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Microsoft’s Copilot has moved decisively from a sidebar helper to a full-fledged AI companion across Windows, Edge, and Microsoft 365 — introducing a new expressive avatar, shared group sessions, tenant‑aware connectors, taskbar “companion” mini‑apps, and a raft of features that make Copilot both more social and more deeply embedded in everyday workflows. Background Microsoft’s Copilot story is no longer just about a chat box inside Office; it’s now an ecosystem strategy that ties generative...

Concentric AI’s Semantic Intelligence platform can now run its heavy-duty data scanning and classification entirely inside a customer-controlled Microsoft Azure tenancy — a Private Scan Manager for Azure that promises on‑tenant raw-data scanning while maintaining a central control plane for policy orchestration and remediation. Background Concentric AI has positioned Semantic Intelligence as a context‑aware data security governance platform that blends discovery, semantic classification...

Microsoft is rolling out Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.7535 (KB5072046) to the Dev and Beta Channels, a mid-January flight that packs targeted accessibility upgrades, new enterprise policy controls for Copilot, an expanded developer integration path for cross‑device continuity, a subtle Windows Spotlight icon refresh, multiple bug fixes, and a slate of still‑unresolved issues that make this build useful for testers — but risky for general deployment. Background This build is...

Microsoft appears to be testing a deeper Copilot integration inside File Explorer — not merely another right‑click shortcut, but a docked, chat‑style Copilot experience that can be attached to the Explorer window and detached into its own pane or window. Hidden strings and UI references in recent Windows 11 preview builds point to labels such as “Chat with Copilot” and “Detach Copilot,” suggesting an inline chat surface for file‑centric questions and actions rather than a hand‑off to a...

Microsoft’s step to let Windows users save and synchronize passkeys to their Microsoft Account changes the practical calculus for passwordless security: the company has combined Windows Hello’s local biometric and PIN unlock with a cloud-backed passkey vault (Microsoft Password Manager) so users can create a passkey once and use it across their Windows devices, while an encryption passkey and a separate vault PIN protect cross-device recovery and synchronization. Background Microsoft has...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly moved from assistant to checkout lane: shoppers in the United States can now complete purchases directly inside Copilot conversations, with payments and merchant plumbing provided by partners including PayPal, Stripe and Shopify — and Etsy sellers already surfacing in early availability. Background Microsoft unveiled the new in-chat purchase flow, Copilot Checkout, as part of a broader retail push built around agentic commerce — AI agents that not only...

Acronis Cyber Protect 17 lands as a major incremental release that doubles down on an aggressive one‑stop pitch: combine enterprise‑grade backup, recovery, and endpoint security into a single pane of glass and sell it to businesses that want fewer vendors and stronger ransomware resilience. This update expands platform support, adds agentless and discovery tools that simplify on‑prem and virtual deployments, and keeps Acronis’ familiar tiered licensing—an approach that remains powerful for...

This week’s Hackaday Podcast episode distilled a week of elegant, oddball engineering into a brisk coffee‑shop conversation: a mystery “What’s That Sound?” that turned out to be a flip‑dot display, two distinct ways to visualize sound (one budget Schlieren setup and one hacker’s strobe trick), an entertaining but unscientific benchmarking run that shows Windows 11 performing poorly on a 12‑year‑old ThinkPad, floppy disks turned into magnetic pixel canvases, deliberate JPEG corruption for...

If you’ve ever copied text or a table from Outlook and tried to paste it into Excel only to be met with the message “Your organization’s data cannot be pasted here,” the interruption is not a random Windows bug — it’s usually a deliberate data-protection control enforced by your organization’s mobile application management (MAM) or data-loss-prevention (DLP) settings. This article explains why the restriction appears, how to troubleshoot it as an end user, and what administrators need to...

Windows lets you open the Settings app in more ways than most users realize — and the fastest, most reliable method remains the keyboard shortcut Windows key + I — but there are also command-line, Run‑URI, File Explorer, Start menu and Power User menu approaches that are useful in specific situations. If you were sent a page or link claiming to “just click to open Settings,” treat it as suspicious: you can accomplish everything safely from the OS itself without visiting untrusted URLs...

Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer an experimental sidebar trick — it’s a multi‑modal assistant baked into Windows, Edge, macOS, mobile apps and Microsoft 365 that can see your screen, speak with you, generate images, work directly with your files and connect to your Gmail or Google Calendar — and there are practical ways to get more value from it right now. Background Copilot began as Microsoft’s answer to the wave of generative AI tools: a chat interface that could help you draft text...

IO Interactive has published the first official PC system requirements for 007 First Light ahead of its May 27, 2026 launch and confirmed a close technical partnership with NVIDIA that brings DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation to the PC build — a combination that promises substantial performance gains for RTX owners, but also raises practical questions about memory budgets, driver maturity, and real‑world latency/artifact trade‑offs. Background / Overview 007 First Light is IO Interactive’s...

Disabling Windows updates is a straightforward way to regain control over when your PC downloads patches and restarts, but it’s a choice that carries immediate convenience and long-term risk in equal measure; this feature story explains every practical method, the technical trade-offs, and a safe, test-first plan for any user who truly needs to stop automatic updates on Windows 10 or Windows 11. Background / Overview Windows Update exists to deliver security fixes, driver updates, and...

A new, faint UI cue in a Windows 11 Insider build suggests Microsoft is testing a tighter Copilot tie‑in inside File Explorer — an invisible button that appears when you hover over a blank spot in the navigation bar and which, according to strings found in preview code, may be labeled "Chat with Copilot" with an option to detach the Copilot interface from File Explorer into a floating pane. This discovery, visible only to Windows Insiders in preview builds and not yet functional, is the...

Microsoft and PayPal’s new in-chat checkout capability turns a conversational assistant into a commerce platform, and it could alter how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy products online by collapsing the traditional “search → browse → buy” funnel into a single agentic interaction. Background Microsoft has rolled out Copilot Checkout, an in-chat shopping and payment flow embedded in Microsoft Copilot, that allows U.S. users to discover products, view details, and complete purchases...

Hytale’s hardware targets are refreshingly pragmatic: a small base install, support for older GPUs and integrated graphics at minimum settings, a clear 1080p/60 recommended tier for mainstream players, and a distinct “creator/streamer” spec that pushes toward modern CPUs, abundant RAM and NVMe storage for stable high-resolution capture. Background Hytale has re-entered public view with a detailed hardware guidance sheet intended to help players and creators plan ahead for Early Access. The...

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...