licensing

The UK Competition Appeal Tribunal has delivered a unanimous preliminary ruling that Microsoft cannot use its contract terms and copyright arguments to stop customers reselling perpetual Windows and Office licences — a major win for reseller ValueLicensing and a decision that reinforces the...

Microsoft’s November cumulative updates closed a long‑standing activation shortcut that many hobbyists and small businesses used to keep Windows and Office running without a legitimate license, and the change — centered on KB5068861 and companion updates — has already forced users in Spain and...

Microsoft’s November Patch Tuesday has quietly removed a long‑exploited activation backdoor: the KMS38 technique used by the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS / Massgrave) project no longer works on updated Windows builds, and the MAS maintainers have removed KMS38 from the script in the v3.8...

Microsoft’s November Patch Tuesday has quietly closed off one of the most convenient — and widely abused — offline activation routes for Windows 10 and Windows 11, effectively neutering the long-running “KMS38” trick used by the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS / MASSGRAVE) project and forcing...

Free, legal, and genuinely usable music on restricted networks is more attainable than most people assume—there are several reputable sites and apps that let you stream or download tracks without the regional blocks, heavy DRM, or subscription walls of the major services. This feature evaluates...

AI-powered browsers that act like human users are forcing a swift and uncomfortable reckoning for publishers: a Columbia Journalism Review investigation found that agentic browsers such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT Atlas and Perplexity’s Comet can, in some cases, access and reproduce content behind...

AI-powered “browsers” that act like users are quietly undermining the assumptions behind paywalls, crawler blocks, and long-standing publisher defenses — and the result is a fast-moving collision between technology, law, and the business of journalism. Background AI browsers are a new class of...

Microsoft’s late-stage pivot in the long-running ValueLicensing dispute — recasting what began as an antitrust and licensing fight into a copyright question — has elevated a technical legal argument into a case that could reshape the pre-owned software market across Europe and the UK. The...

Microsoft’s consumer-facing post “Unlock productivity with AI automation” frames Copilot as an everyday, approachable assistant designed to remove friction from routine tasks and fold generative AI directly into how people plan, write, and organize their lives. The company positions Copilot as...

Microsoft is expanding the reach of AI inside Teams with a public preview of Project Manager agent skills that aim to turn meeting chatter and channel conversations into tracked, actionable work — but the feature brings licensing, governance, and operational caveats that IT teams must weigh...

Work is changing shape: Microsoft is shifting Microsoft 365 Copilot from a personal assistant into a set of collaboration-first agents that live inside Teams, SharePoint, and Viva Engage — effectively giving every team, meeting, project, and community an AI teammate that acts on shared context...

Microsoft’s Windows 365 is taking a pragmatic step toward wider frontline and shift-worker adoption by launching Windows 365 Cloud Apps in public preview — a feature that streams individual Windows applications from a shared Cloud PC so organizations can deliver Outlook, Word, OneDrive and...

Microsoft’s decision to let organizations stream single Windows applications from the cloud — instead of entire Cloud PC sessions — marks a pragmatic pivot in how enterprises will adopt Windows 365 for day-to-day workforces and frontline roles. The new Windows 365 Cloud Apps feature, now in...

Microsoft has quietly moved a full-fledged, free Copilot chat assistant into the daily work surface of Microsoft 365—embedding a persistent, content-aware AI sidebar inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote for qualifying business subscribers, while simultaneously expanding...

Microsoft has begun rolling out a free, in‑app Copilot Chat experience across Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and OneNote—embedding a content‑aware AI assistant as a right‑hand sidebar inside the Office apps millions of people use every day. This shift makes conversational AI a native part of...

Microsoft’s incremental update to Windows 365 Boot turns an already useful sign-in shortcut into a far more resilient, IT-friendly entry point to Cloud PCs, adding direct access to the Connection Center, built‑in troubleshooting flows, display customization, and a paid cross‑region disaster...

Winux arrives wrapped in sleek Windows 11 styling, a glossy demo video and a promise of a familiar desktop — but beneath the theme and the marketing, this distro resurrects the same trust issues, questionable licensing and security baggage that followed its predecessors LinuxFX and Wubuntu, and...

Microsoft’s decision to place a free, in‑context Copilot Chat and a new family of AI agents directly inside Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote is the clearest signal yet that generative AI is being baked into the everyday productivity experience — not sold as an optional add‑on...

Microsoft has begun embedding a persistent, context‑aware Copilot Chat pane directly inside the Microsoft 365 apps people use every day — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote — and is making that conversational AI experience available to qualifying Microsoft 365 subscribers at no...

Microsoft is rolling the Microsoft 365 Copilot app onto Windows 11 devices that already have the Microsoft 365 desktop apps installed, pushing a background, non‑disruptive installation that will place a new Microsoft 365 Copilot entry in Start menus across eligible systems beginning in Fall 2025...