Featured content

Most social workers now describe their early experience of artificial intelligence as a practical relief rather than a dystopian threat: a Community Care poll reported that the majority of practitioners who have trialled AI tools for administrative tasks rate the experience positively, and parallel research commissioned by regulators and independent bodies shows broad agreement that generative assistants and transcription tools can free time for frontline work while raising significant...

Microsoft has put a firm deadline on the end of Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online: tenant-by-tenant disablement begins October 1, 2026, and EWS will be permanently removed from Exchange Online on April 1, 2027 — a hard stop Microsoft says will admit no exceptions. o Background Exchange Web Services (EWS) has been a workhorse of the Exchange ecosystem since Exchange Server 2007, powering everything from third‑party backup and archiving tools to multifunction‑device scan‑to‑email...

GitHub’s platform suffered a multi-service disruption on 9–10 February 2026 that left Actions queues stalled, pull‑request pages slow or erroring, notifications delayed by up to an hour, and parts of Copilot operating with policy propagation delays — a messy reminder that even the dominant code-hosting platform is fallible, and that enterprises should design for downtime as deliberately as they do for features. Background GitHub is the central collaboration hub for an enormous portion of the...

Europe’s move to reclaim digital control has a quiet, practical counterpart in the hobbyist and small‑business IT communities: a crop of polished, ready‑to‑run Linux server appliances that let individuals and organizations run their own clouds—mail, chat, file sync, VPN, and even Windows‑style directory services—without outsourcing everything to the hyperscalers. The idea is simple but consequential: if you can operate a modest server with disciplined procedures, you can keep your data under...

Big Tech is treating 2026 like a construction season for a new industrial economy: together, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon and Meta are committing roughly US$650 billion toward AI-related capital expenditures this year — an unprecedented, front‑loaded bet on data centres, specialised chips, memory, and the energy and cooling systems that keep those machines humming. What looks like headline spectacle is also the operational plumbing for a shift in how cloud compute, advertising and software...

Intel’s latest driver rollouts for Windows 10 and Windows 11 mark a quiet but important step in the industry’s transition to Wi‑Fi 7—bringing early firmware-level support for next‑generation wireless silicon, faster network discovery, and a suite of functional updates intended to smooth the rocky edges of modern wireless connectivity. The new packages (spanning the 23.x and 24.x release families) add explicit compatibility for Intel’s Wi‑Fi 7 modules, tune 6 GHz behavior, and push...

Microsoft has quietly shipped PowerToys v0.97.2 — a small but important stability-and-polish update that addresses a raft of regressions introduced during the broader 0.97 cycle, notably fixing Command Palette glitches, tuning CursorWrap behavior, and repairing several UI and upgrade-path edge cases that affected users on mixed-DPI and Windows 10 systems. Background / Overview PowerToys has evolved from a grab-bag of desktop experiments into a modular productivity platform for Windows power...

Microsoft’s January change to Windows Update means older “V3” and “V4” printer drivers will no longer be published automatically to Windows 11’s update channel, and that shift is already visible in the wild — but you don’t have to throw away your inkjet or laser just yet. Background / Overview Microsoft announced the deprecation of the legacy third‑party printer driver servicing model back in September 2023 and implemented a hard enforcement step on January 15, 2026: from that date...

Microsoft has begun rolling a Windows 11 preview update that quietly delivers two small-but-significant usability improvements: native webcam pan/tilt controls surfaced in Settings, and a staged return of Emoji 16.0 to Insiders—both delivered via the enablement/CFR model Microsoft now favors for 25H2 preview builds. ] Background / Overview Windows Insider previews are increasingly split into two technical steps: the heavy binary work is shipped in cumulative updates, while small enablement...

Windows 11 contains a deliberately obscure, high‑privilege fallback for when the desktop locks up: a built‑in Emergency Restart accessible from the Secure Attention Sequence that force‑reboots the machine without the usual graceful shutdown choreography. Background / Overview For years IT pros and power users have quietly used a handful of secret paths inside Windows to recover a frozen session. One of the most useful of these — commonly reported in forum threads and rediscovered in...

Hytale’s Early Access launch finally landed with the kind of meticulous hardware guidance few modern sandbox games bother to publish: instead of a single “minimum/recommended” table, Hypixel Studios released a tiered briefing — Minimum, Recommended, and Recording/Streamer — that ties concrete parts and performance targets to real in‑game goals. That clarity matters: Hytale is a hybrid voxel sandbox with significant simulation cost in singleplayer, and the studio’s guidance explains what to...

Microsoft shipped identical feature sets to both the Dev and Beta Windows Insider channels on February 9, 2026 — delivering native pan/tilt camera controls in Settings and a staged return of Emoji 16.0 as part of the Windows 11, version 25H2 preview, even though the Dev and Beta builds carry different build numbers. Background / Overview Microsoft’s February 9, 2026 Insider previews represent a notable moment in the Windows release cadence: instead of diverging immediately, the Dev channel...

Microsoft’s latest AI push for Windows has reopened a debate that security teams, privacy advocates and everyday users have been quietly wrestling with for years: how much convenience do we hand to an operating system before we lose control of our own data? Recent coverage from independent outlets and data‑protection experts labels Windows 11 — and in particular its new Recall capability — as a more dangerous option than Windows 10 for privacy‑minded users, and urges caution about upgrading...

Microsoft’s engineers have quietly opened a new front in OS-level security with LiteBox, a Rust‑based “library OS” designed to shrink the exposed surface between running code and the host system so dramatically that entire classes of kernel‑exposed attack vectors become far harder to exploit. Announced and published to GitHub in early February 2026, LiteBox is not a consumer product you install — it’s a developer‑facing sandboxing runtime intended to be embedded into applications, runtimes...

Windows 11’s built‑in Live Captions quietly turns any audio your PC hears into readable text, and it’s capable of more than just on‑screen subtitles — it can caption your microphone, translate dozens of languages on supported hardware, and be customized to fit your workflow. Background Windows has shipped an integrated captioning tool since the introduction of Live Captions in Windows 11 (22H2 and later). The feature appears as a floating or docked caption window and can be toggled with the...

Dynamics Square’s upcoming webinar on 12 February 2026 promises a practical playbook for industrial, project-driven businesses to replace spreadsheets and paper trails with a single, connected Microsoft stack—centered on Dynamics 365 Business Central, Dynamics 365 Project Operations, and Microsoft Copilot—and to demonstrate how that combination can tighten project control, speed invoicing, and make compliance auditable in real-world industrial settings. Background / Overview Industrial...

Microsoft’s Copilot rollout has collided with a reality check: promising agentic AI that “goes into” your OneDrive and cleans up duplicates sounds great on a blog post, but the actual user experience can be messy, gated, and maddeningly inconsistent. The PCWorld writer’s test-drive — where Copilot reportedly saw some files in OneDrive’s Home view but not the deeper My files folder, gave contradictory license messages, and could not run the “scan all files for duplicates” workflow the author...

Most organisations that say they “use AI” still struggle to convert experiments into measurable business outcomes — and the practical lessons from Sigma Software Group underline why the gap is organisational, not just technical. Background / Overview The rush to deploy generative AI (GenAI) and copilots has created a common pattern: rapid tool adoption, a flurry of proof‑of‑concepts, and a much smaller set of sustained, value‑creating deployments. The reality across sectors is that...

The City of Calgary’s decision to block ChatGPT on all municipal networks and devices on Friday, February 6, 2026, is a sharp, public-facing example of how local governments are grappling with generative AI: embracing its productivity benefits while clamping down on perceived data, privacy, and security risks. The ban does not mean the City is turning its back on AI — Calgary’s IT and services teams continue to run machine learning projects, use generative tools in limited, approved forms...

Windows users don’t have to tolerate trialware, nag screens, or opaque binaries — a practical, polished, and truly free alternative already exists: open-source desktop applications. After months of hands-on testing across fresh installs and daily-driver machines, these ten apps consistently delivered real-world reliability, performance, and time savings on Windows systems of all ages. They replace subscription services, remove vendor lock-in, and in many cases outperform proprietary rivals...