Featured content

Microsoft has quietly folded a one‑click internet speed test into recent Windows 11 Insider builds, surfacing a “Perform speed test” / “Test internet speed” control in the taskbar’s network menu and Wi‑Fi quick settings — and for now that control simply opens a browser-hosted Bing speed‑test widget rather than running a native, in‑OS measurement. Background Windows 11’s development cadence has favored frequent, incremental quality‑of‑life updates delivered through the Windows Insider...

Microsoft is testing the ability to insert and render images inside Notepad — a move that would extend the app’s Markdown-based formatting into inline visual content and deepen the transformation of a once-minimal text editor into a richer note-taking and documentation tool. Background Notepad’s identity has shifted markedly over the past 18 months. Once a deliberately minimal, plain-text utility for fast edits and config changes, Notepad received a series of feature additions in 2025 that...

Cisco’s push to bring AI and human expertise directly into the product experience is no longer theoretical — it’s running in customers’ environments and, by the company’s account, changing how support works at scale. In a recent AI Agent & Copilot Podcast interview, Cisco principal engineer Nik Kale laid out the architecture and outcomes of an in‑product system called AI Support Fabric, describing a stack that fuses proactive guidance, multi‑agent AI assistance, and a robust human‑escalation...

Windows 11’s quietly expanding AI layer is no longer an experiment; it’s now a practical toolkit that can speed up everyday tasks, rescue messy photos, bridge language gaps, and even act as a searchable memory for your desktop. If you’ve upgraded in the last year or are shopping for a new PC in 2026, there are seven AI features in Windows 11 you should be using — and understanding — right now. Background Microsoft has steadily reworked Windows 11 to make AI a system-level capability rather...

OpenAI’s decision to begin testing advertisements inside ChatGPT marks a watershed moment for consumer-facing conversational AI — one that promises to fund free access at scale while also forcing users, regulators, and competitors to confront hard questions about privacy, persuasion, and the future of trusted digital assistants. ttps://help.openai.com/en/articles/20001047-ads-in-chatgpt) Background: how we arrived at this moment The practical reality is stark: large-scale, real-time...

A shift is underway: the places users ask questions and expect quick, authoritative answers are becoming advertising surfaces, and advertisers who treat AI search engines as a novelty risk missing the biggest reordering of digital marketing since programmatic display. Background / Overview The conversation started as a how-to primer on the practical mechanics of advertising in the new generation of AI-driven search experiences. The original piece the reader pointed to (a Halston Media Group...

OpenAI’s ChatGPT Pulse is the clearest signal yet that conversational AI wants to move from an on‑demand answer box into a persistent, proactive assistant that delivers information to users — not just responds when asked. Background: what Pulse is and why it matters ChatGPT Pulse debuted as a Pro‑user mobile preview in September 2025 and is built around a deceptively simple idea: perform asynchronous research on a user’s behalf and surface a short, curated batch of updates each day. Pulse...

Microsoft has issued a clear, time‑bound call to action for server administrators: the Secure Boot certificate authorities (CAs) that have underpinned Windows boot security since 2011 are being replaced by a 2023 certificate family, and Windows Server instances do not receive the replacement via the same automated Controlled Feature Rollout used for many client PCs—so administrators must plan and run the certificate update on servers well before the 2011 certificates begin expiring in late...

The AI era is quietly dissolving the old barrier between growth stocks and income stocks: Microsoft and Broadcom are now poster children for a new category of AI dividend growth names — companies that combine platform-scale revenue visibility with meaningful free cash flow, steady capital returns, and the potential for sustained dividend expansion. Background / Overview For decades, income investors treated the technology sector as a place to avoid if you needed cash today. Fast growth...

Microsoft’s humble Notepad — the tiny, decades‑old text editor most of us open for a quick note or to strip formatting — is quietly changing shape: Insider builds and multiple reports show Microsoft is testing inline image support in Notepad for Windows 11, a feature that would let users insert and view pictures alongside Markdown‑formatted text while still offering a switch to preserve classic plaintext behavior. Background Notepad’s evolution over the last 18 months has been deliberate and...

The LG Challenge’s opening round at Lambeth Town Hall made plain a lesson many councils are learning the hard way: embedding artificial intelligence is not a one-off technology project but a multi-dimensional leadership, culture and delivery challenge that must be designed around people, democratic accountability and measurable outcomes. Michael Barrett’s report from the event captures how two competing teams translated that lesson into practical proposals — and why the winning approach...

In a short but pointed Cloud Wars conversation, Stoneridge Software CEO Eric Newell laid out a simple executive premise: organizations must move beyond AI experimentation and build the operational, security, and governance muscle needed to make Microsoft 365 Copilot (and the broader Copilot/agent stack) a productive, trusted part of everyday work. Newell’s upcoming masterclass — “Executive’s Guide to Rolling Out M365 Copilot” — at the AI Agent & Copilot Summit NA (March 17–19, 2026, San...

Mark Russinovich and Scott Hanselman — two of Microsoft’s most visible engineering voices — have fired the opening salvo in what may become the industry's defining personnel debate of the AI era: unless companies deliberately preserve and invest in entry-level hiring and mentorship, agentic coding assistants risk hollowing out the next generation of software engineers. Their paper, published in Communications of the ACM in February 2026, argues that generative coding agents produce a...

Firefox’s latest desktop update leans into a rare — and deliberate — user-first stance on artificial intelligence while polishing the browser’s accessibility, backup, and drag‑and‑drop workflows, plus closing out legacy Windows support with a final security nod to older systems. Background / Overview Mozilla has positioned Firefox 148 as a measured response to the two-headed browser reality of 2026: a surge of AI-powered conveniences and a user base that remains deeply concerned about...

Microsoft builds more useful, opinionated Windows tools than it ships with Windows 11 — and that disconnect matters more than you think. Background / Overview Windows has always shipped as a mix of core system components and optional conveniences. Over the last decade Microsoft shifted many traditionally “built‑in” experiences into Microsoft Store packages and optional provisioning flows. That makes the out‑of‑the‑box experience more modular, but it also changes what users actually find...

Microsoft’s latest lifecycle update is a hard wake-up call: several legacy Windows platforms released in 2016 are moving into final support windows, and organizations that delay will face an accelerating mix of security, operational, and budget risk. Overview Microsoft announced that Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 and Windows 10 IoT Enterprise LTSB 2016 will reach their end-of-support date on October 13, 2026, and Windows Server 2016 will reach end of support on January 12, 2027. After...

A sudden, unsettling development in the handheld‑PC world has put owners of several high‑end Windows 11 devices on alert: multiple reports and OEM responses suggest AMD has stopped delivering new driver updates for the Ryzen Z1 Extreme APU. If that reporting is correct, it would leave a cluster of popular handhelds — including the original Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, and some factory configurations of the Legion Go S and ROG Ally X family — without fresh validated graphics and...

Microsoft’s own list of “best productivity apps in Windows” places Copilot at the top — and that choice tells us as much about Microsoft’s product positioning as it does about real‑world productivity gains for users. Background / Overview Microsoft published a promoted Windows page titled “Best productivity apps in Windows for getting more done,” and it lists nine built‑in Windows tools with Microsoft Copilot sitting in the number‑one slot ahead of long‑established utilities like To Do...

If you booted a Windows 11 PC in 2025–2026 and found an ever-present Copilot icon, a Copilot entry in Edge, Notepad, Paint, File Explorer’s right‑click menu, and even a dedicated Copilot key on your laptop, you’re not imagining things—Microsoft has intentionally layered Copilot across the OS, and removing it reliably now requires a methodical, multi‑layer approach rather than a single toggle. Background Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer a small sidebar experiment; it is a family of features...

Shopify’s latest push — turning AI from a feature into a commerce surface — is more than marketing flourishes: it’s an attempt to re-architect how discovery, negotiation and checkout work in an agent-driven world. By combining a merchant‑grade catalog, an embedded merchant AI assistant (Sidekick), an open commerce standard co‑developed with Google (the Universal Commerce Protocol), and what Shopify calls Agentic Storefronts to distribute those capabilities across major AI channels, Shopify...