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Microsoft has quietly moved a fully functional, free Copilot Chat assistant into the right-hand pane of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote — a move that pushes conversational AI from an optional add-on into the default productivity surface for qualifying Microsoft 365 customers and reframes how organizations must govern and adopt AI at scale. Background Microsoft’s Copilot rollout has followed a deliberate, two-tier strategy: a broadly available, web‑grounded Copilot Chat that...

Microsoft’s latest Windows 11 servicing activity has broken a narrow but painful corner of media playback: several Digital TV, Blu‑ray and DVD applications that rely on the legacy Enhanced Video Renderer (EVR) are now stuttering, freezing or failing entirely when attempting to play protected content that requires HDCP or platform DRM for digital audio. Background The regression traces to late‑summer servicing updates. Microsoft’s own update rollups show the change surfaced after the optional...

Asda’s renewed, multi-year technology agreement with Microsoft is a decisive escalation of the supermarket’s long-running digital overhaul: Azure will become the retailer’s primary cloud backbone while Microsoft Fabric, Azure Databricks, Copilot Studio, and Microsoft 365 Copilot are being woven into an enterprise-wide data and productivity platform designed to accelerate pricing decisions, sharpen on‑shelf availability, and reclaim colleague time from repetitive tasks. Background Asda’s...

When a Dutch researcher glanced at a token stream while preparing a Black Hat talk, he didn’t just find a bug—he found a fault line in the foundations of cloud identity that could have allowed a single click to flip virtually every Microsoft Entra (Azure AD) tenant from secure to owned. The Technology.org report summarized the discovery and the breathless stakes: two legacy-era failures—an obscure internal “Actor token” issuance path and a tenant-validation gap in the legacy Azure AD Graph...

Windows 10 reaches its formal end-of-support on October 14, 2025 — but Microsoft’s final countdown has arrived with a pragmatic, if controversial, twist: a one‑year Extended Security Updates (ESU) lifeline plus new trade‑in and recycling prompts surfaced directly in Windows Update that steer aging PCs toward replacement options. The move eases the immediate security cliff for some users, yet it also crystallizes the arguments policymakers and consumer groups have been making for months about...

Windows’ built‑in telemetry — labeled “Diagnostics & feedback” in Settings — collects far more than crash reports by default, and every Windows user should understand what’s being sent, what they can realistically block, and the trade‑offs involved before they decide whether to turn it down or off. Background / Overview Microsoft describes telemetry as diagnostic data used to keep Windows secure, troubleshoot problems, and improve features. In practice, telemetry in modern Windows is...

Microsoft has quietly published official Windows 11 version 25H2 installation media to Microsoft’s servers — a Release Preview‑gated ISO build identified by the 26200 family that the press is reporting as the RTM candidate (build 26200.6584) — giving IT teams, OEMs, and enthusiasts a canonical clean‑install image to test and image while Microsoft finishes the final rollout. Background / Overview Windows 11 version 25H2 arrives under the same servicing model Microsoft has used for recent...

Microsoft appears to be quietly reintroducing native video wallpapers into Windows 11 — a DreamScene‑style capability discovered hidden in recent Insider preview builds that would let ordinary video files (MP4, MKV, MOV and others) be set as looping desktop backgrounds directly from Settings, without a third‑party app. Background Windows once shipped an official animated‑wallpaper feature: Windows DreamScene for Vista Ultimate, which allowed WMV and MPG clips (and modified AVIs) to play...

OpenAI’s GPT‑5 (delivered as ChatGPT‑5) and Google’s Gemini 2.5 now define the mainstream frontier of consumer and enterprise AI: both are multimodal, tool‑enabled systems that trade raw scale for pragmatic features — and each company has taken a different product route to reach the same technical ideas (fast vs deep inference, tool use, and very-long‑context reasoning). The comparison matters because the decision between them is no longer just “which model is smarter” but “which ecosystem...

Meta's bet on building a pathway to superintelligence has moved from rhetoric to an all‑in bet: large capital outlays, a headline-grabbing $14.3 billion strategic deal with Scale AI, aggressive recruitment from rival labs, and a narrowly focused “Meta Superintelligence Labs” led by Alexandr Wang — a gamble that Mark Zuckerberg says is worth misspending a couple hundred billion dollars rather than risk being late to the next era of computing. Background / Overview Meta’s public position on...

Asda’s renewed multi-year technology agreement with Microsoft marks a clear inflection point in the supermarket’s long-running digital transformation — one that puts Microsoft Azure, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Azure Databricks, Microsoft Fabric, and Copilot Studio at the centre of a cloud-first architecture intended to speed pricing decisions, improve on-shelf availability, and reclaim colleague time from repetitive tasks. Background Asda’s latest announcement builds on a commercial relationship...

Microsoft’s official installation media for Windows 11 version 25H2 has started appearing ahead of a formal public rollout, with Release Preview ISOs and related artifacts now accessible to Windows Insiders and sighted on Microsoft delivery servers — but downloading from unofficial links or acting before broad validation carries measurable risks. Background / Overview Windows 11, version 25H2 is shipping this year as an enablement-style update rather than a full rebase of the operating...

Microsoft appears to be bringing native video wallpapers back to Windows 11, reviving the spirit of Vista’s DreamScene by letting ordinary video files act as looping desktop backgrounds directly from Settings — a change already visible in hidden Windows Insider preview builds but still provisional and gated behind experimental flags. Background Windows has flirted with animated desktop backdrops before. In 2007 Microsoft shipped Windows DreamScene for Vista Ultimate, an early experiment that...

AI shopping assistants can trim real dollars off your receipts by automating the tedious parts of bargain hunting: they watch prices, test coupons, surface cash-back opportunities, and can even time purchases when a product is most likely to be cheapest. In the past two years these browser and mobile tools have become smarter, more integrated into our browsers and search results, and — crucially — more controversial, as conflicts over affiliate tracking and data collection have produced...

Microsoft Teams is getting a set of small but consequential updates that together improve message tracing, iPad multitasking, and hybrid meeting hardware support — and they arrive alongside a steady flow of Copilot agent enhancements that make Teams a more capable, AI-enabled collaboration hub. Background Microsoft has been steadily expanding Teams beyond chat and meetings into a platform that blends messaging, meetings, AI assistants, and managed device experiences. Over the last year...

Windows 10 will stop receiving routine security updates and feature fixes on October 14, 2025, forcing a hard choice for millions of users and thousands of organizations: upgrade to Windows 11 where possible, buy time with paid Extended Security Updates (ESU), migrate workloads to cloud-hosted Windows, or run increasingly risky, unpatched systems. Background / Overview Microsoft launched Windows 10 in 2015 with the promise of long-term, service-driven continuity; that era ends with a firm...

Microsoft is quietly testing a new taskbar entry that makes it possible to send an open app window or the entire desktop to Copilot Vision with a single click — a small interface change that signals a substantial shift in how Windows 11 expects users to interact with AI-powered assistance across apps and workflows. Background Microsoft has been steadily folding Copilot deeper into Windows 11 since Copilot’s initial integration, moving from a sidebar helper to a system-level assistant that...

Seelen UI promises to make a Windows 11 desktop look and feel like an entirely different operating system — and in many respects it delivers a near-total visual and workflow overhaul without replacing the underlying OS. Background / Overview Seelen UI is a web-based, user-installable desktop environment that runs on top of Windows 10 and Windows 11. It wraps your desktop in a unified interface: a top menu bar, a floating dock, a Spotlight-style launcher, widgets, and a configurable tiling...

Microsoft has quietly started testing a built‑in video wallpaper feature for Windows 11, letting users set ordinary video files (MP4, MKV, AVI and more) as their desktop background in current Insider preview builds — a deliberate revival of the long‑loved DreamScene idea that once shipped with Windows Vista. Background For nearly two decades Windows has lacked a first‑party way to make a video the desktop wallpaper. Enthusiasts filled that gap with third‑party tools such as Wallpaper Engine...

Microsoft is testing a one‑click “Share with Copilot” shortcut inside the Windows 11 taskbar preview that launches Copilot Vision against a single app window, plus on‑screen text translation in Click to Do — small UI changes that underline Microsoft’s push to make Copilot an ambient, context‑aware assistant inside the OS rather than a separate sidebar. Background Windows 11’s Copilot evolution has been gradual but relentless: what began as a single chat pane and web‑style assistant has been...