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AI-powered anime character creation has reached the point where anyone with an idea—and a few well‑crafted words—can produce polished, anime‑style visuals and build a character’s personality, backstory, and scenes without traditional drawing skills. Background AI anime generators convert natural‑language prompts into visuals that mimic anime aesthetics: linework, exaggerated facial features, stylized hair, and genre cues such as “shōnen” or “slice‑of‑life.” These systems combine large‑scale...

Microsoft researchers have shown that a single, seemingly benign unlabeled prompt can erase safety guardrails in a wide range of modern open-weight models — a finding that forces a hard rethinking of how enterprises and vendors evaluate alignment, fine-tuning workflows, and the threat model for downstream customization. (microsoft.com) Background The Microsoft Security research team, led by Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and co‑authors, released a paper and accompanying blog post describing a...

A recent campaign has weaponized paid Bing search ads and Microsoft Azure Blob Storage to deliver convincing tech‑support scam pages, redirecting users from routine searches to fake Microsoft security warnings and toll‑free numbers — a scalable, low‑cost social‑engineering pipeline that hit at least 48 U.S. organizations in early February 2026 and exposes critical gaps in ad vetting, cloud governance, and endpoint protections. Background / Overview Threat researchers at Netskope identified...

Windows 11 already gives you the ability to create multiple, persistent workspaces — virtual desktops — and using them well can be one of the fastest, least obvious productivity upgrades on any PC, if you know the shortcuts and a few simple habits. Background: what virtual desktops are and why they matter Virtual desktops are a lightweight organization layer above the normal Windows desktop: each virtual desktop holds a set of open windows and apps that you can switch between instantly...

Microsoft’s Copilot is no longer a sidebar novelty — it’s a platform and an operational challenge, and O’Reilly’s new Copilot and Agent Administration Fundamentals (Exam AB-900) course aims to put administrators and builders on a firm footing for that reality. The offering promises a pragmatic mix of administration, security, and hands‑on agent building using Copilot Studio, framed around the AB‑900 certification. That combination — governing who gets access, how tenant data is protected...

Microsoft appears to be pulling back from its "AI everywhere" sprint across Windows 11 — but the question isn't whether it can slow down the rollout; it's whether Microsoft can rebuild the trust it eroded while racing to plaster Copilot onto every UI surface. Background: how Copilot became omnipresent Since Windows 11 began receiving deep Copilot integrations, Microsoft's strategy has been unmistakable: make AI a first-class, visible part of the platform. Copilot moved from an optional chat...

A sharply worded satirical post on royaldutchshellplc.com — drafted with generative tools, fed back into other assistants for critique, and then published by a human editor — has become an accidental laboratory for how satire, defamation law, and AI-driven journalism now collide. The late‑December experiment staged by longtime Shell critic John Donovan routed a satirical role‑play piece and its supporting archive through multiple public assistants, then published the side‑by‑side transcripts...

Microsoft hasn’t confirmed a “Windows 12” release, but a steady stream of leaks, Copilot-driven product pivots, and hardware moves make a next‑generation, AI‑first Windows a realistic and consequential possibility — one that could reshape system requirements, app compatibility, update cadence, and even how Microsoft charges for the OS. rview Microsoft’s public messaging in 2025 emphasized a different priority: it called 2025 the “year of the Windows 11 PC refresh,” and has been pressing the...

Microsoft issued an urgent fix this week for a high‑severity vulnerability in the modern Windows Notepad app that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands on a target PC simply by getting a user to open a specially crafted Markdown (.md) file and click a link inside it. The flaw, tracked as CVE‑2026‑20841 and rated CVSS 3.1: 8.8, is a classic command‑injection problem (CWE‑77) in how the Store‑distributed Notepad handles certain link and protocol elements in Markdown, and...

Microsoft has not named or confirmed a product called Windows 12, but an increasingly coherent narrative—driven by Microsoft’s published lifecycle dates, its Copilot+ device program, analyst timelines and repeated reporting from industry veterans—points to a plausible “next major Windows milestone” arriving in the 2027 timeframe. What is certain today is not a product name but a direction: Microsoft is reshaping Windows around on‑device AI, new hardware classes (Copilot+ PCs), and a...

Windows multitasking doesn’t feel like magic because Windows is doing the work — you’re simply not using the right tools or workflows to let it do that work for you. A short, keyboard-focused reframe — plus a handful of built-in features and PowerToys utilities — will transform a cluttered screen into a fast, context-aware workspace. The common complaint “multitasking on Windows 11 feels bad” is accurate only if you limit yourself to dragging windows around and hunting for icons; use the OS...

I installed Windows 11 on a 10‑year‑old PC using Rufus’ built‑in bypass options — and it worked, but not magically: Rufus modifies the Windows 11 installer so the setup program skips Microsoft’s hardware gates, while the installed OS remains an unmodified Windows 11 image. This approach gives you a practical path to bring legacy machines forward, but it also carries real tradeoffs — from possible update restrictions and driver incompatibilities to the risk of data loss if you don’t prepare...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 release, version 26H1, is not a conventional feature update for existing PCs — it’s a narrow, device‑first platform image designed to enable next‑generation Arm silicon and will ship only on select new devices (notably those built on Qualcomm’s Snapdragon X2 family). Background / Overview Microsoft’s 26H1 departure from the familiar H2 feature‑update model is deliberate. Rather than pushing a single feature update to the entire installed base, the company...

I’ve spent the past year using an Arm-based Surface Laptop 15 with a Snapdragon X Elite and 32 GB of RAM as a daily driver, and the short, practical answer to “is app compatibility still a problem on Windows 11 ARM?” is: not the way it used to be, but the caveats matter. The platform’s new emulation layer, Prism, plus an increasing number of native ARM64 builds, have turned Windows on Arm from a specialist curiosity into a practical option for many users — while leaving a predictable set of...

Microsoft’s Copilot rollout has delivered a leap in workplace productivity—and with it, a fresh class of security risk that is only visible when the assistant is actually running. Recent disclosures and vendor analyses show a practical, repeatable pattern: configuration hardening, identity controls, and static DLP reduce risk, but they don’t fully close the gap that opens when an LLM-driven assistant synthesizes and returns information at runtime. That blind spot—what the assistant grounded...

Google’s Gemini is quietly testing a feature called “Import AI chats” that — if it ships as shown in leaks — would let users upload exported conversation archives from other chatbots (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and others) and continue those threads inside Gemini without losing prior context or media. Early screenshots and hands‑on reporting place the control in Gemini’s attachment/“+” menu as a beta option; the import flow appears to ask users to download a chat archive from the origin...

The semiconductor industry’s supply chain tension just tightened another notch: memory suppliers are actively policing orders to curb hoarding even as hyperscalers race to deploy custom inference silicon, and Microsoft’s newly announced Maia 200 accelerator — built on TSMC’s 3 nm process — is already adding pressure to scarce advanced packaging and HBM resources. This collision of demand-side strategy and back-end manufacturing reality is reshaping procurement, device roadmaps, and...

Avira’s antivirus offerings have vaulted back into the conversation as a top-tier option for Windows users — but the story is more nuanced than a single headline. Recent reporting tied to a Consumer Reports roundup prompted renewed interest in Avira Free Security and Avira Antivirus Pro, and independent lab data from AV‑Comparatives and AV‑Test confirm Avira remains a formidable defender against modern threats. At the same time, tradeoffs — from aggressive upsell prompts in the free tier to...

Microsoft’s February Patch Tuesday closed a dangerous loophole in the modern Notepad app that could let an attacker turn a simple Markdown (.md) file into a remote code execution (RCE) trap — a single click on a crafted link inside Notepad’s Markdown view could launch unverified protocols and cause arbitrary code to run with the user’s privileges. (msrc.microsoft.com) Background / Overview Notepad has shed its reputation as a minimal text-only program over the last year, gaining Markdown...

For years, Notepad was the little, instant-open tool you reached for when you needed a scratch, a quick edit, or a place to paste a one-off command—no sign‑in, no telemetry prompts, no bloated menus. That era is changing, and the shift is more than cosmetic: Microsoft has steadily reworked Notepad into a modernized, Copilot‑enabled app with tabs, Markdown-aware formatting, and AI actions, prompting a growing exodus of users who prefer predictability and performance. In response...