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Ralph Lauren has quietly embedded a branded AI stylist into its mobile app — Ask Ralph — a conversational, shoppable assistant developed with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform that delivers brand‑curated, head‑to‑toe outfit recommendations and in‑app purchase actions to U.S. shoppers. Background Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph arrives at a moment when conversational AI is moving from experimental lab projects into consumer‑facing commerce. The brand frames the feature as the digital equivalent...

Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday arrived with a broad set of fixes and a matching set of detection updates from Cisco Talos — including a new Snort ruleset — aimed at the most likely-to-be-exploited flaws this month. The update package contains dozens of CVEs spanning Windows core components, Office, the graphics stack, SMB/SMBv3, NTLM and virtualization subsystems; Talos called out several elevation-of-privilege and memory‑safety issues as priorities, and published Snort rules to detect...

More than a third of New Zealand retail investors now say they use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot to inform their investment decisions — and a large majority report being satisfied with the outcomes — a shift that is simultaneously pragmatic and precarious for markets, advisers and regulators. Background The findings were reported after Chartered Accountants Australia & New Zealand (CA ANZ) released its annual investor confidence work, which surveyed retail...

Racing to meet a design deadline with zero budget is a familiar panic for creators, and the NewsBreak piece that went viral — claiming easy, legal ways to “get Windows & Photoshop for free” — captured that desperation with click-ready simplicity. The reality is messier: there are legitimate, low-cost and free paths to the tools you need, but they come with limits, trade-offs, and important legal and security considerations. This feature unpacks the NewsBreak claims, verifies the technical...

Ralph Lauren has quietly embedded a branded conversational stylist into its mobile app — Ask Ralph — a generative-AI feature built with Microsoft on the Azure OpenAI platform that returns shoppable, head‑to‑toe visual laydowns and styling advice drawn from Ralph Lauren’s own catalog and creative assets. Background Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph arrives at the intersection of two industry shifts: the retail drive to compress discovery-to-purchase flows, and the rapid commoditization of...

Microsoft’s quiet entry on the Windows deprecation list this summer signals a decisive end to another generation of web integration in the OS: Legacy Web View, EdgeHTML-based web apps, legacy PWAs, and the EdgeHTML DevTools are now officially deprecated, and developers are being pushed toward modern, Chromium-based alternatives. Background Microsoft’s official “Deprecated features for Windows client” page — the canonical list of OS features that are no longer in active development — was...

Microsoft's recent moves to tighten controls on employee speech, restrict building access and cement a three‑day‑a‑week return‑to‑office requirement mark a decisive shift in how the company balances internal safety, operational control and employee expression — and they arrive at a moment when Microsoft is also reshaping its workforce and doubling down on AI-first priorities. (wsj.com, reuters.com) Background Microsoft spent much of the pandemic and its immediate aftermath embracing hybrid...

I dragged my Windows 11 desktop back into the late 2000s, and — to my surprise — the result isn’t just nostalgia porn: it’s a practical, usable environment that keeps modern security and features while restoring the things many people still prefer about Windows 7. The MakeUseOf walkthrough that started this experiment demonstrates how a small toolkit — chiefly Stardock’s Start11 and WindowBlinds — can reproduce the classic Start menu, glassy window frames, and visual consistency of Windows 7...

Microsoft’s September 2025 hardening update for Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) on Windows Server 2025 removes legacy update binaries used by WSUS to service the Windows Update SelfUpdate component, and that change has immediate operational implications for organizations still relying on Extended Security Updates (ESU) for Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. Background Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) has long been the on‑premises workhorse for centralized Windows update...

Google’s Gemini app now accepts user-uploaded audio — a long‑requested capability that turns recorded lectures, interviews, podcasts, and meeting captures into first‑class inputs for transcription, summarization, and structured research workflows, while tying those media flows into NotebookLM’s expanding multilingual report features and Google’s broader AI product strategy. Background / Overview Google has been explicit about turning Gemini into a multimodal productivity layer that spans...

Microsoft’s decision to fold Anthropic’s models into Office 365 represents a deliberate, high-stakes recalibration of its AI supply chain — one that pares dependence on a single vendor, broadens technical options inside Copilot features, and reshapes enterprise risk calculations for productivity software across the board. Background Microsoft’s relationship with generative AI has been defined by rapid escalation: an early strategic anchor investment in OpenAI followed by years of deeper...

Microsoft’s Copilot in Word for the web now offers a genuine time-saver for anyone who spends hours polishing documents: a one‑click “Fix spelling and grammar” action that applies all suggested corrections to a selected passage, then lets you accept or undo them in bulk or one at a time. Overview Microsoft has added a new Copilot action inside Word for the web that automatically applies spelling and grammar corrections to a highlighted section of text. The workflow is intentionally simple...

Microsoft’s IBC 2025 message is unmistakable: media and entertainment companies must move from experimentation to full-scale deployment of agentic AI if they want to become what Microsoft calls a “Frontier Firm” — organizations that combine human creativity with autonomous AI agents to unlock new storytelling, engagement, and operational models. At IBC, Microsoft framed this as a pragmatic platform play: Azure cloud, Azure AI Foundry, Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and a partner...

Microsoft’s latest internal shake-up has collapsed two debates that have run through corporate tech since the pandemic: how much power employers should have over employee speech, and how far the hybrid workplace experiment goes before organizations insist on physical presence as a business imperative. In a cascade of changes that includes shutting long-standing employee forums, tighter building access rules, high‑profile terminations tied to campus protests, and a phased requirement for many...

Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday lands for Windows 10 with a mix of stability fixes, enterprise controls and a new organizational backup capability — but the rollout is as much about operational discipline as it is about fresh features. The September 2025 cumulative updates bring build bumps for 22H2 (notably OS Build 19045.6332), backported fixes for legacy branches, the general availability of Windows Backup for Organizations, and a licensing/networking control tied to Extended Security...

Microsoft’s September Patch Tuesday for Windows 11 24H2 quietly surfaced support for Emoji 16.0, completing the behind‑the‑scenes work that began with the August optional preview update and bringing the system emoji inventory up to the Unicode‑recommended total — but the experience is uneven: the new glyphs render correctly in some apps while the system picker and many popular services still show missing‑glyph boxes. Background Windows has historically treated emoji support as a combination...

Microsoft’s reported decision to integrate Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 4 into Microsoft 365 marks a deliberate and consequential step away from a single‑provider AI strategy and toward a multi‑model, standards‑based future for enterprise productivity tools. This move — first reported today by several outlets and corroborated in internal and developer documentation — reflects months of platform engineering, benchmark testing, and emerging commercial friction between the major AI players. The...

Google’s Gemini app can now accept audio uploads — a long‑requested capability that broadens Gemini’s multimodal reach and reshapes how users can transcribe, summarize, and analyze spoken content inside Google’s AI ecosystem. The rollout splits limits between free and paid tiers, extends Gemini prompts to accept multiple files (including ZIP archives), and arrives alongside substantial NotebookLM and Search language upgrades that push Google’s productivity‑first AI play into clearer...

The Trade Desk’s AI gamble has moved from experiment to enterprise: Kokai is live, adoption has accelerated, and the company is consciously steering its product and go-to-market strategy around the very forces — generative search and AI-driven ecosystems — that threaten the open web it sells into. (thetradedesk.com, fool.com) Background The Trade Desk (TTD) long pitched itself as the independent demand-side platform (DSP) for advertisers who prefer transparency and control outside Big Tech's...

There has been a sharp and measurable shift in how Irish mid‑market executives view artificial intelligence: the proportion who described AI as “over‑rated” or mostly hype has collapsed, firms are moving rapidly to formalise generative‑AI rules for staff, yet anxiety about data privacy has never been higher — a paradox that will shape which Irish SMEs win and which stumble as AI moves from experiment to steady state. Background and overview Grant Thornton’s International Business Report...