Featured content

Microsoft Access’s latest Current Channel build—version 2510 (Build 19328.20158)—delivers a compact but meaningful set of quality‑of‑life fixes that directly address long-standing designer pain points: Undo/Redo behavior when changing control stacking, improved syntax visibility in the Monaco SQL editor under dark Office themes, and better visibility controls for Waterfall chart connector lines. These are incremental changes on the surface, but they remove friction from everyday design and...

The Louvre’s security embarrassment boiled down to a single, humiliating detail: auditors reported that the server managing the museum’s video surveillance could be accessed with the password “LOUVRE,” and a separate Thales system used “THALES” — trivial credentials flagged years earlier in a 2014 audit that warned the museum about obsolete operating systems, weak passwords and poor segregation between critical networks and the public domain. This revelation has transformed the October...

Windows 11’s glossy surfaces and Fluent Design flourishes hide a quieter reality: under the polish lies a decades‑old codebase and a surprising number of user interfaces that haven’t seen meaningful redesigns in years. Pocket‑lint’s recent roundup of five “ancient” corners of Windows 11 — Computer Management, Registry Editor, Character Map, Windows Mobility Center, and the screensaver subsystem — is a useful reminder that modernizing an OS isn’t just about new features, it’s also about...

Over the past two weeks the cloud’s convenience suddenly felt brittle: two back‑to‑back outages at the largest hyperscale providers — an AWS disruption rooted in DNS/DynamoDB in the US‑EAST‑1 region and a configuration error in Microsoft Azure’s Front Door fabric — produced widespread service stoppages that grounded bank flows, delayed airline check‑ins, and left millions of consumers staring at error screens. Background / Overview The technical headlines were straightforward: on October 20...

Decagon’s pitch is simple but consequential: replace brittle, one-size-fits-all chatbots with an always-on, concierge-grade AI agent that reasons across systems, executes workflows, and learns from every interaction — and do it in a way that business teams can own. The company’s Agent Operating Procedures (AOPs), multi‑model runtime, and Azure‑backed fine‑tuning have helped clients push deflection and resolution metrics that would once have seemed aspirational in contact center operations...

Transmission’s third 4.1.0 beta lands with a tight, pragmatic changelog that focuses on real‑world reliability improvements — particularly for sequential downloads, web access via proxies, and the daemon/service plumbing — while also polishing client UIs and developer tooling; the release is explicitly still in feature-not-final status, so cautious testing is the order of the day. Background Transmission is a long‑running, open‑source BitTorrent client prized for a small memory footprint, a...

NVIDIA’s newest GeForce driver update has rendered a clutch of older Forza titles unplayable for many PC owners, with users reporting an AP204 “GPU not compatible” error when launching Forza Horizon 3, Forza Motorsport 6 Apex and Forza Motorsport 7 — and the most reliable fix so far is to roll your driver back to version 576.88. Background Older PC games and modern GPU drivers have an uneasy relationship: drivers evolve to support new hardware and APIs while legacy games assume driver...

Microsoft quietly showed a credible path out of one of Windows 11’s most persistent gripes — the long, crowded right‑click (context) menu — with a split context‑menu concept surfaced during a WinUI developer presentation, but the change is still an early, developer‑first proposal and not a finished, system‑wide fix. Background / Overview Windows’ right‑click context menu has always been a powerful, composable surface: installers, shell extensions, and apps can add verbs and entries, which...

Microsoft has created a dedicated Superintelligence team under AI chief Mustafa Suleyman and framed its mission not as an open‑ended race to artificial general intelligence but as a deliberate push for humanist superintelligence — domain‑specialist, auditable, and strictly contained systems that prioritize human control and interpretability over raw, unrestricted capability. Background Microsoft’s announcement formalizes a strategic pivot: the company will build first‑party high‑capability...

Microsoft and Meta have quietly — and strategically — moved a long‑teased idea from preview into practical reality: Windows 11 can now run as a high‑resolution, multi‑monitor desktop inside Meta Quest 3 and Quest 3S headsets via Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Link, delivered alongside Meta’s Horizon OS v81 rollout. Background Mixed Reality Link started life as a public technical preview in December 2024, a collaboration between Microsoft and Meta to test whether a streamed Windows desktop could...

Microsoft has begun silently deploying three new Microsoft 365 “companion” apps — People, Files, and Calendar — to Windows 11 business devices that run Microsoft 365, and the apps are being installed and pinned to the taskbar by default unless administrators opt out through the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center. Background Microsoft announced a taskbar‑centric productivity set aimed at reducing context switching for knowledge workers: lightweight apps that surface people details, organization...

Microsoft’s apology and refund offer for Australian Microsoft 365 subscribers came after the ACCC filed Federal Court proceedings alleging Microsoft misled roughly 2.7 million Australians by obscuring a lower‑cost, non‑AI “Classic” subscription while rolling Copilot into consumer plans — the company now provides a self‑service path to switch back to Microsoft 365 Classic and has promised refunds for eligible renewals, but the process has caveats, timing constraints, and practical pitfalls...

Microsoft has quietly — and decisively — created a new research and engineering unit inside its AI division called the MAI Superintelligence Team, led by Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman, and set its north star on what the company calls “humanist superintelligence” — advanced, domain‑targeted AI that is explicitly designed to remain controllable, auditable and firmly in service of people. Background Microsoft’s announcement is more than a rebrand or a PR exercise: it signals a strategic...

Microsoft’s placement as a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for CRM Customer Engagement Center marks a consequential moment for enterprise customer service: the vendor’s product strategy has moved from incremental AI assistant features to a deliberate, agentic-service play built around autonomous agents, embedded Copilot experiences, and deep Dynamics 365 integrations. Background / Overview Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CRM CEC) evaluates vendors on...

Microsoft’s API Management (APIM) now includes a built‑in policy that can publish messages directly to Azure Service Bus, turning API calls into first‑class events without the glue code or adapter services that teams have used until now. Background Azure API Management is a gateway and policy engine that sits between clients and backend services to provide security, governance, transformation, and observability for APIs. Azure Service Bus is Microsoft’s fully managed enterprise messaging...

The sudden appearance of a blue screen labeled Kernel Security Check Failure can turn a routine work session into an urgent troubleshooting exercise, but the stop code is usually Windows doing its job—halting the system because the kernel found corrupted or inconsistent data it cannot safely ignore. Background The Windows kernel is the core of the operating system: it manages memory, schedules processes, and mediates hardware access. When the kernel detects memory corruption or a critical...

Microsoft’s AI leadership has just announced a new, deliberately constrained path toward “superintelligence” — one framed not as an open-ended race to omniscience but as Humanist Superintelligence (HSI): advanced, domain-focused systems designed explicitly to serve people and societal priorities while remaining controllable and auditable. The initiative — the MAI Superintelligence Team, led by Mustafa Suleyman — is a clear strategic pivot: build first‑party capabilities, emphasize...

I switched to a multi‑monitor desktop and discovered the frustrating truth: Windows still won’t let you adjust the backlight of most external monitors from the built‑in brightness slider — but a tiny, smart app called Twinkle Tray fills that gap elegantly and safely, putting per‑monitor brightness, contrast, power and automation controls into the system tray and dramatically improving the day‑to‑day experience of multi‑display setups. Background Windows provides convenient brightness...

Microsoft’s AI leadership has just taken a dramatic new step: the company has created a dedicated MAI Superintelligence Team under the leadership of Mustafa Suleyman, positioning Microsoft to build next‑generation models it describes as humanist superintelligence while deliberately reducing operational dependence on OpenAI and external frontier models. Background Microsoft’s new initiative arrives at a high-stakes moment for the cloud‑AI era. For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have been closely...

Boeing’s new Virtual Airplane Procedures Trainer (VAPT) — a cloud-powered, Microsoft Flight Simulator–driven tool billed as a way to bring high-fidelity flight‑deck procedure practice to laptops and tablets — was unveiled at the European Aviation Training Summit in Cascais and immediately positioned as a potential game-changer for how airlines prepare crews before they step into full‑flight simulators. Background / Overview Boeing presented VAPT as the first application in a broader “Virtual...