privacy and security

The UK’s new age-verification regime has arrived on Xbox in the worst possible way: sudden lockouts, interrupted multiplayer sessions, broken verification flows, and a rush of angry players asking why a platform they’ve used for years now treats them like strangers until they hand over ID or a...

Microsoft is adding a one‑click Internet speed test to Windows 11’s network menu — but the convenience comes with an important caveat: it’s a launcher that opens a browser‑hosted speed widget (surfaced via Bing and observed to use established speed‑test backends like Ookla), not a native, in‑OS...

Microsoft has quietly moved one of the security community’s most trusted tools out of the Sysinternals download bucket and into Windows itself, delivering native Sysmon functionality as an optional Windows 11 feature that can be enabled, updated, and (crucially) supported through Microsoft’s...

Mozilla is adding a new, centralized AI Controls section to Firefox that lets users block generative AI features with a single toggle — and manage individual AI-powered tools — starting with Firefox 148, which begins rolling out on February 24, 2026. Background Mozilla’s announcement arrives at...

Microsoft appears to be quietly rethinking the way artificial intelligence is baked into Windows 11, moving from an “AI everywhere” posture to a more measured, removal-first approach for visible Copilot integrations and controversial features such as Windows Recall. Background / Overview For...

Mozilla has given users a one-click way to tell the AI revolution to stay out of their browser: starting with Firefox 148, rolling out February 24, the desktop browser adds an AI Controls panel with a single “Block AI enhancements” master switch that disables current and future generative AI...

Microsoft is rolling Copilot Vision into Windows — a permissioned, session‑based capability that lets the Copilot app “see” one or two app windows or a shared desktop region and provide contextual, step‑by‑step help, highlights that point to UI elements, and multimodal responses (voice or typed)...

The rhetorical blast from a recent opinion headline — that using AI chatbots to follow the news is like “injecting severe poison directly into your brain” — captures a real anxiety, but it also obscures what’s provably wrong, what’s still speculative, and what we must fix now if conversational...