security

Microsoft stopped hiding Easter eggs in Windows because the costs — to security, compliance, and customer trust — began to outweigh the nostalgia and developer whimsy that produced those secrets. Background For more than two decades, Easter eggs were a quirky part of software culture: tiny...

A newly cataloged vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20927, has been posted in Microsoft's Update Guide as a denial‑of‑service (DoS) flaw affecting the Windows SMB Server component; the advisory and the vendor‑confidence classification published alongside it change the operational calculus for...

Windows and Linux users have been trading myths, half-truths, and sermon-like lectures for decades — and the latest round of “just use Linux” sermons misses important nuance: Windows today is neither defenseless nor hopelessly obsolete, but it also isn’t flawless. This feature untangles five...

Alejandro Armas — known on GitHub as mycroftsnm — has released a compact collection of five boot-time UEFI games that force a simple choice every time you start a PC: win, and the machine continues to boot; lose, and it shuts down. The project, published as the UEFIGame repository, bundles a mix...

If you take screenshots regularly, the built‑in Windows Snipping Tool is a helpful default — but for many workflows it’s the start, not the finish. This deep feature guide shows which free and freemium utilities are worth installing, why they matter, how they differ from Snipping Tool, and the...

The Linux Foundation’s creation of the Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF) marks a decisive moment in the maturation of “agentic AI” — a coordinated, tool-enabled class of autonomous systems — by placing three rapidly adopted open projects from Anthropic, Block and OpenAI under a single neutral...

Microsoft’s big bet on embedding generative AI into Windows 11 has collided with the lived reality of millions of users: instead of clear productivity gains, many report slower machines, flaky features, and invasive telemetry-like behaviors that have turned excitement into exasperation for both...

Lenovo and Motorola today unveiled Qira, a system-level, cross-device AI assistant that the companies say will begin rolling out on select Lenovo PCs in Q1 2026 and appear on Motorola phones and proof‑of‑concept wearables later in the year, positioning Qira as a “Personal Ambient Intelligence...

Setting up a new Windows 11 PC is fast and polished, but the out‑of‑box defaults aren’t tuned for everyone; a short, methodical checklist after the first boot will secure your files, remove junk, improve reliability, and save frustration later. The following feature distills a practical...

Microsoft is rolling its in-house security expertise into a single, subscription-based package called the Microsoft Defender Experts Suite — a bundled, expert‑led offering that combines managed extended detection and response (MXDR), on‑demand and proactive incident response, and designated...

Microsoft’s Copilot has moved fast from a neat demo into a pervasive, multi‑headed AI assistant that now sits in Windows, in Microsoft 365 apps, in the Edge browser, and on phones — but it’s more than a chatbot: it’s a layered platform with distinct product tiers, on‑device acceleration...

Microsoft’s new Security Copilot Dynamic Threat Detection Agent is now running in the Defender backend and promises to find the threats that traditional rules and signatures miss by continuously correlating telemetry from Microsoft Defender and Microsoft Sentinel, producing explainable...

Amazon has quietly returned Alexa to the web—this time as a full-featured conversational assistant called Alexa+ accessible at alexa.com—bringing the voice assistant out of Echo speakers and into desktop browsers with a chat-style interface, smart‑home controls, and agentic capabilities that can...

Microsoft’s AI ambitions have collided with social-media ridicule and regulatory alarm this week as a new slang — “Microslop” — trended across X, Reddit, and Instagram, crystallizing a broader public revolt against what many users now describe as a force-fed, under‑polished AI makeover of...

FRRouting has a serious denial-of-service bug — tracked as CVE-2025-61103 — that allows a crafted OSPF packet to crash the ospfd process via a NULL pointer dereference in ospf_ext.c, and operators should treat any running FRR instances that have OSPF debugging enabled as high-priority for...

A newly assigned CVE, CVE-2025-15284, exposes a subtle but impactful logic hole in the popular Node.js query-string parser package qs that allows attackers to bypass configured array-size limits and trigger denial-of-service (DoS) through memory exhaustion when requests use bracket notation...

Sandboxie Plus 1.16.9 and Sandboxie Classic 5.71.9 are now available in a stability-first release that patches a number of long‑standing compatibility and reliability issues — from browser and portable app quirks to a critical driver-level crash under heavy GPU process loads — while keeping the...

A fresh machine feels like a promise: clean, fast, and ready for whatever you need to do next. Whether you’ve just unboxed a Windows laptop, switched to a Mac, or reinstalled the OS, the first software choices you make shape performance, privacy, and productivity for months. This feature unpacks...

Neowin’s end‑of‑year roundup of the “Top 10 most viewed stories on Neowin in 2025” arrived as a familiar mirror for the Windows community — but the original page’s interactive verification barrier prevented a direct archival fetch, so the list as published could not be programmatically...

I get it: that flat white arrow that ships with Windows works reliably, but it’s easy to lose on pale backgrounds and it’s boring. If you want a fast, low‑risk way to inject personality into Windows or your browser — from starship‑grade lightsabers to tiny game characters, holiday mascots, or a...