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IFA 2025 made one thing unavoidably clear: artificial intelligence is no longer an experimental sidebar at trade shows — it’s the main stage. From conversational TV companions to penguin-like domesticated robots and a self‑flushing cat toilet that promises to log your pet’s health metrics, AI was embedded in products across every hall and price point. What looked like marketing hyperbole a few years ago has become tangible product engineering: AI is being baked into hardware, appliances, and...

The latest turn in the Windows 11 SSD story suggests the worst-case outcomes may be narrowly concentrated among pre‑production reviewer samples rather than across retail drives — but the incident still exposes fragile chains of co‑engineering between Windows, NVMe controllers and SSD firmware, and it deserves careful attention from anyone who stores irreplaceable data on NVMe drives. Background / Overview Within days of Microsoft’s August cumulative rollup for Windows 11 (commonly tracked as...

The week’s tech headlines read like a cross‑section of modern computing: a runaway indie game launch that briefly overwhelmed multiple digital stores, a conservative Linux distribution shipping long‑sought biometric polish, Mozilla experimenting with AI chatbots in the browser sidebar (now including Microsoft Copilot in Nightly), a new premium Windows handheld from Lenovo, and a cinematic first look at IO Interactive’s James Bond reboot. These stories matter because they touch three...

Google’s Chrome is quietly treating copy-and-paste as a first‑class privacy risk: Canary builds now show Safety Check automatically removing clipboard permissions from sites you haven’t visited recently, surface a clear “Removed permissions for [x] sites” notice in the menu, and give users a one‑click path to restore access — signaling that clipboard access is no longer a casual, forever‑granted capability. Background Chrome’s Safety Check has evolved from a static checklist into a proactive...

Pairing Google’s NotebookLM with Microsoft Copilot as a single, unified research-to-creation pipeline can transform a clumsy, multi‑tab workflow into a fast, controllable content engine — a practical approach that shifts the hard work from juggling windows to orchestrating tools. Overview The basic idea is deceptively simple: use Microsoft Copilot as an intelligent, conversational web search and drafting assistant, and treat NotebookLM as the source‑bound knowledge workspace that ingests...

Microsoft’s deal with the General Services Administration (GSA) to offer Microsoft 365 Copilot and broad Azure and Microsoft 365 discounts to federal agencies is one of the most consequential technology procurement moves in recent memory — a governmentwide push that promises major near‑term savings and a rapid pathway for AI to enter routine government workflows. The agreement makes Microsoft 365 Copilot available at no cost for up to 12 months for eligible Microsoft G5 customers, provides...

The semi-final at the 2025 US Open between World No. 1 Jannik Sinner and Canada’s Félix Auger‑Aliassime was a study in expectation versus reality: the pre-match narrative — amplified by mainstream previews and a chorus of AI platforms that overwhelmingly favoured Sinner — largely proved correct on the winner, but the way the match unfolded exposed the limits of deterministic AI forecasting and underlined why live sport remains a poor fit for single-point predictions. The widely read preview...

Samsung’s next Edge model is shaping up to be a study in contrasts: a radically slimmer body and a camera island that spans almost the device’s full width, while leaked specs suggest Samsung will push camera resolution parity with its Ultra line by bringing a 200MP main sensor and a newly upgraded 50MP ultra‑wide to the Galaxy S26 Edge — a move that mirrors the S25 Ultra’s recent ultrawide revision and signals a strategic shift in how Samsung differentiates its S‑series variants. Background...

If your Windows 11 laptop’s battery life feels shorter than it should, the usual advice—dim the screen, close background apps, choose a power‑efficient mode—helps, but it may not be the whole story; one often‑overlooked background system, the Windows Search Indexer, can silently chew CPU, disk I/O and RAM and meaningfully shorten runtime. The good news is that the indexer is controllable: you can tune, pause, or disable it when you need maximum battery life, and then restore it when you’re...

The AI you keep open in a browser tab is doing more than answering queries — it's broadcasting something about how you think, what you value, and how you want the world to work. A recent cultural riff that maps people to their preferred models — from OpenAI’s GPT‑5 users to xAI’s Grok fans and the anarchic LLaMA tinkerers — is more than a clever listicle: it crystallizes a shift in how technology mediates identity. The piece that started the conversation is charmingly reductive by design...

Windows 11’s typing ergonomics just got a small but decisive polish: Insiders can now insert an en dash (–) and an em dash (—) with single memorable keystrokes — and that change is already shipping in recent Dev and Beta channel preview builds. This is the kind of tiny usability fix that saves seconds across thousands of typing sessions and removes one of the little friction points that has long frustrated writers, editors, and anyone who composes text without a numeric keypad. Background /...

OpenAI’s decision to publish high‑quality, open‑weight language models has suddenly reframed its relationship with Microsoft — shifting what until recently felt like a settled strategic partnership into a contested terrain of contracts, cloud economics, and platform control. The company’s gpt‑oss family (two models, “gpt‑oss‑120b” and “gpt‑oss‑20b”) was announced and distributed under a permissive Apache 2.0 license and made available through multiple hosting partners — including Hugging...

Microsoft’s recent narrative — that an AI-first Azure is building an unassailable moat while Windows 11 becomes an “AI platform” — is both materially true and rhetorically optimistic; the data underpinning the claim is strong, but the timeline and some headline figures in the popular bull case are conflated, and the pace of integration introduces meaningful execution and product risks investors and IT leaders must weigh carefully. Background Microsoft’s FY25 performance is the clearest...

Microsoft is offering every U.S. college student one year of Microsoft 365 Personal at no cost, a limited-time move that folds the company’s consumer productivity suite and its Copilot AI assistant into a broader education-focused push tied to the White House’s AI Education Task Force and Microsoft’s new “Elevate” initiative. The free 12‑month subscription—normally valued at about $99.99 per year—includes the desktop and web Office apps, Copilot integration, and the familiar 1 TB of OneDrive...

AI chatbots are answering more questions than ever — and, according to a de‑anonymized NewsGuard audit released in September 2025, they are also repeating falsehoods far more often: roughly one in three news‑related replies contained a verifiable false claim during the August 2025 test cycle. Background Chatbot reliability has been a live issue since large language models became widely available. NewsGuard’s AI False Claims Monitor is a monthly red‑teaming program that tests leading consumer...

X’s new XChat promises “end-to-end” privacy — but its current implementation leaves several simple, well-known privacy protections out in the open, and experts warn that the feature as shipped can expose users to avoidable risks ranging from leaked image metadata to a service operator or insider able to read supposedly private chats. Background X introduced XChat as a major upgrade to Direct Messages: an encrypted chat mode built on a new Rust-based architecture, with support for media...

AI is already everywhere in the enterprise — and the biggest short-term risk may be that most employees don’t even realize they’re using it. Background The conversation about AI risk has, until recently, centered on sophisticated threats: algorithmic bias, model explainability, intellectual property and an emerging patchwork of regulation. Those are real and important. But a quieter, faster-growing risk lives in the day-to-day: shadow AI — AI features embedded in familiar apps and workflows...

Microsoft and Cloudflare’s push to make websites “AI‑search friendly” is more than a product announcement — it’s an attempt to rewire how content is discovered, attributed, and monetized on the web by combining Microsoft’s NLWeb protocol with Cloudflare’s managed AutoRAG pipeline. The idea is simple: let sites answer natural‑language queries themselves (and in a machine‑readable way) so AI assistants stop silently scraping and repackaging content without sending readers back to the creators...

Microsoft has set a hard stop: Windows 10 will reach end of support on October 14, 2025, and the clock is now counting down for hundreds of millions of PCs still running the decade-old OS. Microsoft is urging users to move to Windows 11 where possible, while offering a limited Extended Security Updates (ESU) bridge for those who need more time. Background / Overview Microsoft’s lifecycle pages and support notices confirm a firm end‑of‑support date for Windows 10: October 14, 2025. After that...

Samsung’s Vision AI Companion arrived at IFA 2025 as a deliberate pivot: a unified, multi‑agent AI hub for smart displays that folds on‑device vision features and third‑party conversational agents into a single, remote‑invoked experience designed for the living room and home office alike. The system — powered by an upgraded Bixby voice layer and integrating standalone agent apps including Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity — will roll out as a staged software update beginning in late September...