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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...

Microsoft’s late‑October cloud disruption — an Azure Front Door configuration error that briefly knocked Microsoft 365, Azure portals and thousands of customer sites offline — and an earlier October AWS control‑plane/DNS failure that disrupted services across the U.S. East region together exposed a blunt reality for advertisers: when hyperscalers hiccup, advertising spend, reporting pipelines and campaign controls can be paused or wasted in minutes. Background Cloud infrastructure is no...

Samsung has quietly but deliberately moved its mobile browser onto the desktop, releasing a beta of Samsung Internet for Windows as the company prepares to position the browser as a keystone in a broader AI strategy. Overview Samsung Internet for Windows arrives as a beta for Windows 11 and Windows 10 (version 1809 and later), explicitly supporting ARM-powered PCs and designed to synchronize browsing data between mobile devices and Windows machines. The desktop build mirrors core features...

Samsung’s decade‑plus stretch as a mobile‑first browser maker has come full circle: the company has released a Windows beta of Samsung Internet for PC, bringing Smart anti‑Tracking, a Privacy dashboard, cross‑device sync and Galaxy AI’s Browsing Assist to Windows machines in a region‑gated rollout that began on October 30, 2025. Background / Overview Samsung Internet debuted on Android more than a decade ago as the default browser on Galaxy phones and gradually developed a reputation for...

Microsoft has released a corrected Windows 11 Media Creation Tool after a late‑September regression caused the utility to close silently on many Windows 10 machines, restoring the official, single‑file path for creating bootable Windows 11 USB drives and ISOs and offering an official remediation path bundled with an optional preview cumulative update. Background / Overview The Media Creation Tool (MCT) is Microsoft’s lightweight, single‑executable utility for downloading official Windows...

Samsung has shipped a Windows beta of Samsung Internet for PC, a deliberate relaunch of its long-running mobile browser that converts bookmarks, open tabs and browsing history into a true cross-device continuity layer while bringing Galaxy AI-assisted summarization, translation and privacy tooling to Windows desktops and laptops. Background / Overview Samsung Internet began life as a mobile-first Chromium‑based browser bundled with Galaxy phones, building a reputation for privacy controls...

Microsoft has quietly moved the full list of installed apps onto the Start surface, given users direct control over the long‑complained‑about Recommended feed, and introduced three distinct viewing modes — Category, Grid and List — as part of a staged Windows 11 refresh delivered in October 2025 via preview servicing (packaged under KB5067036). Background When Windows 11 debuted, Microsoft replaced the long-standing two‑pane Start pattern with a centered, minimalist launcher that separated...

Microsoft has quietly extended its Copilot footprint into the lightweight Microsoft 365 companion apps that live on the Windows 11 taskbar, embedding contextual AI prompts and one‑click Copilot access into People and Files today — with Calendar integration scheduled to follow — and doing so via an automatic, tenant‑gated deployment that many organizations will see appear on eligible devices unless administrators act first. Background Microsoft’s long‑running strategy to make Copilot the...

Microsoft’s new Copilot agents bring a long-awaited shift from “ask and receive” AI to agents that act inside the apps people use every day, automating repetitive work, coordinating multi-step workflows across Microsoft 365, and—if configured—taking pre-authorized actions on behalf of teams and channels. Background Microsoft has extended the Copilot family beyond chat and search into a platform of autonomous, context-aware agents that operate inside Teams, Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint...

A high‑impact Microsoft Azure outage on October 29, 2025, knocked large swathes of internet services offline for hours — from Microsoft’s own productivity suite and gaming ecosystem to major airline check‑in systems and retail storefronts — after an inadvertent configuration change to Azure Front Door caused DNS and routing failures that propagated across Microsoft’s global edge. Background / Overview The visible fault began at roughly 16:00 UTC on 29 October 2025, when external monitoring...

Samsung’s long-running mobile browser is finally arriving on Windows desktops: a region‑gated beta of the Chromium‑based Samsung Internet for PC began rolling out on October 30, 2025, offering cross‑device sync with Galaxy phones, built‑in Galaxy AI features such as Browsing Assist, and a privacy‑forward toolkit that includes Smart Anti‑Tracking and a live Privacy Dashboard. Background / Overview For more than a decade Samsung Internet has been a mobile‑first browser bundled with Galaxy...

Microsoft and Meta have quietly turned the Quest 3 into a bona fide Windows workstation — one you can don and carry anywhere — by rolling out Windows 11’s Mixed Reality Link to the Quest 3 and Quest 3S, bringing an Apple Vision Pro–style virtual desktop experience to a far more affordable headset ecosystem. Background Microsoft first introduced the idea of streaming a full Windows 11 desktop into a mixed‑reality headset as a preview feature in late 2024. That preview has now moved into a...

I started using Windows File Explorer the way most people do—save here, download there, hope I remember where—and then discovered six deceptively simple tricks that instantly cut the time I waste on hunting and moving files; those same tips were the basis of a recent MakeUseOf guide you may have seen, and they’re worth a closer, verified look. Background / Overview File organization is one of those productivity problems that appears trivial until it becomes the time-sink of your week...

Windows can and will reopen apps you didn’t explicitly ask to run after a restart — and a single Settings toggle fixes it quickly. Overview Windows includes a feature called Restart apps (shown in Settings as Automatically save my restartable apps and restart them when I sign back in) that tries to restore the apps you had open when you shut down, sign out, or restart. It’s intended to preserve your workflow, but in practice it can reopen unwanted programs, slow sign‑in, and create a...