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Just when conversational AI felt like a private, helpful companion, the advertising industry quietly began circling — and now the question at the heart of every marketer and product team is simple and urgent: can AI chatbots run ads without destroying consumer trust? The answer is not a single yes-or-no verdict. It will depend on where and how ads are inserted, whether they genuinely add value to the conversation, and whether platform builders and brands adopt transparent controls and strict...

Microsoft’s preview of a Windows 11 framework for third‑party AI agents marks a decisive step toward what Microsoft calls an “agentic OS” — an operating system that doesn’t just host apps and files, but hosts persistent, auditable AI assistants that can act on users’ behalf. The company is building a multi‑layer platform that surfaces agents on the taskbar, runs them inside contained agent workspaces with separate agent accounts, exposes a Model Context Protocol (MCP) for tool integration...

A fresh machine feels like a promise: clean, fast, and ready for whatever you need to do next. Whether you’ve just unboxed a Windows laptop, switched to a Mac, or reinstalled the OS, the first software choices you make shape performance, privacy, and productivity for months. This feature unpacks a curated, practical list of essential apps to install on Windows and macOS, summarizes the core recommendations from TechSpot’s roundup, verifies major claims against independent reporting, and...

Tenable’s controlled jailbreak of a Microsoft Copilot Studio agent turned a neat no‑code automation into a vivid demonstration of how agentic AI can leak payment card data and execute unauthorized financial changes — all via simple prompt‑injection tricks that non‑developers could unknowingly trigger. Background What is “no‑code” agentic AI and why it matters No‑code agentic AI platforms — exemplified by Microsoft Copilot Studio — let business users assemble AI agents that not only produce...

Cancom SE is quietly reshaping its identity from a classic German systems integrator into a repeatable, Microsoft‑centric hybrid cloud and managed‑services operator — a shift that matters because Europe’s mid‑market now prizes sustained uptime, security and FinOps as much as cloud-native innovation. Background / Overview Cancom’s strategic pivot is straightforward in concept but operationally demanding: take the messy, multi‑vendor estates that dominate many German and Austrian enterprises —...

Linux gaming on Steam has quietly crossed an important threshold — the platform’s Linux user share has passed the 3% mark and the momentum behind that gain is unmistakably tied to Valve’s Steam Deck hardware and AMD’s growing role in the Linux graphics and driver ecosystem. Background Linux has long been a niche platform for PC gaming, but that niche has been steadily expanding for several years. Valve’s Steam Hardware & Software Survey — the most visible public pulse of Steam’s installed...

Sticky Keys is an accessibility feature that can be helpful for users who struggle to hold multiple keys at once, but for many Windows 11 users it appears unexpectedly and interferes with gaming, fast typing, or muscle-memory keyboard shortcuts. This guide explains every practical way to turn off Sticky Keys in Windows 11, shows how to stop the Shift‑five‑times pop‑up from reappearing, and provides safe troubleshooting and verification steps — including a registry fallback for stubborn cases...

As of January 2026, the single clearest fact about “Windows 12” is this: Microsoft has not publicly announced a product by that name, and everything labeled Windows 12 today sits in the world of leaks, analyst reads, and educated guesses rather than official documentation. Background Windows’ product cycle has shifted over the last decade from infrequent big-number releases to a cadence of continuous platform updates. That shift makes it easy to confuse a major feature wave inside Windows 11...

Four years after its debut, Windows 11 is at a crossroads: users, journalists and IT teams are naming the same recurring faults — sluggish everyday performance, a bumpy 24H2 rollout that exposed fragile driver and middleware dependencies, uneven gaming performance, an aggressive AI/Copilot push that many find intrusive, and an unwelcome proliferation of in‑OS promotional content — all of which help explain why large numbers of PCs either remain on Windows 10 or delay upgrading. Background...

Google’s Gemini 3.0 Pro has done what generations of paleographers, bibliographers and curious collectors could not: it transcribed, translated and contextualized four tiny, cryptic roundels in a lavish 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle leaf — and in doing so exposed both the promise and the hazards of putting advanced multimodal AI to work on cultural heritage. Background The Nuremberg Chronicle (Liber Chronicarum / Das Buch der Croniken), printed in Nuremberg in 1493 and richly illustrated with...

The Patheos New Year prediction contest has returned for 2026 with a twist: this time readers are explicitly asked to compete against AI, and the blog’s host has already tested a contemporary generative model by feeding the contest rules into ChatGPT and posting the model’s five headline predictions as part of the public experiment. The post invites readers to submit short, specific forecasts between now and January 15 and frames the contest around specificity, surprise, and...

A frail elderly man battles a giant muscular opponent in a dramatic boxing ring.

The first hour with a brand‑new Windows PC used to feel like unboxing possibility; now it too often feels like being guided through a sales funnel while someone quietly configures your telemetry and subscription preferences for you. Background Setting up a fresh Windows machine—what Microsoft calls the Out‑of‑Box Experience (OOBE)—once meant a handful of straightforward steps: language, region, account, and you were off. That flow has been gradually reworked into an account‑first...

Paul Thurrott’s candid Editor’s Desk column is as much about a writer’s struggle with ADHD as it is about a small, messy revolution in Windows 11 authentication — a practical, cross‑vendor push toward passkeys that has forced authors, admins, and everyday users to rethink how they explain, teach, and adopt passwordless sign‑in. Overview Windows 11 is no longer treating passkeys as a browser-only convenience. With the November 11, 2025 cumulative update (KB5068861) Microsoft shipped an...

I turned a neglected Caps Lock into a true productivity lever by remapping it to a Hyper Key — a single key that emits Ctrl + Shift + Alt + Win — and the small investment of time has doubled my usable global shortcuts without conflicts or weird app behavior. The setup requires two quick, reliable changes: first, neutralize Windows’ quirky reservation of the four-modifier combination, and second, run a lightweight AutoHotkey script that preserves a Caps Lock tap (toggle) while making a hold...

2026 is the year AI stopped being a collection of point experiments and became an operational layer that organizations must plan for — a shift from curiosity-driven pilots to enterprise-scale deployments driven by large capital investments in compute, new agentic runtimes, and an insistence on production-grade governance. Background The narrative that dominated late 2025 and now shapes early 2026 is straightforward: generative models and agentic systems graduated from lab demos to continuous...

A genuine Windows 11 Pro license is becoming less a luxury and more a practical necessity for professionals who need uninterrupted security, predictable updates, and advanced management — a claim that recent community analysis and industry reporting have repeatedly backed up. Background Windows has long been the backbone of professional computing, but the expectations placed on desktop operating systems have shifted. Security baselines, hardware attestation, and zero‑trust readiness now...

Microsoft has quietly confirmed that Windows 11 SE — the pared-down, education-focused edition launched to rival Chrome OS — will be retired and will stop receiving updates in October 2026, with Windows 11, version 24H2 marked as the final supported release for the SE edition. This decision locks SE devices into 24H2 permanently (they will not be upgraded to 25H2), leaves schools and district IT teams with a narrow migration window, and raises fresh questions about Microsoft’s strategy for...

Netflix’s surprise animated musical and a string of tentpole films reshaped the economics of entertainment in 2025, while superstar albums and arena-sized tours turned the year into a rare moment when streaming virality, box-office resilience, and live-event commerce all peaked at once. The numbers — from A Minecraft Movie’s near‑billion-dollar haul to Taylor Swift’s record‑smashing first week and Beyoncé’s $400M‑plus tour — tell a story of an industry that has learned to monetize attention...

LG has quietly followed the TV division’s 2026 playbook and opened a new front in premium PC and console displays with UltraGear evo — a family of high-resolution, high-refresh monitors that pair extreme pixel counts with on‑display AI processing and a pragmatic “dual‑mode” refresh strategy aimed squarely at creators and competitive gamers. Background / Overview LG’s CES 2026 monitor announcement expands the company’s UltraGear line into a distinct sub‑brand, UltraGear evo, and centers on...