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Microsoft Paint is getting a new AI-powered style-transfer feature called Restyle that lets you apply preset artistic looks — pop art, sketch, cyberpunk, impressionist and similar — directly to images on the canvas, but Microsoft is deliberately gating the preview to Copilot+ hardware and signed-in Microsoft accounts as it rolls the feature out to Windows Insiders. Background Microsoft Paint began life as a tiny, preinstalled doodling app and has quietly been refashioned into a lightweight...

Microsoft released an emergency out‑of‑band update on October 20, 2025 to repair a critical regression that left USB keyboards and mice unusable in the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) after the October 14 Patch Tuesday cumulative (KB5066835), restoring input functionality for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2 and their server equivalents. Background Within days of Microsoft’s October 14, 2025 cumulative update (tracked as KB5066835) arriving via standard Windows Update channels...

Microsoft and India’s Collective Artists Network (CAN) have placed Galleri5 — CAN’s in‑house technology studio — onto Microsoft Azure AI Foundry to build a production pipeline aimed at scaling AI‑driven filmmaking, episodic storytelling, advertising and virtual talent, and the collaboration is already tied to an ambitious slate including a theatrical feature, an episodic Mahabharata reimagining, and dozens of short-form works. Background / Overview Collective Artists Network (CAN) is...

Florida Atlantic University engineers say a practical, low-cost alternative to the expensive, immobile gait lab is finally within reach: foot-mounted wearable IMUs and Microsoft’s Azure Kinect depth camera can reproduce the detailed gait measurements clinicians expect from an electronic walkway — even in a busy clinical environment. Background / Overview Gait — the manner and rhythm of walking — is a clinical vital sign. Changes in walking speed, stride timing, and support phases help...

Digital Brands Group’s headline announcement that its technology arm is “exploring advanced quantum initiatives through Microsoft Azure Quantum” may read like cautious corporate boilerplate, but it marks a noteworthy — and timely — intersection of two fast-moving trends: retailers embracing cloud-native AI and hyperscalers pushing quantum into the enterprise mainstream. The Austin-based e‑commerce operator frames the work as an early experiment in quantum machine learning, quantum‑inspired...

Microsoft's decision to end mainstream support for Windows 10 has created an urgent fork in the road for millions of users: upgrade to a hardware‑gated Windows 11, migrate to a different OS such as Linux or ChromeOS Flex, buy a new PC, or embrace a community‑built lightweight variant of Windows 11 known as Tiny11 25H2. The debate has a practical, emotional, and environmental edge: many capable laptops are being retired not because they lack horsepower, but because Microsoft's official...

Microsoft has quietly taken away one of Windows users’ last simple choices: the ability to permanently turn off automatic updates for apps installed from the Microsoft Store. What previously was a binary toggle — “Update apps automatically: On/Off” — now behaves like a forced pause button, letting users delay updates for one to five weeks before automatic installs resume. The change is rolling out via the Microsoft Store client and was first flagged in reporting on October 20; Microsoft has...

A coordinated audit by 22 public broadcasters has issued a blunt verdict: popular AI chat assistants routinely misrepresent news, with nearly half of tested responses containing at least one significant problem that could mislead readers. Background / Overview Public-service newsrooms across 18 countries pooled resources to test mainstream AI assistants on real-world news queries. Journalists and subject experts asked the same news questions of four leading assistants — ChatGPT, Microsoft...

Microsoft has quietly opened a conversation with on‑prem Exchange Server administrators about whether they would welcome Copilot-style AI features in locally hosted mail environments — and the survey’s most pointed question makes clear Microsoft is actively exploring hybrid approaches that could send some Exchange data to the cloud for processing. Background / Overview Microsoft 365 Copilot today is a cloud‑first service that grounds answers using data in the Microsoft Graph and tenant...

The browser — long the stoic conduit between users and the web — has been remade as an assistant-first platform in 2025, with OpenAI, Microsoft, Perplexity, The Browser Company, Opera and Brave all racing to ship browsers or browser modes that embed large language models and agentic assistants at the UI layer: persistent sidebars, multi‑tab context, cursor chat, and agentic “do this for me” features that can click, fill, and transact on users’ behalf. These changes promise major productivity...

Microsoft’s latest Copilot update pushes the assistant further toward a personality-driven, multimodal helper — introducing a tactile avatar called Mico (with a built‑in Clippy easter egg), an argumentation-style Real Talk mode, expanded Advanced Search, and new group chat capabilities that are beginning to roll out on iOS and Android in the United States. Background / Overview Microsoft has been steadily evolving Copilot from a text-only assistant into a platform that blends voice, vision...

Microsoft’s latest push to add AI‑use benchmarks to Viva Insights and automatic work‑location detection in Teams marks a clear pivot: workplace telemetry is moving from generic collaboration signals to precise, AI‑centric and location‑aware metrics — and that shift demands immediate governance, technical scrutiny, and legal review from IT leaders and privacy teams. Background Microsoft has quietly rolled two related capabilities into its enterprise portfolio that together increase the...

Real-time data science analytics in 2025 is no longer an experimental niche — it’s the backbone of latency-sensitive business outcomes, and practical platform choices now determine whether teams deliver true sub‑second insights or inherit brittle, expensive pipelines that fail under pressure. The consensus across vendor documentation, open‑source roadmaps, and recent industry analysis is clear: successful real‑time analytics combines a durable event backbone, a stateful stream processor, and...

Keeper Security’s new native integration with Microsoft Sentinel promises to turn privileged credential telemetry into a real‑time detection stream for SOC teams — delivering prebuilt dashboards, analytics rules and a push connector that ingests Keeper event data into Sentinel workspaces in both commercial and Azure Government clouds. Background Keeper Security has positioned its cloud‑native Privileged Access Management (PAM) platform, KeeperPAM®, as a modern, zero‑trust and zero‑knowledge...

The most surprising performance story of the Ally X launch cycle isn’t AMD’s APU or ASUS’ chassis — it’s that a lean, SteamOS‑style Linux image called Bazzite can measurably and reproducibly deliver smoother gameplay and higher sustained frame rates on the Asus ROG Xbox Ally X than the device’s factory Windows 11 image, at least in specific shader‑heavy scenes and mid‑range power modes. Background / Overview The ROG Xbox Ally X ships as ASUS’ premium Windows handheld, built around an AMD...

The ROG Xbox Ally’s hardware ceiling is higher than many expected, but the operating system you choose is proving to be the decisive factor between “good handheld” and “great handheld.” Recent community tests show that replacing the factory Windows 11 image and Xbox full‑screen shell with a SteamOS‑style Linux distribution called Bazzite OS can unlock significant, measurable improvements in frame‑rate stability, average FPS in shader‑heavy scenes, and suspend/resume responsiveness on the ROG...

Forgetting the username or password to sign into Windows 11 happens to everyone — and the good news is that, in most cases, regaining access is straightforward if you know where to look and which recovery path applies to your account type. This guide distills the practical methods for finding your Windows 11 username, recovering or revealing stored passwords, and safely regaining access when you’re locked out. It also explains the security trade‑offs, flags common pitfalls (EFS and BitLocker...

AI chatbots are no longer curiosities — they're a primary information conduit for millions — and a new set of audits shows that when people trust these systems for news, the results can be dangerous, confusing, and institutionally corrosive. Recent independent research led by the BBC and the European Broadcasting Union finds that leading assistants like ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Microsoft’s Copilot and Perplexity produce answers with serious problems in a substantial share of news-related...

Microsoft’s Copilot may be about to get a face — and a voice — as Microsoft teases an ambitious refresh that blends animated avatars, agentic browsing inside Edge, and session-aware “Journeys” that promise to reorganize how tabs and research work; the company’s Copilot-focused livestream on October 23 is expected to fill in the details. Background / Overview Since Copilot’s public arrival, Microsoft has positioned the assistant as a platform-level companion woven into Windows 11, Microsoft...

Intuit’s purchase of Mailchimp once read like a textbook strategic fit: QuickBooks meets email marketing, cross-sell to millions of small businesses, and a steady stream of subscription revenue to justify a roughly $12 billion price tag. But the marketplace has shifted — and fast. Today, the real test for Intuit is not whether Mailchimp can still build good email templates, but whether a product that once seemed defensible can survive when the world’s infrastructure owners fold marketing...