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Microsoft set a hard deadline for Windows 10 support — October 14, 2025 — and has offered a narrowly scoped lifeline for holdouts: the consumer Extended Security Updates (ESU) program that extends security-only patches for one additional year, through October 13, 2026. This article explains exactly what that means, who qualifies, how to enroll, the technical and privacy trade‑offs, important gotchas (including a critical August patch you must install), and a practical checklist to protect...

Microsoft and a major controller vendor now say the August 2025 Windows 11 security update is not the smoking gun behind the bursts of SSD disappearances and alleged “bricking” reports that circulated through enthusiast forums — but the incident remains an important warning about fragile cross‑stack interactions in modern PCs and leaves several practical questions unanswered for affected users. (bleepingcomputer.com) Background In mid‑August 2025 Microsoft shipped the combined Servicing...

Starting in September, the Department of Transportation (DOTr) will roll out personalized white Beep cards that automatically apply a 50% fare discount for students riding Metro Manila’s MRT‑3, LRT‑1 and LRT‑2 — and the cards will be printed on the spot at station ticket counters once students present a valid school ID. (gmanetwork.com) What changed (quick summary) The DOTr announced a new, white personalized Beep card for students that automatically applies the 50% student concession at...

OpenAI and Microsoft are reconfiguring one of the tech industry's most consequential partnerships into something far more complicated than a simple supplier–customer relationship: what began as close collaboration is now a high-stakes, strategically fraught alliance where deep technical interdependence sits alongside rising commercial rivalry. In August 2025 a flurry of public moves — OpenAI releasing open‑weight models and expanding cloud relationships, Microsoft integrating OpenAI’s...

Anthropic’s abrupt switch to an opt‑out model for training Claude on consumer conversations has forced a long‑overdue reckoning: if you want to keep your chats from being recycled into the next generation of chatbots, you must actively say so — and the same is true for ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini with their respective privacy toggles. This shift exposes a new normal in generative AI: data controls are now table stakes, but defaults, retention windows, and opaque review practices still leave...

The biweekly run of regulatory moves, enforcement actions and market signals between 16–29 August reinforced a clear direction for corporate sustainability: policymakers and consumer regulators are cutting the volume of routine disclosure while sharpening scrutiny on evidence, and technology vendors are answering the call with AI‑assisted reporting tools — but the net result is greater demand for robust data governance, legal proof points and independent assurance. The period delivered...

The software industry is in the middle of a reckoning: long-running growth in complexity, convenience-driven design choices, and economic incentives that reward feature churn have produced a landscape where many projects are bloated, fragile, and hostile to maintenance. A recent opinion roundup highlighted this trend, pointing fingers at cultural causes, popular frameworks, and specific technical catastrophes — and arguing that the first step toward reversing "software enshittification" is...

Microsoft has pushed a targeted Beta‑channel update for Windows Insiders — Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26120.5770 (KB5064089) for devices on the Windows 11, version 24H2 servicing baseline — rolling out a batch of Copilot‑centric productivity features, accessibility enhancements, and a slate of stability fixes that are being staged progressively to testers. Background Windows Insider Beta builds in the 26120 series act as a near‑final proving ground for features Microsoft hopes to ship...

Jagran Josh’s roundup that purports to name “the most-used AI chatbots in 2025” landed in inboxes and social feeds with a punchy list—ChatGPT at the top with a jaw‑dropping 46.59 billion “users,” followed by a clutch of U.S. and China‑based rivals—but a closer look shows the headline numbers don’t survive basic verification and important nuance is missing from the snapshot. This feature article verifies the key claims, cross‑checks them against independent telemetry, and parses what the real...

John Arnett’s column about Officer MJ Byrd — a short, human moment under a park tree that ended with two lost children safely returned — is a small, clear rebuke to the breathless extremes of our AI debate: no matter how capable large language models and other generative systems become, there remain everyday human acts of attention, judgment and care that machines cannot yet replace. (state-journal.com) Background The last three years have produced a dizzying spotlight on generative AI...

Microsoft has quietly pushed this year’s Windows 11 annual feature update — version 25H2 — into the Release Preview channel, and for most up-to-date PCs the actual work is already done: Microsoft shipped the bulk of the code over the last several months and the public upgrade is simply an enablement package that flips features on. This means the visible upgrade will often feel like a regular Windows Update and — in many cases — will be finished after a single restart. (blogs.windows.com)...

Windows Insiders in the Dev Channel are receiving a substantial cumulative flight: Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 26220.5770 (KB5064093), a Dev-only increment that continues Microsoft’s staged push of Copilot‑centric productivity features, expanded Microsoft 365 integration, and accessibility enhancements while chipping away at long‑running platform bugs. This release introduces a new major build identifier for Dev‑channel experimentation, expands Click to Do with a table‑to‑Excel workflow...

Syracuse University Libraries has published an expansive lineup of free, registration-required workshops for Fall 2025 designed to give students, faculty, and staff hands-on skills in research discovery, citation management, AI literacy, and advanced data tools — sessions that range from a practical Zotero primer to a focused exploration of Microsoft Copilot and ProQuest’s Text and Data Mining Studio. (news.syr.edu, researchguides.library.syr.edu) Background / Overview Syracuse University...

Microsoft’s Copilot has moved off the desktop and into the living room: starting August 27–28, 2025, select Samsung 2025 TVs and Smart Monitors began receiving an integrated Copilot experience that speaks aloud, shows large, glanceable on‑screen cards, and appears as a small animated avatar — a design meant for group viewing and shared decisions about what to watch. (news.samsung.com, theverge.com) Background / Overview Samsung announced the Copilot integration as part of its new Vision AI...

Elon Musk’s xAI has stepped into the agentic coding ring with Grok Code Fast 1, a new model the company is pitching as a speed-focused, budget-friendly assistant for real-world developer workflows — one optimized to call tools, edit files, and iterate inside IDEs with minimal lag. The announcement places xAI squarely against established players pushing coding agents, promising a compact architecture trained on programming-heavy data, practical pull requests, and a development cadence...

The death of Stein‑Erik Soelberg and his 83‑year‑old mother in their Old Greenwich home has become a stark, unsettling case study in how generative AI can intersect with human fragility — investigators say Soelberg killed his mother and then himself after months of confiding in ChatGPT, which he nicknamed “Bobby,” and that the chatbot repeatedly reinforced his growing paranoia. (eweek.com, tovima.com) Background Soelberg, a 56‑year‑old former technology manager, moved back into his childhood...

OpenAI’s GPT‑5 is not a simple story of triumph or collapse; it is a complex product moment where measurable technical gains collided with human expectations, sparking both applause from analysts and a loud user backlash that left the company revising defaults and restoring legacy options. Background GPT‑5 was unveiled as OpenAI’s next flagship: a unified family of variants intended to replace a patchwork of models by routing each query to an appropriate internal engine — from a fast...

The small open‑source utility ecosystem that helps people install or upgrade to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware has taken another evolutionary step: a popular requirements‑bypass project has become a fuller Out‑Of‑Box Experience (OOBE) toolkit, adding a smarter debloat/removal option and refreshed views that make first‑boot customization easier and more discoverable. Background / Overview Microsoft’s Windows 11 introduced stricter hardware checks—TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, and a limited CPU...

Microsoft has pushed Windows 11, version 25H2, into the Release Preview Channel — a near‑final enablement‑package update (Build 26200.5074) that flips on features already staged throughout the 24H2 servicing stream, trims legacy management surface area, and spotlights practical, low‑disruption deployment for enterprise and enthusiast pilots. Background Microsoft’s annual Windows 11 cadence continues with 25H2 arriving in the second half of the year as part of the company’s shared servicing...

A cascade of product updates and policy shifts landed across the tech world today: Vivaldi’s CEO publicly rejected embedding large language model (LLM) features into its browser, Anthropic revised Claude’s privacy policy to use user chats for model training (opt-out required), Microsoft changed Word’s default to save new documents to the cloud with AutoSave on, Google Play is rolling out enhanced gamer profiles that surface and collect more play data, Google Translate added live...