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Microsoft’s pullback in China is real, but the evidence points to a selective retrenchment, not the broad corporate exit suggested by some recent summaries. The company has wound down a major support joint venture, closed a Shanghai IoT and AI lab, and reduced parts of its engineering presence. At the same time, Bloomberg reported in June that Microsoft has built a substantial business selling Azure-hosted AI capabilities to Chinese companies, with ByteDance its largest customer by spending...

Microsoft has started bringing the consumer Copilot app and the Microsoft 365 Copilot app into one experience, a change that will eventually put personal chat, work content, Microsoft 365 apps, and paid AI features behind the same Copilot brand. The immediate effect for Windows and Microsoft 365 users is less dramatic than the phrase “super app” suggests: this is a staged app consolidation, accompanied by the removal of three consumer features on August 18, 2026. Techgenyz reported the...

Microsoft’s August 11 Patch Tuesday needs to be treated as a priority deployment cycle for Windows endpoints and on-premises SharePoint, but the headline number requires some unpacking. Notebookcheck reported 421 CVEs, a figure also used by Secarma for Microsoft’s August release; BleepingComputer counted 400 vulnerabilities released on Patch Tuesday itself because it excluded fixes Microsoft shipped earlier in August for products including Mariner, Teams, Azure, Entra, Office, and Power...

FaCTz, a newly published CUDA compression method for scientific vector fields, reached 60 GB/s of GPU-resident compression throughput while preserving every tested critical point in three 2D datasets—a meaningful advance for simulation workflows where a numerically accurate file can still produce scientifically wrong feature analysis. But the headline figure is a laboratory result on one NVIDIA A100 configuration, not a drop-in solution for every CFD, climate, or plasma pipeline. HPCwire...

Spline Architect’s new GPU-instancing path changes the scale of Unity scenes the tool can animate along a spline, but its headline claim needs to be read precisely: the developer is not moving one million Unity GameObject instances. He is moving one million lightweight spline-instance records and rendering them through Unity’s instanced drawing API. That distinction is the practical news behind Spline Architect 2.7.2, which 80 Level reports adds GPU instancing to Mike Danielsson’s Unity...

Brave is rolling out a new layer of fingerprinting protection in Brave 1.93 that changes what websites can learn about a Windows PC’s graphics hardware. The desktop browser now substitutes generic WebGL GPU vendor and renderer values, clears WebGPU adapter descriptors, and randomizes the WebGL extension list; the protections are enabled by default but are arriving in phases on desktop and Android. The change was detailed by Brave on August 13 and reported separately by CyberInsider and...

Asobo Studio’s current Steam listing for Resonance: A Plague Tale Legacy sets a relatively clear floor for PC players ahead of its August 27, 2026 launch: 16GB of system memory, 75GB of available storage on an SSD, and a graphics card with at least 6GB of VRAM. The important qualification is that the figures now shown on Steam conflict sharply with older specifications still circulating through other outlets and even an AMD promotional page, making the storefront listing—not a reposted...

A publicly posted exploit called ShieldBreak can elevate a local Windows user to SYSTEM on current Windows 11 25H2 Canary builds and Windows Server 2025, according to its author and independent testing cited by The Register. The immediate problem for administrators is not a missed cumulative update: Microsoft’s most recent Defender release notes still do not identify a ShieldBreak fix, while the proof-of-concept code remains publicly available. PC Perspective reported ShieldBreak as the...

Microsoft plans to let Teams calls opened in a browser remain visible in a simplified, separate window while users navigate away from—or hide—the tab or Progressive Web App hosting the meeting. The feature, listed as Microsoft 365 Roadmap item 569206, is marked In development for worldwide general availability in September 2026. For people using Teams on the web, the change targets a familiar interruption: a meeting competes with the very browser tab needed to look up a ticket, open a...

Microsoft has cancelled the planned general-availability rollout of Excel’s =COPILOT worksheet function for Windows desktop, withdrawing Roadmap ID 499658 on August 13, 2026. The feature had been listed for worldwide multi-tenant availability in January 2027; the revised entry now says Microsoft has “decided not to move forward” and offers no technical reason, replacement, or migration plan. For IT teams and Excel power users, the important detail is that this is a cancelled GA commitment...

Microsoft has marked Roadmap ID 547732, the New SharePoint Experience, as launched, but the practical change for IT teams is larger than the brief roadmap description suggests: SharePoint Online’s main navigation and start experience have been replaced across tenants, and administrators no longer have a tenant-wide or per-user switch to keep the previous interface once the feature moved beyond preview. Microsoft’s roadmap entry, updated August 13, describes the release as a cleaner...

Microsoft has cancelled the planned general-availability rollout for the Mac-specific Excel =COPILOT roadmap item, but the cancellation does not amount to a public withdrawal of the formula itself. Roadmap ID 499659, updated August 13, says Microsoft has “decided not to move forward” with the feature previously targeted for worldwide GA on Mac in January 2027. The important distinction is buried in Microsoft’s own product records: =COPILOT remains documented by Microsoft Support as a feature...

Microsoft has cancelled the planned general-availability rollout of the =COPILOT function for Excel on the web, abandoning Roadmap ID 499660 less than five months before its scheduled January 2027 release. The roadmap entry was updated on August 13, 2026, with the unusually direct notice: “We have decided not to move forward with this feature.” The cancellation applies specifically to the web version of Excel and does not, on the record available so far, mean Microsoft has removed the...

Microsoft has confirmed that SQLCon Europe will be co-located with FabCon Europe in Barcelona from September 28 through October 1, 2026, giving SQL Server DBAs, Azure SQL operators, and application developers one registration for a program that now spans transactional databases, Fabric analytics, and AI application design. The practical news is less that Microsoft is holding another data conference than that the published agenda treats SQL Server 2025, Azure SQL Database Hyperscale, and...

Compal Electronics expects its PC shipments to fall 15% to 17% year over year in the second half of 2026, despite the overdue Windows 10 replacement cycle, because memory costs are now making both consumers and enterprise buyers defer purchases. The warning matters to Windows administrators because it describes a collision between an operating-system migration deadline and the hardware market’s ability to deliver affordable replacement PCs. The Taipei Times reported the forecast after...

Dell’s revived XPS 13 gives Windows buyers a genuinely premium-feeling ultraportable at $699.99, with an aluminum chassis, 13.4-inch 2,560-by-1,600 touch display, 120Hz refresh rate, Wi‑Fi 7, and a claimed starting weight of 2.2 pounds. But PCMag’s testing identifies the decision that defines this machine far more than its Intel Core 5 320 processor: the entry-level XPS 13 ships with only 8GB of RAM, and Dell charges $200 more for 16GB. That makes the new XPS 13 a credible answer to Apple’s...

Microsoft says it has brought 97% of its roughly 500,000-device Windows estate into compliance with the 2023 Secure Boot certificate set, following a rollout that began in earnest across its Windows 11 fleet in February 2026. The significant detail for other enterprises is not the percentage itself; it is that Microsoft is still working through the remaining three percent after the first 2011 Secure Boot certificates expired in late June. Microsoft Digital, the company’s internal IT...

Schneider Electric’s new AMD Helios reference design is a practical facility blueprint for operators planning 246 kW-per-rack AI deployments, but it is not a turnkey “AI factory” product or evidence that a 10.4 MW site can be deployed without substantial local engineering. The most useful part of Reference Design 121 is its attempt to connect AMD’s forthcoming MI455X-based Helios rack with the power, liquid-cooling, residual-air-cooling, redundancy, and monitoring systems that must surround...

Liqid’s UltraStack 30 is a real attempt to push AMD’s 144GB Instinct MI350P PCIe cards past the eight-GPU ceiling of ordinary enterprise servers, but its headline 4.3TB of HBM3E and 69 FP8 PFLOPS are aggregate hardware totals, not a published inference result. The design announced by Liqid on July 23 combines a dual-socket AMD EPYC 9005 host, a PCIe Gen5 fabric, three 10-slot expansion chassis, and as many as 30 MI350P accelerators. StorageReview’s August 12 report brought attention to the...

Microsoft’s Copilot key is becoming a support and usability problem before it has settled into a stable purpose, but the claim that Microsoft has already merged the consumer Copilot app with Microsoft 365 Copilot goes further than the public record currently supports. Microsoft has confirmed a forthcoming Windows 11 option to restore the physical key to Right Ctrl or the Context Menu key on affected hardware; it has not, in the documentation available on August 13, confirmed that one...