant can summarize or act on documents without opening them. These changes promise real productivity shortcuts — but they also bring immediate governance, privacy and UX trade‑offs that...

Message center in the Microsoft 365 admin center is no longer just a passive inbox of corporate announcements — it’s a lightweight command center you can tune to surface the Windows updates that truly matter to your environment, and the keys to that control are Preferences, Filters, and Columns. The Windows IT Pro Blog walks administrators through the exact controls — from selecting “Windows” in Preferences to filtering by Tag, Relevance, or Act‑by date, and even syncing tasks to Planner —...

For weeks this winter, a logic error in Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat’s “Work” experience allowed the AI to read and summarize emails that organizations had explicitly marked Confidential, bypassing configured Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and sensitivity‑label protections and exposing a material risk to customer‑facing teams and regulated data flows. Background Microsoft 365 Copilot was designed as an embedded productivity assistant across Outlook, Word, Excel, Teams and other Microsoft 365...

Picking the right system voltage — 12V, 24V, or 48V — is the single decision that will most directly determine how practical, safe, and upgradeable your DIY solar + battery system becomes; make the wrong choice early and you’ll pay later in oversized copper, oversized fuses, frequent rework, or an impractical inverter installation. rview Every electrical decision for an off-grid, mobile, or hybrid system comes back to one simple relationship: Watts = Volts × Amps. For a fixed power demand...

Saudi Aramco and Microsoft have signed a non‑binding Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to accelerate the deployment of industrial AI, deepen cloud‑anchored digital transformation across the Kingdom, and build a measurable national pipeline of AI and cloud skills — a move that ties Aramco’s operational scale to Microsoft’s sovereign‑ready Azure strategy and signals a decisive step from pilot projects toward production‑grade industrial AI. Background: what was announced and why it matters On...

Google is quietly testing a small onboarding tweak in Chrome Canary that could have outsized effects: during first run on Windows the browser now offers a bigger “Make default” button alongside an explicit option to pin Chrome to the taskbar, putting a one‑click launch tile in front of new users at the moment their habits are forming. rce.com] Background The change is currently visible only to some testers in Chrome Canary and is gated behind an experimental flag called First Run Desktop...