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Mozilla has quietly drawn a hard line under one of the last broad compatibility guarantees for legacy Windows users: Firefox 115 (ESR) will be the final Firefox build to support Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 8.1, and Mozilla’s own support documentation now shows that security updates for those legacy installations will stop at the end of February 2026. Background Shortly after Firefox 115 shipped in July 2023, Mozilla designated that release as the last feature build compatible with...

Microsoft has started seeding Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7859 to Beta Channel testers — a service-focused flight that mixes reliability fixes with a small but notable user-facing test: a Microsoft 365 subscription prompt appearing inside Settings for some devices. Background Windows Insider Preview builds arrive in multiple channels — Dev, Beta, and Release Preview — and the Beta Channel is where Microsoft balances early access with greater stability for broader testing. Beta...

Aramco’s February 12, 2026 memorandum of understanding with Microsoft signals a deliberate shift from industrial AI experimentation to an operational, cloud‑anchored strategy — one that binds Saudi Arabia’s national energy champion and a major hyperscaler around sovereign‑ready cloud infrastructure, production‑grade industrial AI use cases, and a measurable national skilling agenda. Background Saudi Aramco and Microsoft have a multi‑year relationship that has already touched on cloud, AI...

Microsoft and Ericsson have quietly stitched advanced 5G management directly into Windows 11, taking a decisive step toward turning the laptop into a native, policy-driven, always‑connected endpoint for the AI era. Background For years enterprise IT organizations have treated cellular connectivity on laptops as an add‑on: useful for occasional travel but complex to provision, inconsistent across operators, and difficult to manage at scale. That is changing. Microsoft and Ericsson announced a...

The European Parliament has taken the rare and unambiguous step of disabling built‑in generative AI features on the work devices it issues to Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and staff — a precautionary block driven by an internal cybersecurity assessment that concluded the institution cannot yet guarantee how much data those features send to external cloud services or how that data might be used. This operational prohibition, communicated to MEPs in an internal email in...

Microsoft has asked the UK’s Business and Trade Committee to correct the parliamentary record after a senior Microsoft executive gave testimony that understated the company’s operational role in the suspension of an International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor’s Microsoft-hosted email — a small sequence of events that has become a large signal in Europe’s accelerating debate over digital sovereignty, vendor trust and the limits of so‑called “sovereign cloud” promises. Background: what...

Marlink’s decision to integrate Microsoft’s Azure ExpressRoute into its managed maritime network stack is a pragmatic — and potentially game-changing — move for vessel operators and remote-site enterprises that rely on satellite and hybrid connectivity to reach cloud services reliably. The integration promises to let ships, offshore platforms, and other remote assets treat Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 as an extension of their private networks via dedicated, non‑Internet links, while...

A senior former Microsoft engineering leader has publicly admitted he “fought hard” to keep the long‑standing ability to place the Windows taskbar on the left or right of the screen — a customization that Windows users have taken for granted since the 1990s but which Microsoft removed in Windows 11 — and his admission has renewed debate about design priorities, accessibility and whether Microsoft is finally listening to its most persistent critics. Background For decades the Windows taskbar...

Microsoft’s Copilot-powered Premier League Companion is being folded directly into Gary Neville’s The Overlap network this season, bringing near‑real‑time, data‑driven insights into headline podcast formats and live punditry — a move that aims to make matchday conversations faster, richer and more numerate while also testing how AI can sit inside editorial workflows and fan culture...

When Linus Torvalds wrote to the comp.os.minix newsgroup on August 25, 1991, describing “a (free) operating system (just a hobby…for 386(486) AT clones),” he set in motion not just a technical project but a social experiment that proved one of the most durable ways to build software: distributed, meritocratic collaboration at internet scale. The Register’s recent conversation with Torvalds and several early contributors is a timely reminder that Linux’s ascension from a one-man kernel to a...

BUI’s announcement that it has become the first Microsoft Solutions Partner in South Africa to earn the new Support Services designation is more than a marketing milestone — it is a signal that the bar for post‑sales technical support across the Microsoft ecosystem has moved from checklist to capability, and that local customers now have a clearer way to evaluate support partners when minutes literally mean millions. osoft used the platform of Microsoft Ignite 2025 to surface a refreshed set...

Windows 11 now includes a native, production-grade MIDI stack — Windows MIDI Services — bringing first-party support for MIDI 2.0 while modernizing and preserving compatibility with MIDI 1.0, a move that promises to reshape how Windows hosts musical instruments, DAWs, and live-performance rigs. Background For four decades MIDI 1.0 was the lingua franca of electronic instruments, controllers, and sequencers. The MIDI 2.0 specification, introduced by the MIDI Association and the wider industry...

Microsoft and Ericsson have taken the “always‑connected PC” promise out of pilots and put it squarely into the operating system: Windows 11 will now surface enterprise‑grade 5G management capabilities that tie Microsoft Intune device controls to Ericsson’s cloud‑native Enterprise 5G Connect platform, letting IT teams provision eSIMs, enforce network and application policies, and use AI‑driven analytics to steer connectivity for performance and security across managed laptop fleets...

Ask an AI to build a ten‑slide deck for tomorrow’s client call and you’ll usually get something fast — but if the fonts drift, the logo slides, and each hue strays from your palette, you’ll spend the next hour undoing what the model did. The single most important technical question for PowerPoint-first teams is simple: which AI tools actually honor your Slide Master and corporate template so generated slides are immediately usable? Overview AI PowerPoint add-ins and web builders promise huge...

i-Genie.ai’s acceptance into Microsoft’s invite‑only Pegasus Program is more than a shiny line on a press release — it’s a practical accelerator for a data‑intensive startup that sells to global consumer brands, and it exposes a clear playbook for how hyperscalers are turning enterprise partnerships into commercial and technical leverage. Trevor Sumner, i‑Genie.ai’s CEO, told ERP Today that Pegasus has already unlocked marketplace listing, co‑sell eligibility, Azure consumption benefits and...

Microsoft’s latest non-security preview for Windows 11—packaged as KB5077241 and appearing as Builds 26200.7918 and 26100.7918 in the Release Preview Channel—delivers a surprisingly practical mix of small productivity refinements and notable platform changes. The update surfaces a one‑click taskbar network speed test, in‑box Sysmon telemetry support, camera pan and tilt controls exposed in Settings, Microsoft Entra ID SID translation, support for .webp wallpapers and Emoji 16 glyphs, plus a...

FlyOOBE’s latest updates — and a fast-growing family of community tools like RemoveWindowsAI and Winslop — have sharpened the Windows 11 “debloat” toolset, adding smarter detection and deeper removal options for the operating system’s expanding AI surfaces while also widening the safety, supportability, and update‑stability trade-offs users must accept. Background Windows 11 has steadily evolved from a UI refresh into an “AI PC” platform: Copilot, Recall, on‑device models, and other...

The Good Men Project’s Ethics & Values archive is a living, wide-ranging conversation about morality, masculinity, and social responsibility — a place where personal confession, syndicated analysis, and sharp political commentary converge under a single topical umbrella. The site’s Ethics & Values category publishes a steady stream of pieces — everything from first-person reckonings and cultural criticism to syndicated wire stories and op-eds — and it does so with a clear editorial promise...

Microsoft’s latest release of SQL Server Migration Assistant (SSMA) v10.5 brings a targeted set of improvements aimed squarely at the knottier parts of enterprise database modernization: code conversion fidelity, “large script” reliability, and operational stability when running converted logic on Azure targets. The headline is the expansion of AI-assisted code conversion — Microsoft Copilot is now integrated into SSMA for SAP ASE (Sybase) and further beefed up for Oracle conversions — but...

A small Nairobi barber shop using an app inside M-Pesa to turn a stack of PDF transaction statements into a simple chart of repeat customers and peak hours is not a novelty — it is a signal. In the past three months a Nairobi startup called Fastagger has embedded a mini app, Auni, inside Safaricom’s M-Pesa Business Super App and signed up thousands of MSMEs. Auni converts M-Pesa PDF statements into structured tables and dashboards using optical character recognition, lightweight...