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A concentrated cluster of undersea cable failures in the Red Sea has throttled internet performance across South Asia and the Gulf, forcing cloud providers and carriers to reroute traffic and leaving businesses and consumers to contend with higher latency, intermittent packet loss, and slower application performance across critical east–west routes. Early telemetry and public advisories point to simultaneous faults near Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, affecting major trunk systems that link Asia, the...

On September 8, 2025 Microsoft pushed a fresh Canary-channel flight—reported as Build 27938—that strings together a set of small-but-significant UI and AI experiments. The visible pieces are straightforward: a new “AI actions” entry in File Explorer’s right‑click menu that surfaces image edits and visual search, a resurrected larger Notification Center clock that can show seconds, and a Settings page that makes on‑device and OS‑provided generative‑AI usage more visible to users and admins...

Microsoft’s latest Canary-channel whisper — reported as Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27938 — brings a practical blend of AI-powered shortcuts in File Explorer and a small but widely requested UI restoration: a larger Notification Center clock that shows seconds. The headline items are designed to reduce friction for common image tasks (visual search, background blur/removal, generative erase) by surfacing those capabilities directly in Explorer’s right‑click menu, while Settings gains...

Microsoft’s latest pre-release whisper to the Windows Insider Program’s most experimental ring landed with a thud of déjà vu: the Canary channel recently received a new build — reported as Build 27938 — that mainly repackages features already seen elsewhere in the Insider ecosystem, notably AI-focused image actions in File Explorer, the return of a larger clock with seconds in the Notification Center, and a Settings page that surfaces recent generative-AI activity by apps. That may sound...

Microsoft’s Copilot on Windows 11 is shedding its “chat-first” skin and opening a new, dashboard-style Home tab that behaves less like a conversational window and more like an AI-centric Start menu — surfacing recent files, apps, conversations, and guided help in one place. Background Microsoft has been iterating Copilot across products for more than a year, moving from sidebar helper and PWA experiments into a full native app that’s intended to sit at the center of productivity on Windows...

Borderlands 4’s official PC system requirements have arrived — and they push the franchise into a distinctly modern‑PC envelope: an eight‑core CPU minimum, 16 GB RAM baseline, an RTX 2070 / RX 5700 XT‑class GPU at minimum, and a headline 100 GB SSD install, with recommended specs climbing to 32 GB RAM and RTX 3080 / RX 6800 XT‑class GPUs for a comfortable, high‑fidelity experience. (store.steampowered.com, support.borderlands.com) Background Borderlands has always balanced mayhem...

Microsoft has shipped Windows 11 Insider Preview Build 27938 to the Canary Channel, and the headline feature worth immediate attention is the introduction of AI actions in File Explorer — a right‑click context menu that brings image editing, web visual search, and document summarization into the flow of file management. Background The Canary Channel is Microsoft’s earliest public testing ring for Windows platform changes. It’s designed for rapid experimentation with foundational platform...

Microsoft’s next operating system may not exist outside of a concept video, but the ideas in Abdi’s latest Windows 12 mockup capture a broader moment in PC computing: Windows 10’s upcoming end-of-support deadline, a swinging market-share pendulum between Win10 and Win11, and Microsoft’s own public signals that the next Windows will be deeply AI-driven and more multimodal than ever. Background / Overview Microsoft has set a firm date for the end of mainstream support for Windows 10: October...

External portable drives remain one of the most practical — and fastest — ways to move, back up, and archive large volumes of data, and our hands-on testing confirms that the current crop of external SSDs and HDDs gives buyers choices that span blistering performance, rock-solid value, and everyday convenience. Background External USB/Thunderbolt SSDs and hard drives (often called direct-attached storage or DAS) still play essential roles in modern workflows. Local storage is the fastest way...

ZDNET’s compact roundup of “40+ Windows keyboard shortcuts” distills decades of built‑in OS commands and newer Windows 11 features into a practical, learnable playbook for anyone who wants to stop hunting menus and start working at keyboard speed. The list emphasizes high‑impact, repeatable keystrokes—core editing commands, app and window navigation, screenshots and clipboard tools, Snap Layouts, and virtual desktop controls—that together shave minutes off routine tasks and compound into...

Microsoft’s Copilot has quietly crossed a threshold: it can now turn sections of a Word document into fully formed PowerPoint slides — not as a rough sketch, but as editable, presentation-ready slides that include layouts, speaker notes, and suggested imagery. This is a practical, day-to-day productivity development that will matter to teams and knowledge workers who spend hours converting reports into decks. The feature reduces repetitive formatting work, but it also brings immediate...

Microsoft’s work to move Copilot and Azure AI out of the office and into the vehicle cabin has taken a concrete step through an expanded relationship with Cerence — a partnership that stitches together in‑car voice assistants, Azure OpenAI capabilities, and the emerging third‑party agent ecosystem around Microsoft 365 Copilot. The move matters because it brings agentic AI to a new surface (the car), tightens Microsoft’s cloud‑to‑edge industrial play, and creates both new revenue pathways and...

Sydney Zoo’s IT team has quietly turned a zoo‑wide data tangle into a single analytics surface, adopting Microsoft Fabric to consolidate multiple siloed databases, ingest real‑time operational telemetry and build semantic models that drive business reporting, visitor analytics and future CRM integrations. Background / Overview Since opening in 2019, Sydney Zoo has accumulated a variety of operational systems — point‑of‑sale, CRM, security and network telemetry — that lived in separate...

Microsoft warned customers that portions of Azure experienced higher‑than‑normal latency after multiple undersea fiber‑optic cables in the Red Sea were reported cut on September 6, 2025 — an event that forced international traffic onto longer, congested detours, produced localized slowdowns across parts of Asia and the Middle East, and underscored how physical cable faults can translate quickly into cloud performance incidents. Background Undersea fiber‑optic cables carry the overwhelming...

Microsoft Azure users experienced widespread performance degradation after multiple undersea fiber-optic cables in the Red Sea were cut, forcing Microsoft to reroute traffic, warn of increased latency for routes through the Middle East, and reigniting urgent questions about cloud resilience, geopolitical exposure, and the fragility of the internet’s physical backbone. Background The global internet depends on a dense, but geographically concentrated, network of submarine fiber-optic cables...

Microsoft’s Copilot is getting quietly practical: you can now turn a Word document into a ready-to-edit PowerPoint slide in seconds — and for anyone still running Windows 10 there’s a second, much louder message: upgrade planning is no longer optional. This dual moment — an incremental but productivity-shifting Copilot feature and the hard deadline for Windows 10 support — matters for individuals, teams, and IT leaders who rely on Microsoft 365 for day-to-day work. Use the new...

Microsoft’s long‑standing limitation — that Windows Studio Effects only worked with a device’s built‑in front camera — is finally being addressed: recent Windows 11 Insider preview builds let supported Copilot+ PCs route an additional camera (for example, a USB webcam or a rear laptop sensor) through the Studio Effects pipeline so the same NPU‑accelerated enhancements (Auto Framing, Background Blur, Eye Contact, Voice Focus, and more) are available to any app that consumes the processed...

Tiling window managers aren’t a Linux-only productivity secret anymore — Windows has a healthy, maturing ecosystem of tilers that can radically change how you work, and four projects stand out right now for stability, polish, or sheer ambition. Overview Tiling window managers automatically arrange application windows in non-overlapping layouts so everything important stays visible and accessible without constant manual resizing. On Windows, that idea shows up in different forms: modules that...

Purdue University Northwest’s IT reminder is a timely, practical warning: Microsoft has scheduled Windows 10 end‑of‑support for October 14, 2025, and campus machines must be upgraded to Windows 11 or replaced — older hardware that cannot meet Windows 11 requirements will need to be retired or remediated before that date. The university’s notice confirms that desktop notifications are being shown to users, that hardware audits have been distributed, and that departments were expected to...

Zenity’s expanded partnership with Microsoft plugs real-time, inline security directly into Microsoft Copilot Studio agents — a move that promises to make agentic AI safer for widespread enterprise use while raising new operational and architectural questions for security teams. The announcement, carried by the company and live in Azure Marketplace previews, describes an enforcement model that interposes Zenity’s controls inside each Copilot Studio agent to prevent data exfiltration, block...