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Microsoft's quiet retreat from one of the small conveniences that made desktop Windows feel like a living jukebox has landed with a thud for anyone still ripping CDs: Windows Media Player's online album-lookup service has stopped returning metadata, leaving freshly inserted discs labelled “Unknown album” and forcing users to type track names by hand or find new tooling to restore what used to happen automatically. Background Windows Media Player (WMP) has carried CD lookup functionality...

A clever but risky tweak discovered by enthusiasts can flip Windows 11 onto Microsoft’s new “native NVMe” I/O path and, in many configurations, produce measurable SSD performance gains—particularly in random I/O—by forcing the operating system to use the in-box NVMe driver instead of the legacy SCSI translation path. The change is implemented with a few registry DWORDs or equivalent PowerShell commands; it replicates an opt‑in server feature introduced with Windows Server 2025 and can unlock...

Microsoft’s Copilot is now not just an assistant for answers — it’s a checkout lane. The company announced Copilot Checkout, a new in-chat purchasing experience that lets U.S. users discover products, view details, and complete purchases without leaving the Copilot conversation. The rollout attaches branded checkout flows to product recommendations in Copilot, with payments handled via integrations with PayPal, Stripe, and Shopify, and initial retail partners including Urban Outfitters...

Microsoft and PayPal have quietly turned Copilot into a checkout lane: shoppers in the United States can now discover, decide and pay for items without leaving the Copilot conversation, thanks to a PayPal-powered integration that supplies inventory surfacing, branded in-chat checkout, guest checkout and card acceptance through PayPal’s agentic commerce services and store sync. Background / Overview Microsoft's Copilot Checkout is the next step in the fast-growing trend commonly called...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly shifted from assistant to checkout clerk, Google’s Gemini features are seeding deeper into Gmail and Workspace, Elon Musk’s Grok faces a severe moderation probe over image misuse, OPPO’s Reno 15 Pro lands with flagship-grade cameras and battery life, and RayNeo continues to push compact AR optics — a single news cycle that underlines how AI, commerce, and immersive hardware are colliding across consumer and Windows ecosystems. Background / Overview The last...

The week’s vulnerability roundup from Cyble landed as a blunt reminder that 2026 opened with a sustained, high-pressure tempo for defenders: 678 newly tracked CVEs, nearly 100 with public Proof‑of‑Concept (PoC) code, and multiple high‑impact items already flagged by national authorities — a combination that compresses windows for safe remediation and increases the risk of opportunistic exploitation. Background / Overview Cyble’s intelligence brief — and the community chatter that followed —...

Anthropic’s decision to donate the Model Context Protocol (MCP) to a new Agentic AI Foundation under the Linux Foundation marks a decisive step toward industry-standard plumbing for “agentic” AI — the class of systems that act autonomously by connecting models to tools, data stores and services. The move bundles MCP with two other donated projects — Block’s goose agent framework and OpenAI’s AGENTS.md — into a single, vendor-neutral home backed by some of the largest cloud and platform...

If you own a SAPPHIRE Radeon X1650 Pro and are running Windows 10, the short, practical reality is this: the X1650 Pro is a legacy GPU from the mid‑2000s and there is no modern, AMD‑maintained “Windows 10 native” driver that adds contemporary features or WHQL guarantees; your safest and most reliable options are to accept Microsoft’s signed legacy driver delivered through Windows Update, or to perform a carefully controlled manual install of an archived Catalyst/legacy package — and only if...

Google Search and Microsoft Bing both pushed another week of tectonic shifts: renewed ranking volatility in Search; Google quietly expanding and hardening AI answer infrastructure (including new hires and policy nudges); Microsoft moving from discovery to in-chat commerce with Copilot Checkout and Brand Agents; advertising policy updates that open narrow new ad categories; and a sharp, visible example of how AI-driven discovery can collapse a business model — Tailwind’s dramatic engineering...

Microsoft has quietly turned Copilot into a checkout lane: users in the United States can now complete purchases directly inside Copilot conversations through a new in-chat checkout experience called Copilot Checkout, a move that folds discovery, cataloged inventory, and tokenized payments into a single conversational surface. Background Microsoft’s announcement places Copilot squarely in the center of a fast-growing industry trend often called agentic commerce — where AI agents not only...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly become a checkout lane: shoppers in the United States can now complete purchases directly inside Copilot conversations, and Stripe says it is one of the payment engines powering the new Copilot Checkout experience. This move stitches Microsoft’s conversational AI, merchant catalogs and tokenized payment plumbing into a single in‑chat purchase flow that promises lower friction for buyers and a new distribution surface for merchants—but it also raises immediate...

Microsoft and PayPal have taken conversational commerce from demonstration to checkout-line reality: shoppers can now discover, decide, and pay for products directly inside Copilot with the launch of Copilot Checkout, powered in part by PayPal’s new agentic commerce services. Background Microsoft’s Copilot has steadily evolved from an assistant for productivity into a multi-surface platform for discovery and transactions. The latest step — Copilot Checkout — embeds a branded, shoppable...

Microsoft's latest flirtation with renaming — the appearance of a product page that calls the familiar Office app "The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office)" — has set off predictable outrage, fresh confusion, and a broader conversation about the real costs of sloppy or opportunistic rebranding in tech. What looked like a sudden erasure of the Office name was actually a long, incremental shove: Microsoft has been layering the Copilot label across its ecosystem for years, and this...

Sectigo’s migration to single‑purpose public roots is no longer an abstract industry update — it’s an active, time‑bound infrastructure change that requires immediate attention from anyone who runs TLS, S/MIME, or code‑signing certificates issued by Sectigo. The vendor has already begun issuing certificates from the new Sectigo Public roots (R46/E46 and the R36/E36 subordinate CAs), cross‑signing those roots for legacy compatibility, and setting a firm migration window that will leave...

AMD’s move to bring a Virtualized Automotive Stack (VAS) to Microsoft Azure — pairing Radeon PRO V710 GPUs and EPYC CPUs with Xen-based nested virtualization and Siemens’ PAVE360 digital‑twin environment — promises to accelerate “shift‑left” development for software‑defined vehicles, but it raises important technical questions about VM feature support, performance trade‑offs, and safety/security posture that OEMs and Tier‑1s must verify before committing to cloud‑first validation pipelines...

Microsoft’s Power BI, Tableau (Salesforce), SAP Analytics Cloud, Oracle Analytics Cloud, IBM Cognos, Qlik Sense, Google’s Looker + BigQuery, SAS Viya, Databricks, and TIBCO Spotfire define the business analytics landscape in 2026 — each delivering distinct trade-offs between accessibility, scale, governance, and advanced AI-driven capabilities that organizations must weigh when choosing a platform to power data-driven decisions. Background Business analytics has moved well beyond static...

Microsoft’s Defender platform now adds an AI-driven incident prioritization layer aimed squarely at reducing SOC overload by turning a noisy incident queue into an explainable, ranked worklist that analysts can act on with speed and confidence. Background Security operations centers (SOCs) have long faced a twin problem: too much telemetry and too little human attention. Microsoft’s recent enhancement to the Defender incident queue—announced in early January 2026—applies a machine learning...

Microsoft has quietly restored a simple, native terminal text editor to Windows: Microsoft Edit — a compact, open‑source TUI (text user interface) editor you can run directly from Command Prompt, PowerShell, or Windows Terminal without switching to a GUI. The tool is designed for quick edits — think configuration files, quick notes and on‑the‑fly fixes — and is distributed both as a GitHub project and via the Windows Package Manager. This feature marks a deliberate move to give Windows users...

Turning a monitor from landscape to portrait is one of the cheapest, quickest productivity experiments a Windows user can run—and for many writers, coders, and power readers it yields immediate, measurable gains in visible context and scrolling reduction when set up correctly. Background / Overview Vertical (portrait) monitor orientation isn't new, but it keeps resurfacing because it answers a real ergonomic and workflow problem: many knowledge tasks are tall, not wide. Long-form articles...

Turning off Windows Security on a modern PC is something that should trigger more caution than curiosity: for most people in 2026 it remains a risky move, useful only in very narrow, controlled scenarios and never as a casual performance tweak or "clean" troubleshooting shortcut. Background: what Windows Security (Microsoft Defender) actually is Windows Security — the app interface that exposes Microsoft Defender Antivirus, Firewall, SmartScreen, and other protections — has evolved from a...