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PUBG is adding an AI teammate that can listen, loot, drive, and fight much like a human player — a first public example of NVIDIA’s ACE (Autonomous Character Engine) being used to create a “co‑playable” squadmate called PUBG Ally — a feature that promises to reshape solo play, onboarding, and multiplayer design while raising hard questions about fairness, privacy, and long‑term player behaviour. Background / Overview NVIDIA announced ACE — a suite of RTX‑accelerated technologies that combine...

On October 29 a broad Microsoft service disruption knocked Microsoft 365, Azure management surfaces, Xbox/Minecraft authentication and thousands of Azure‑fronted customer sites offline or intermittently unreliable, with Microsoft tracing the incident to an inadvertent configuration change in Azure Front Door that propagated through its global edge fabric. Background / Overview Microsoft’s cloud and consumer stacks depend on a global edge fabric called Azure Front Door (AFD) for TLS...

Thousands of businesses and millions of users worldwide were disrupted on October 29, 2025, when a configuration error in Microsoft Azure’s global content delivery fabric triggered an hours‑long cloud outage that knocked out Microsoft 365, Xbox services, Minecraft, and hit retail and travel apps from Starbucks to Kroger and Alaska Airlines. Background Cloud providers have become the invisible backbone of modern commerce and entertainment: a handful of hyperscale vendors host identity...

Microsoft’s latest earnings cycle turned into one of the clearest demonstrations yet that the company’s AI-first strategy is working — at least on the top line — and that Azure and Microsoft’s Copilot-led product stack are the twin engines investors and analysts now point to when recommending the stock. Proactive Investors’ coverage of the reaction captured the tone succinctly: analysts cheered reaccelerating cloud revenue and a rapidly growing AI business, even as the market parsed elevated...

Microsoft’s new e-book on generative AI security lands at a pivotal moment: defenders are racing to embed AI into detection, response, and automation pipelines even as adversaries weaponize the same technology to scale phishing, deepfakes, and adaptive malware. The guide — 5 Generative AI Security Threats You Must Know About — frames the problem cleanly and urges security teams to move beyond point solutions to an integrated, cloud-and-AI-aware security strategy. Background Generative AI is...

iLink Digital’s work with Crane demonstrates how a focused data modernization program, built on Microsoft Fabric and Azure services, can turn fractured reporting and slow decision cycles into a unified, near real‑time decision engine that supports global operations and strategic leadership. Background Crane — a long‑established global manufacturing company operating across multiple industries — faced a classic enterprise data problem: years of incremental systems, technical debt, and siloed...

Microsoft’s Australian legal challenge is the sharpest enforcement test yet of how tech giants bundle artificial intelligence into subscription services and communicate price changes to consumers, with the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) alleging that Microsoft misled roughly 2.7 million Australian Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscribers by obscuring a lower‑priced, non‑AI “Classic” option while rolling Copilot into its consumer plans. Background Microsoft began...

Microsoft’s global cloud suffered a high‑visibility failure when an inadvertent configuration change to Azure Front Door (AFD) on 29 October 2025 produced widespread timeouts, authentication failures and management‑portal disruptions — an outage that knocked parts of Microsoft 365, Copilot for Security integrations, Microsoft Sentinel/Purview telemetry paths and thousands of customer front‑ends offline for hours while engineers rolled back the faulty configuration and recovered edge nodes...

Microsoft and Meta have quietly turned the Meta Quest 3 family into a practical, affordable spatial workstation: with the Windows App on Quest and Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Link for Windows 11, Quest 3 and Quest 3S owners can now stream a local Windows 11 PC or a Windows 365 Cloud PC into their headset and place up to three virtual monitors around them for what Microsoft calls immersive productivity. Background Microsoft first demonstrated the idea of streaming a full Windows desktop into...

Samsung's mobile browser has finally crossed the line to the desktop: a beta of Samsung Internet for PC is rolling out to Windows users in the United States and South Korea today, bringing cross‑device sync, Galaxy AI helpers like Browsing Assist, and Samsung Pass autofill to Windows 11 and Windows 10 (version 1809 and later) machines as Samsung begins to stitch its mobile-first browsing experience into a broader ambient‑AI vision. Background Samsung Internet began life as the default...

Terraform can provision an Azure Windows VM and, with a single VM extension call, make that VM an Active Directory member so it’s ready for work the moment provisioning finishes — but doing this safely and reliably at scale requires careful choices about secrets, identities, network design and Terraform state handling. Background / Overview Infrastructure-as-code (IaC) is about repeatability, consistency and reducing manual toil. For Windows servers in enterprise environments the...

Microsoft and Meta have moved Windows-on-headset from lab demo to mainstream tool: the Mixed Reality Link app for Windows and the Windows App on Meta Quest are now broadly available, letting Quest 3 and Quest 3S owners stream a local Windows 11 PC or a Windows 365 Cloud PC into a headset and arrange up to three high‑resolution virtual monitors around them for “immersive productivity.” Background Microsoft first publicly described this partnership and the Mixed Reality Link concept in late...

Apple’s sudden windfall of Mac buyers is the clearest market signal yet that Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 end‑of‑support for Windows 10 turned a long‑running upgrade cycle into a calendar‑driven buying event—and that some users chose to leave the Windows ecosystem rather than wrestle with eligibility, firmware fiddling, or a hurried Windows 11 transition. Counterpoint Research’s Q3 2025 snapshot shows global PC shipments rising by roughly 8.1% year‑over‑year, while Apple’s Mac shipments...

A targeted espionage campaign linked to a China‑nexus threat actor has weaponized an unpatched Windows shortcut flaw to deliver the long‑running PlugX backdoor to diplomats and government aviation staff in Europe, security researchers warn — and the underlying Windows weakness remains a live, unremediated attack surface months after it was disclosed. Background The technical core of this story is a Windows shortcut (LNK) UI‑misrepresentation bug that Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative tracked...

Upgrading a last remaining Windows 10 machine to Windows 11 often feels less like a checklist item and more like a small reboot of your workflow — unfamiliar Start menu layouts, a redesigned taskbar, and new default behaviors that can slow you down. These five open‑source apps — Windhawk, Microsoft PowerToys, NanaZip, VSCodium, Joplin, and Bitwarden — are the practical toolkit many power users reach for immediately after the upgrade to reclaim control, privacy, and productivity. This feature...

Microsoft and Meta have moved Mixed Reality Link and the Windows App for Meta Quest out of preview and into general availability, enabling Windows 11 and Windows 365 Cloud PC sessions to run directly inside Meta Quest headsets and delivering a practical, multi‑monitor virtual desktop experience for Quest 3 and Quest 3S users. Background Mixed Reality Link began life as a public preview in December 2024, a tight Microsoft–Meta collaboration intended to bring the full Windows 11 desktop —...

Sparkle arrives as the kind of tidy, opinionated utility Windows users have been asking for: a polished, open‑source debloater and optimizer that packages decades of PowerShell tweaks, community scripts, and practical maintenance tasks into a modern GUI — and the real‑world gains reported so far are meaningful for everyday use, if not miraculous. Background Windows ships with a surprising amount of preinstalled software, hidden services, and telemetry hooks that silently consume CPU, RAM...

AMD’s latest Adrenalin driver release has triggered more headlines than usual — not because of a runaway performance win or a flashy new feature, but because the official release notes appear to target Windows 11 only, even while AMD insists its drivers will continue to work on Windows 10. The situation exposes a real-world tension between vendor documentation, engineering priorities after an operating system reaches end-of-life, and the practical needs of millions of users still running...

Microsoft has finally put Clippy out to pasture — not with a quiet farewell, but with a theatrical handoff: the paperclip’s spirit lives on only as a wink inside Mico, a new animated avatar that now fronts Microsoft Copilot’s voice experience as part of the Copilot Fall Release announced in late October 2025. The update transforms Copilot from a faceless query engine into a voice-first, memory-enabled companion that can join group chats, tutor students in a Socratic style, and — when prodded...

A widespread Microsoft Azure outage on October 29 produced a cascading series of failures that briefly knocked airline and airport digital services offline, preventing online check‑in, blocking payment flows and digital boarding‑pass issuance for thousands of travelers, and exposing stark operational risks tied to concentrated cloud dependencies. Background The October 29 disruption traced back to Azure Front Door (AFD), Microsoft’s global Layer‑7 edge and application delivery fabric that...