Microsoft Retreats In China
Microsoft has been steadily scaling back its China presence, closing at least 15 branch offices and joint ventures over the past five years as Beijing favors domestic software. U.S. export controls also make it harder to grow its cloud and AI businesses, leaving the market with relatively little economic upside. Reuters reports: Microsoft took a major hit from the erosion of trust between Washington and Beijing, the fi … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Combining Its Copilot Apps Ahead of a ‘Super App’
Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps ahead of a broader “super app” launch later this year. “Both personal and work accounts will be moved to the new unified app, which recycles the ‘Microsoft Copilot’ name but features an updated app icon,” reports The Verge. “The single app also means there won’t be two annoying Copilot … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 Ships With 233+ CVE Fixes
While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era… ⌘ Read more

Most of this insane power consumption happens during the models training, so the additional cost of prompting, is minimal. Facebook invented cool ways to exted the environmental damage far beyond the training stage, by dumping the dirty data center water into nearby water sources, but that’s more so a Facebook problem, than a fault of AI.

I would still never waste my own money, paying for any AI subscriptions that my employer doesn’t already pay for, no matter if we use them, or not.

I am also against aggressive scraping and taking everything as training data, disregarding the authors wishes and license. I allow it on my website, mostly as proof that no matter how much they scrape my stuff, the real me remains both a superior webdev and artist.

I am well aware this makes me come across really egotistical, especially after developers far better than me, embraced vibe coding, arguably way too much. To give an example, all attempts to get Microsoft Copilot, that’s embedded into SharePoint, to generate an extension/uBlock filter to make SharePoint revert to the old superior UI failed, but I was able to do that in three lines of code ( https://thecanine.smol.pub/ublock-filters ), in half an hour, despite me never seeing the code of that page before. After a few of these comparisons, it is increasingly hard to see most of these tools, as my replacement.

I am not even going to talk about the people trying to imitate my art style with AI, until they can show me a result where all the squares are the same size, in a grid and actually square.

Intel Xeon 678X Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Performance With The HP Z4 G6i
HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I’ve had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS performance benchmarks to see how th … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quietly Installing Beta ‘Photos’ App on Enterprise Machines
Microsoft’s cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . “The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality.”

One admin questioned why … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle: Expect a Negative Cash Flow of $125 Billion Next Year
The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle “are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they’re expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Pos … ⌘ Read more

AI Helped Create A DirectX 11 Driver For QEMU VMs
Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines… ⌘ Read more

Azure CTO Pastes Doom Into Paint One Frame At a Time
Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as “DoomPaint” or “MS Paint Doom” on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn’t doing anything other than serving as a … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Tells Engineers ‘Tokenmaxxing Is Not What We Are Optimizing For’
Microsoft is introducing AI token budgets for employees, making the cheaper GPT-5.6 its default internal model and telling engineers to focus on business results rather than maximizing AI usage. 404 Media reports: “As we accelerate our use of GitHub Copilot to deliver on our goals, we all need to be aware of how we consume tokens,” J … ⌘ Read more

Russia-Linked ‘Midnight Blizzard’ Group Hijacks Hotel Wi-Fi With CaptiveCrunch
A Russia-linked group tracked as Midnight Blizzard has compromised hotel and conference Wi-Fi portals worldwide, redirecting guests to phishing pages and fake software updates that steal credentials, session tokens, and other sensitive data. Microsoft says the campaign, dubbed CaptiveCrunch, “targets traveling employees g … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Bringing Xbox 360 Games to PC
Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project To Wall Street and His 20 Million Followers
theodp writes: During Microsoft’s 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst’s PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7’s (‘Magnificent 7’ companies) massive capital expenditure … ⌘ Read more

‘AI’s Decimation of Call Center Jobs Has Begun’
“AI’s decimation of call center jobs has begun,” reports Bloomberg:

Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans. In some cases, they’ve already wiped out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together repres … ⌘ Read more

Is There a Way to Promote Open Document Formats Instead of ‘MS Office’ Format?
The Register looks at exactly why “It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it’s worth.”

OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a gru … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History
Microsoft shares surged as much as 17% after reporting 43% growth in Azure revenue, putting the company on track to add a record $490 billion in market value in a single day. Bloomberg notes that it “would eclipse Nvidia’s $440 billion addition, following President Donald Trump’s announcement of a 90-day tariff pause last year, as the biggest ever. … ⌘ Read more

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows
Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan “RADV” driver to Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more

Double Fine get layoffs after split from Microsoft
Double Fine have announced that 23 members of their team have been let go, as they need to cut down on expenses to keep the studio alive.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Slight Advantage Over Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470
A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux based CachyOS into the benchmarking mix. ⌘ Read more

Apple Will ‘Watch Everything Burn’ When AI Bubble Bursts
MacRumors interviewed AI critic Ed Zitron, author of the Where’s Your Ed At newsletter and host of the Better Offline podcast, about what could happen to Apple if the costly AI infrastructure boom collapses. Zitron argued that Apple is relatively well insulated because it has spent far less on data centers than rivals such as Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. He sai … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA & Others Form The Open Secure AI Alliance
NVIDIA and more than two dozen other companies have started the Open Secure AI Alliance for helping to keep open-source AI models secure. The other founding members range from Microsoft to Adobe, IBM, Red Hat, SpaceX, OpenClaw, Palantir, and others… ⌘ Read more

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against ‘Premature Restrictions’ of Open-Weight Models
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could “stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.” CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models st … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Responds to LG Monitors Installing McAfee Ads On Windows
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install autom … ⌘ Read more

Did Microsoft Shift Its Profits to Low-Tax Countries?
Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate “is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,” remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added “It wo … ⌘ Read more

Coreboot + AMD openSIL On MSI Ryzen Motherboard Now Works With Windows 11
With 3mdeb’s Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Previews Linux Containers That Run In Windows
Microsoft has released a public preview of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) containers, adding a built-in command-line tool and API for running Linux containers directly inside Windows applications without third-party software. The update also introduces faster file access, improved networking and memory management, plus integration with Defender, Intune, and VS … ⌘ Read more

Remembering How Microsoft’s Fake Windows Error Ended In a $280 Million Secret Settlement
Slashdot reader joshuark summarizes this walk down memory lane from the tech site MakeUseOf:
Facing real competition from Digital Research’s DR DOS, Microsoft secretly embedded a sabotaging mechanism known as “AARD code” into beta versions of Windows 3.1 to prevent it from running on Digital Research’s com … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Announces Public Preview For Linux Containers On WSL
Microsoft today shipped the first public preview of WSL Containers “WSLC” as their latest extension of the Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows 11… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Slammed for Building Copyright-Infringing Supercomputer for OpenAI in New Court Filing
The New York Times alleges Microsoft actively encouraged OpenAI to steal its copyrighted work, reports Ars Technica, citing a new (and heavily redacted) court filing Thursday:

NYT’s motion comes after the [U.S.] Supreme Court sided with Cox Communications in a case where Sony tried … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Adds Another Year To Windows 10 Extended Update Program
Microsoft has quietly extended free Windows 10 security updates for consumers by another year, pushing the Extended Security Updates (ESU) program’s end date from October 12, 2026, to October 12, 2027. “The ESU support page was updated with that date, and Microsoft’s blog post on the program has a new editor’s note confirming the change,” repor … ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation & Others Launch “Akrites” To Defend Open-Source Software From AI-Enabled Exploits
The Linux Foundation along with others like Amazon, Anthropic, OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Red Hat, and others have joined forces to launch Akrites. The Akrites project is aiming to help defend critical open-source software from the brisk pace of new AI/LLM-discovered software bugs and vulnerabilities in ensuring that said issues are effectively addressed before they can be exploited by bad actors… ⌘ Read more

Linux Foundation Launches Akrites To Coordinate AI-Driven Open Source Security
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation has announced Akrites, a new initiative to coordinate vulnerability disclosure and remediation for critical open source software as AI dramatically speeds up vulnerability discovery. Founding members include AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Red Hat, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, JPMorgan … ⌘ Read more

Boffin Claims Microsoft’s ‘Quantum Leap’ Is Invalid Due To ‘Basic Python Errors’
A peer-reviewed Nature critique argues that Microsoft’s 2025 Majorana quantum-computing breakthrough – and its claim that it could enable “a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years” – is fundamentally flawed. According to Dr Henry Legg, a lecturer at the University … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Accidentally Breaks Replying To an Email On Outlook
Microsoft has accidentally introduced a bug in Outlook for Mac that omits the original message from email replies, making it difficult for recipients to follow conversation history. Until Microsoft releases a fix, its suggested workaround is to roll back from version 16.110 and disable automatic updates, which is “great for users in full control of their … ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Lands Battery/Charger Driver For 14 Year Old Microsoft Surface RT Tablet
It’s been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Discovers Cryptocurrency Stealer That Spreads Through USB Drives and Uses Tor
Ars Technica’s senior security editor reports:

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers.

The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the cont … ⌘ Read more

EU To Soon Classify AWS and Azure As Gatekeepers Under DSA
The European Commission is reportedly preparing to provisionally classify Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as “gatekeepers” under the Digital Markets Act, bringing cloud infrastructure under the law’s stricter competition rules for the first time. The designation could require greater interoperability and data portability, making it easier for customers to … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Working To Patch ‘RoguePlanet’ Zero-Day
wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Microsoft on Wednesday published an advisory acknowledging the public disclosure of a vulnerability in Defender that could lead to privilege escalation. The security defect, tracked as CVE-2026-50656 (CVSS score of 7.8), was dropped last week by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse (also known as Chaotic Eclipse). “We are working to … ⌘ Read more

Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI Back Linux Foundation’s Appia AI Standards Initiative
BrianFagioli writes: Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Arm, Mastercard, Siemens, and other companies have joined the newly launched Appia Foundation under the Linux Foundation. The project aims to create common specifications and assessment frameworks that organizations can use to demonstrate AI systems meet emerging s … ⌘ Read more

FBI Issues Urgent Kali365 Security Warning For Teams, Outlook, OneDrive Users
alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: The FBI released an urgent security warning to the public about a fast-acting scam targeting Microsoft 365 users on Teams, Outlook and OneDrive. The agency warned that the hacking platform Kali365 seeks out OAuth device codes, allowing scammers to sneak past multi-factor auth … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Updates Six Windows’ Apps. ‘Photos’ Gets Watermarks for Copilot Images (Off by Default)
Microsoft dropped “massive” updates for six stock Windows apps, reports the “Microsoft enthusiast” site Neowin.

Here’s some of their more interesting highlights for Clock, Media Player, Calculator, Voice Recorder, Photos, and Paint:

The Photos app (version 2026.11060.2004.0):

AI wat … ⌘ Read more

The FCC Wants to Kill Burner Phones
Plus: AI bug hunting fuels Microsoft’s biggest-ever Patch Tuesday, ShinyHunters ransomware gang exploits an Oracle zero-day, and more. ⌘ Read more

AMD Opens Pre-Orders For The Linux-Friendly Ryzen AI Halo Developer Platform
AMD today announced the opening of pre-orders for their Ryzen AI Halo petite PC powered by AMD Ryzen AI Max+ “Strix Halo” and working with either Microsoft Windows or Linux… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Surface Flaw Allowed Unprotected Devices To Be Bricked By a Single Packet
Longtime Slashdot reader Dotnaught shares a report from The Register: For the past 90 days, Microsoft has been quietly patching a firmware flaw in Surface devices that allowed the hardware to be bricked with a single packet, though only for those who have disabled Secure Core and Secure Boot. And the company’s … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft: Xbox warnt vor unbezahlbaren Konsolen
Speicher und andere Komponenten für die Xbox kosten Microsoft inzwischen mehr als das Fünffache von vor zwei Jahren. ( Xbox, Microsoft)

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Euro-Office 1.0 Arrives To Open-Source Infighting: ‘Compatibility Is Not Sovereignty’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: If digital sovereignty is important to you, and it certainly is in the European Union (EU), then you’ll be pleased to know that EuroOffice, a new open-source browser-based office suite alternative to Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, has officially reached its … ⌘ Read more

В Microsoft назвали важнейшую дату для пользователей Windows ⌘ Read more

Anzeige: Microsoft Surface Pro zu Einsteigerpreisen bei Back Market
Als Windows-Tablet bietet das Microsoft Surface Pro kompakte Produktivität. Bei Back Market ist es professionell erneuert besonders günstig. ( Surface, Technik/Hardware)

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