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Today’s paper from cryptographers at ETH Zurich and the Università della Svizzera italiana shatters a comforting shortcut many of us keep telling friends and colleagues: the marketing line that your cloud password manager has “zero knowledge” of your vault is not an absolute guarantee once you assume the provider’s servers are malicious. The researchers show a range of plausible, practical attacks that let someone who controls or tampers with a password‑manager backend read, modify, or fully...

Microsoft’s flagship productivity assistant, Microsoft 365 Copilot, mistakenly read and summarized emails that organizations had explicitly marked as confidential, bypassing Data Loss Prevention (DLP) controls and triggering an urgent reassessment of how cloud AI features interact with enterprise compliance tooling. The failure, tracked internally as CW1226324, affected Copilot Chat’s “Work” tab and was limited to messages stored in users’ Sent Items and Drafts folders, but its implications...

As the first quarter of 2026 unfolds, the era of AI experimentation in the enterprise has given way to an era of accountability. After three years of pilots, proofs of concept, and vendor sampling, buyers are consolidating their stacks, procurement teams are pruning experiments that never delivered, and C-suite leaders are demanding measurable, quarter-level returns. For founders building enterprise software, especially in AI, healthcare, retail, and security, this is both a threat and an...

The fourth quarter of calendar 2025 crystallized a clear industry inflection: cloud revenue re‑accelerated across the hyperscalers as enterprises moved from AI experiments to large‑scale production, and while Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each posted impressive results, Google Cloud emerged as the short‑term growth leader—but not without important caveats about scale, capital intensity, and supply constraints. Background: why Q4 2025 matters The cloud market...

Marlink’s new managed ExpressRoute offering promises to push private, predictable cloud access into the most remote operating environments by pairing Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute private circuits with Marlink’s multi-orbit satellite footprint and managed networking stack. Background / Overview Marlink, a longtime specialist in maritime and remote-site connectivity, announced on February 18, 2026 that it will deliver Microsoft ExpressRoute connectivity as a fully managed service integrated...

The discovery that attackers are weaponizing Microsoft Entra ID OAuth flows to gain long‑lived access to corporate mail and files is not theoretical—it’s a clear, recurring pattern that demands a rethink of how organizations govern third‑party applications, consent, and service principals across tenants. Background / Overview Microsoft’s OAuth model intentionally separates a global application object (the developer’s blueprint) from local service principals (the tenant‑specific instance)...

Microsoft Research's latest paper and demonstrations make a bold promise: a laser-etched glass archival system that can store terabytes of data in a coaster‑sized plate and survive for millennia—potentially 10,000 years or more—without powered maintenance. What was once a laboratory curiosity has been presented as a full end‑to‑end archival system: write, read, decode, and validate, with automated microscopes and machine‑learning decoders doing the heavy lifting. For organizations wrestling...

The hyperscalers are not panicking — they are building. Over the last earnings cycle the three biggest cloud platforms—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure—reported a clear, coordinated pattern: reaccelerating cloud growth driven by AI workloads, paired with an unprecedented front-loaded surge in capital expenditures (CapEx) to add compute capacity, networking and specialized cooling. What looks to short-term investors like a cash-burning binge is, from an engineering...

Microsoft has quietly added a one‑click network speed test to Windows 11’s taskbar — a small but meaningful convenience that surfaces a “Perform speed test” or “Test internet speed” control in the network system tray and Wi‑Fi quick settings and, for now, launches a browser‑based speed test rather than performing a native, in‑OS measurement. Background Windows has long left ad‑hoc throughput checks to third‑party utilities and websites: think Speedtest by Ookla, Fast.com, and lightweight...

Microsoft is quietly testing a new “postgame recaps” feature in the Xbox PC app that automatically summarizes your recent play session—highlights like screenshots, achievements, and in‑game events—after you exit a game, and the rollout has begun with Xbox Insiders in the PC Gaming Preview. Background Microsoft has been iterating the Xbox PC app steadily for several years, moving the client from a simple storefront into a centralized gaming hub on Windows. The company has increasingly added...

The insurance value chain — from marketing and distribution through underwriting and claims — is entering an accelerated phase of reinvention where AI agents are not merely augmenting tasks but reweaving workflows end to end. Microsoft’s recent positioning of agentic AI (intelligent agents that plan, act, and coordinate across systems under human oversight) presents a playbook for insurers that want to move beyond isolated pilots to enterprise-scale transformation. The implications are...

The problem turned out to be embarrassingly domestic: noisy, streaming smart‑TVs behaving like overenthusiastic network clients were triggering a series of router log entries — flagged as “Possible DNS rebind attack” — and causing intermittent Wi‑Fi dropouts across an otherwise healthy home network. What started as a mystery of momentary blackouts and router reboots became a lesson in why modern homes need the same defensive thinking as corporate networks: the call can indeed be coming from...

The European Parliament’s IT department has ordered built‑in generative AI features on official devices to be disabled, citing the inability to guarantee the confidentiality of information routed to cloud-based assistants and the ongoing uncertainty about what data those services retain and how they may be shared with third parties. The move — which affects embedded AI in operating systems, browsers, and productivity suites such as Microsoft Copilot, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and similar cloud-first...

CrowdStrike and Microsoft have deepened a strategic tie that will let Azure customers buy the CrowdStrike Falcon platform directly through Microsoft Marketplace and apply those purchases against their existing Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment, a move the vendors say will remove procurement friction and accelerate deployment of Falcon’s AI‑native protections across endpoints, cloud workloads, identity and data. Background The new arrangement — announced by CrowdStrike and Microsoft on...

Microsoft and Ericsson have launched a coordinated push to make 5G a first-class, manageable connectivity option for enterprise Windows PCs—embedding AI‑driven 5G controls into Windows 11 and tying those controls into Microsoft Intune and Ericsson’s Enterprise 5G Connect to give IT teams centralized policy, eSIM lifecycle control, and real‑time connectivity optimization. Background / Overview On February 17, 2026, Ericsson and Microsoft announced a joint solution that embeds advanced 5G...

Microsoft is quietly prototyping a reversal of one of Windows 11’s most contested design choices: engineering teams are reported to be working to restore taskbar mobility—letting users move the Taskbar to the top, left or right edges and offering finer height controls—after years of user criticism and broad reliance on third‑party workarounds. ([windowscentral.cocentral.com/microsoft/windows-11/former-microsoft-ceo-was-against-vertical-taskbar-removal) Background / Overview For three decades...

Windows 11’s newest Release Preview — appearing as builds 26100.7918 and 26200.7918 — pivots away from headline AI experiments and instead delivers a collection of pragmatic, troubleshooting‑first updates: a one‑click network speed test from the taskbar, native Sysmon for improved endpoint visibility, better Quick Machine Recovery availability, UI and settings polish, and several enterprise‑focused fixes that prioritize reliability over spectacle. (hothardware.com) Background / Overview...

Microsoft’s February cumulative update for Windows 11, shipped as KB5077181, was supposed to squash several Nvidia-related black‑screen and gaming regressions — but within days of the Patch Tuesday rollout users reported new and, in some cases, worse problems: rhythmic in‑game stutters, complete freezes, boot loops, and networking regressions that left machines unusable until the update was removed. Background / Overview Microsoft published KB5077181 as the monthly cumulative security and...

Microsoft has quietly completed one of those long-overdue but profoundly practical upgrades: Windows 11 now includes full, in-box support for MIDI 2.0 alongside a modernized MIDI 1.0 stack, giving musicians, producers, and audio developers a unified, system-level foundation to build on. Background MIDI — the Musical Instrument Digital Interface — has been the plumbing of electronic music since the early 1980s. The original MIDI 1.0 specification standardized how keyboards, controllers...

Microsoft’s mobile Microsoft 365 Copilot update that swaps the old document viewer for an AI‑first, chat‑centred workflow is now colliding with real world expectations — and, according to multiple user reports and one recent Windows Latest investigation, that collision can result in local files being routed into OneDrive and Copilot for analysis before you even see the document. This is not just a UX regression; it raises immediate privacy, security, and enterprise governance questions that...