Featured content

Microsoft is targeting October 2026 to bring malicious-URL warnings in Teams chats and channels to its government cloud customers, including GCC, GCC High, and the Department of Defense environment. The company’s newly published Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 569421 says Teams will detect links identified as malicious and warn users before malware or phishing campaigns can spread through internal conversations. The practical takeaway for government IT teams is narrower than the roadmap wording...

Microsoft Purview’s Data Loss Prevention notifications can now put remediation controls into an employee’s mailbox for OneDrive and SharePoint policy matches, according to Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 527831. The change matters because a DLP event that previously sent a user back into the file’s SharePoint or OneDrive context can now offer actions including removing sharing links, deleting the file, applying a label, overriding the policy, reporting a false positive, or reporting that the user...

Microsoft’s Windows recovery guidance now describes a four-rung response model for Windows 11 failures: repair a widespread boot outage through Quick Machine Recovery, roll one PC back with point-in-time restore, reinstall the operating system through the Cloud rebuild preview, or move the user to a Windows 365 Reserve Cloud PC when the hardware is unavailable. The useful change for IT teams is not that Windows has gained one magic “fix my PC” button. It is that Microsoft is finally...

Microsoft Entra ID tenants that still depend on Microsoft-delivered SMS codes or voice calls for MFA have a firm migration deadline: February 1, 2027. From that date, Microsoft will retire its own telecom delivery for those methods in the public cloud, and a user whose only available MFA option is SMS or voice will hit a blocking passkey-registration prompt before they can continue signing in. The change, documented by Microsoft Learn and independently reported by TechRadar and IT Pro, does...

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Sim Update 6 restores Bush Trips to the simulator’s Activities menu, bringing back a structured, multi-leg exploration mode that was absent when the 2024 edition launched. Windows Central reports that the returning collection includes the Bush Trips carried over from Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020, alongside Guided Tours in the same menu. For players who bought the newer simulator expecting its much-improved terrain, ground detail, and lighting to support...

Microsoft 365 Copilot Notebooks can now use Markdown, plain-text, and rich-text files as reference material, removing a format barrier that had made the product awkward for technical teams and anyone whose working documents do not begin life in Word or PowerPoint. Neowin reported the addition on August 14, while Microsoft’s Message Center records show TXT and RTF support was scheduled to reach worldwide availability by mid-July and Markdown support by early August. The timing matters less...

Windows 11 Release Preview build 26100.9267 for 24H2 and 26200.9267 for 25H2 restores a capability Microsoft removed more than a decade ago: users can place the taskbar on the top, left, or right edge of the display. The change arrives in KB5120998, released to the Release Preview channel on August 14, and it is paired with new Start menu sizing controls, configurable Search suggestions, an important WMIC removal, and a staged rollout model that means many testers will not see every...

AMD’s Ryzen chipset driver 8.08.12.551 adds “Ryzen AI Max” program support on Windows 10 and Windows 11, but the practical reason to install it today is narrower than the headline suggests: AMD has not identified the bugs it fixed, and it has not presented the release as a security update. As reported by Neowin from AMD’s newly posted release notes, the package updates a collection of chipset, processor-power-management, security-processor, and platform-management components. For Ryzen AI...

Cooler Master’s V8 ACE 3DHP is a $119.99 single-tower air cooler that can genuinely compete with much larger dual-tower designs in sustained CPU loads—but buyers should treat its “flagship single-tower” positioning as a performance-and-style premium, not a straightforward value upgrade. The cooler has been on sale since July, despite eTeknix describing it on August 14 as newly launched. Cooler Master’s product page confirms the core specification: a 167.3 mm-tall tower using two proprietary...

Windows Insiders in the Release Preview channel received two separate Windows 11 cumulative-update candidates on August 14: KB5120998 for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, raising those branches to builds 26100.9267 and 26200.9267, and KB5120996 for Windows 11 26H1, build 28000.2796. Microsoft’s Windows Insider Blog announced the builds, while the accompanying Microsoft Learn notes reveal a more consequential split than the short announcement suggests: 24H2/25H2 are being tested as a shared...

LiteLLM versions 1.82.7 and 1.82.8 were malicious PyPI releases, and organizations that installed them in March should treat every credential accessible to the affected Python environment as potentially exposed. The immediate story is not that Nvidia, AWS, Samsung, Cisco, or other named companies have been confirmed breached. CloudSEK’s newly published dataset says they were potentially exposed through affected CI/CD activity—a material distinction the company itself makes but that the...

Windows’ application-compatibility system is real, local, and still relevant on Windows 11—but the claim that it makes every old game work stretches far beyond what the technology can do. As XDA reported, Windows keeps application-compatibility databases in its C:\Windows\AppPatch directory and can match known executables with tailored fixes at launch. Microsoft’s own documentation confirms that these .sdb databases can identify an application by its file attributes and apply either warning...

Dell’s new XPS 13 has earned the MacBook comparison the hard way: the $699 Windows 11 laptop pairs a 2.2-pound aluminum chassis with a 13.4-inch 2.5K touchscreen, a 30–120Hz refresh rate, Wi-Fi 7, and enough real-world battery life to cover a workday. MakeUseOf’s review says the machine felt so polished that its reviewer repeatedly forgot they were using Windows; separate testing from Tom’s Guide broadly supports the central point, measuring 14 hours and 26 minutes in a Wi-Fi web-browsing...

MakeUseOf’s OpenWrt walkthrough makes a sound case for treating smart-home devices as an untrusted network tier: put IoT clients in their own firewall zone, permit only the services they need from the router, and allow internet access without allowing lateral movement into the trusted LAN. The Windows 11 VM test described by MakeUseOf demonstrates the central point well—placing a device on a different subnet achieves very little if that interface remains attached to a trusted firewall zone...

XPG’s NOVAKEY RGB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit can gain meaningful smoothness in Baldur’s Gate 3 on a Core Ultra 9 285K, but TechPowerUp’s frametime testing points to a more important conclusion for Intel Arrow Lake builders: the benefit comes from Intel’s 200S Boost platform profile, not from treating a DDR5-6000 kit as a magic upgrade on its own. In its August 13 review, TechPowerUp tested the 32 GB, two-stick NOVAKEY kit in Baldur’s Gate City, one of the game’s most CPU-limited areas. With its...

TechPowerUp’s Counter-Strike 2 frametime testing of the 32 GB XPG Novakey RGB DDR5-6000 CL30 kit delivers a useful reality check for Intel Core Ultra 9 285K owners: the difference between a well-tuned DDR5-6000 kit and dramatically faster DDR5 memory is small in this CPU-bound esports workload, and becomes smaller again once the GeForce RTX 4090 becomes the limiter at higher resolutions. In its August 13 review, TechPowerUp found the XPG kit sitting roughly 4–6% behind the quickest memory...

Microsoft has confirmed that Exchange Server Subscription Edition CU1 has slipped again: it has no release date, and the company now says it will wait for a month without a pressing security payload before shipping the first cumulative update. The Exchange Team’s August 13 post turns what had been a second-half-of-2026 target into an open-ended hold, leaving administrators on Exchange SE RTM to continue applying monthly updates rather than plan around a CU1 deployment window. The explanation...

Classic Outlook’s missing Copilot controls were a real Microsoft 365 issue, but they are not an active general outage on August 14, 2026. Microsoft says it fixed the problem with a service-side change on June 29, and its current support record limits the original impact to users with a Copilot Chat (Basic) license — not customers with the paid Microsoft 365 Copilot license. That makes Windows Central’s newly published framing materially misleading. Its report correctly identifies build...

Neowin reports that HoneyMyte, the espionage group also tracked as Mustang Panda and Bronze President, has added a kernel-mode Windows rootkit to its CoolClient backdoor in campaigns against government organizations in Asia. The reported change is significant because it moves protection for the malware below ordinary user-mode inspection: a driver installed as a Windows service can shield the backdoor’s processes, files, and Registry data from security tools and frustrate attempts to...

Chieftec’s Vista Max is now entering retail listings as the GX-30B-OP, a larger panoramic ATX case whose genuinely useful design choice is not the glass or RGB: it has two physical power buttons, placed at the top and low on the front edge so the same chassis can be used above or below a desk without making the switch awkward to reach. That feature has been described as a new launch this week, but the timeline is more complicated. Chieftec showed the Vista Max at Computex in early June...