Author of Systemd Quits Microsoft To Prove Linux Can Be Trusted
Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his “role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has.” Poettering will also continue to … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Experimenting With a Top Menu Bar for Windows 11
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or older versions of Windows. The menu bar, or Command Palette Dock as Microsoft calls it, would be a new optional UI that provides quick access to tools, monitoring of system resources, and much more.

Micros … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Working On Improved vCPU Scheduler Support For Hyper-V Linux VMs
Microsoft posted a patch series for introducing Hyper-V integrated scheduler support into the Linux kernel for enhancing vCPU scheduling behavior for virtual machines running within Microsoft’s virtualized environment… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Admits Windows 11 Has a Trust Problem, Promises To Focus on Fixes in 2026
Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system’s performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls “swarming.”

” … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Hardware Revenue Craters 32%
Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft’s total revenue exceeded $80 billion.

Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.

[

Image

Windows 11 Has Reached 1 Billion Users Faster Than Windows 10
An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.

“Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the compa … ⌘ Read more

There’s a Rash of Scam Spam Coming From a Real Microsoft Address
There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address – which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list – is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various source … ⌘ Read more

FreeType Speeds-Up ClearType-Like LCD Filter Rendering By 40%
The widely-used FreeType library used for rendering text onto bitmaps has landed a significant optimization for its LCD filtering code path for Microsoft ClearType-like rendering. Thanks to the improvement, the rendering can be around 40% faster… ⌘ Read more

France To Ditch US Platforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom For ‘Sovereign Platform’ Amid Security Concerns
France will replace the American platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own domestically developed video conferencing platform, which will be used in all government departments by 2027, the country said. From a report: The move is part of France’s strategy to stop using foreign … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Was Routing Example-Domain Traffic To a Japanese Cable Company for Five Years
Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com – a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party – to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo E … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Refreshing the Xbox Cloud Gaming Web Experience
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. “This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly,” Microsoft’s Patrick Siu explains. “Players who opt in to … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Latest AI Chip Claims Performance Edge Over Amazon and Google
An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it’s the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon’s latest Trainium chip on certain b … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft 365 Endured 9+ Hours of Outages Thursday
Early Friday “there were nearly 113 incidents of people reporting issues with Microsoft 365 as of 1:05 a.m. ET,” reports Reuters. But that’s down “from over 15,890 reports at its peak a day earlier, according to Downdetector.” Reuters points out the outage affected antivirus software Microsoft Defender and data governance software Microsoft Purview, while CRN notes it also imp … ⌘ Read more

PowerShell Architect Retires After Decades At the Prompt
Jeffrey Snover, the driving force behind PowerShell, has retired after a career that reshaped Windows administration. The Register reports: Snover’s retirement comes after a brief sojourn at Google as a Distinguished Engineer, following a lengthy stint at Microsoft, during which he pulled the company back from imposing a graphical user interface (GUI) on adminis … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Gave FBI a Set of BitLocker Encryption Keys To Unlock Suspects’ Laptops
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Microsoft provided the FBI with the recovery keys to unlock encrypted data on the hard drives of three laptops as part of a federal investigation, Forbes reported on Friday. Many modern Windows computers rely on full-disk encryption, called BitLocker, which is ena … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Software 1.7 Released For Improved Performance On NPUs, New Model Support
AMD today released a new version of Ryzen AI Software, the user-space packages for Microsoft Windows and Linux for making use of the Ryzen AI NPUs for various AI software tasks like Stable Diffusion, ONNX, and more… ⌘ Read more

The Microsoft-OpenAI Files
Longtime Slashdot reader theodp writes: GeekWire takes a look at AI’s defining alliance in The Microsoft-OpenAI Files, an epic story drawn from 200+ documents, many made public Friday in Elon Musk’s ongoing suit accusing OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman of abandoning the nonprofit mission (Microsoft is also a defendant). Musk, who was an OpenAI co-founder, is seeking up to $134 billion in damages. “Previously undisclosed emails, … ⌘ Read more

AI Company Eightfold Sued For Helping Companies Secretly Score Job Seekers
Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed AI hiring platform used by Microsoft, PayPal and many other Fortune 500 companies, is being sued in California for allegedly compiling reports used to screen job applicants without their knowledge. From a report: The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday accusing Eightfold of violating the Fair Credit … ⌘ Read more

Energy Costs Will Decide Which Countries Win the AI Race, Microsoft’s Nadella Says
Energy costs will be key to deciding which country wins the AI race, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has said. CNBC: As countries race to build AI infrastructure to capitalize on the technology’s promise of huge efficiency gains, Nadella told the World Economic Forum (WEF) on Tuesday that “GDP growth in any place … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI CFO Says Annualized Revenue Crosses $20 Billion In 2025
According to CFO Sarah Friar, OpenAI’s annualized revenue surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from $6 billion a year earlier with growth closely tracking an expansion in computing capacity. Reuters reports: OpenAI’s computing capacity rose to 1.9 gigawatts (GW) in 2025 from 0.6 GW in 2024, Friar said in the blog, adding that Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Xbox Cloud Gaming May Soon Let You Stream Your Own Games for Free - If You Watch Ads
Microsoft appears to be preparing an ad-supported tier for Xbox Cloud Gaming that would let players stream games they’ve purchased digitally without needing a Game Pass subscription, according to a Windows Central report citing sources familiar with the plans. Users last week began n … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Forced to Issue Emergency Out-of-Band Windows Update
The senior editor at the blog Windows Central decries two serious Windows issues “that were not spotted by Microsoft during testing, and are so severe that the company has now issued an emergency fix to address the problems.”

Microsoft’s first update for Windows 11 in 2026 has already caused two major issues that saw users unable to fully shutdown t … ⌘ Read more

To Pressure Security Professionals, Mandiant Releases Database That Cracks Weak NTLM Passwords in 12 Hours
Ars Technica reports:

Security firm Mandiant [part of Google Cloud] has released a database that allows any administrative password protected by Microsoft’s NTLM.v1 hash algorithm to be hacked in an attempt to nudge users who continue using the deprecated function … ⌘ Read more

Patch Tuesday Update Makes Windows PCs Refuse To Shut Down
A recent Microsoft Patch Tuesday update has introduced a bug in Windows 11 23H2 that causes some PCs to refuse to shut down or hibernate, “no matter how many times you try,” reports The Register. From the report: In a notice on its Windows release health dashboard, Microsoft confirmed that some PCs running Windows 11 23H2 might fail to power down properly af … ⌘ Read more

Code.org: Use AI In an Interview Without Our OK and You’re Dead To Us
theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world’s K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Closing Its Employee Library and Cutting Back on Subscriptions
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft’s library of books is so heavy that it once caused a campus building to sink, according to an unproven legend among employees. Now those physical books, journals, and reports, and many of Microsoft’s digital subscriptions to leading US newspapers, are disappearing in a shift des … ⌘ Read more

Wikipedia Signs AI Licensing Deals On Its 25th Birthday
Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies – Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content “at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs.” The Wikim … ⌘ Read more

Unions score rare win over AI rollout with Microsoft agreement
The deal follows a wave of AI-linked job cuts at major Australian employers including CBA, Atlassian and WiseTech. ⌘ Read more

UK Police Blame Microsoft Copilot for Intelligence Mistake
The chief constable of one of Britain’s largest police forces has admitted that Microsoft’s Copilot AI assistant made a mistake in a football (soccer) intelligence report. From a report: The report, which led to Israeli football fans being banned from a match last year, included a nonexistent match between West Ham and Maccabi Tel Aviv.

Copilot hallucinated t … ⌘ Read more

ZLUDA Boasts Full Llama.cpp Support, Better Windows Handling For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs
The open-source ZLUDA project for bringing CUDA to non-NVIDIA hardware that can run unmodified is out with a new progress report. ZLUDA had a productive fourth quarter with now enjoying better Microsoft Windows support, full support for running Llama.cpp atop ZLUDA, AMD ROCm 7 support, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Receives Fix For A Very Annoying Usability Issue
ReactOS began 2026 with another “major step” towards Windows NT 6 compatibility with updating its MSVCRT implementation from Wine for the Microsoft C Runtime DLL library. That improved support for a number of Windows applications running on this open-source OS. ReactOS is taking another step-forward now with addressing a very annoying usability issue where up until now you may need to refresh the file manager for seeing folder changes… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Pledges Full Power Costs, No Tax Breaks in Response To AI Data Center Backlash
Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a “community first” initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clea … ⌘ Read more

Trump Says Microsoft To Make Changes To Curb Data Center Power Costs For Americans
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won’t see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. “I never want Americ … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Pulls the Plug On Its Free, Two-Decade-Old Windows Deployment Toolkit
Microsoft has abruptly retired the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, a free platform that IT administrators have relied on to deploy Windows operating systems and applications for more than two decades. The retirement, reports the Register, came with “immediate” notice, meaning no more fixes, support, security patches, or u … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot
Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installe … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how… by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more … ⌘ Read more

Send To Kindle from Microsoft Word is Discontinued
Microsoft is discontinuing its Send to Kindle integration in Word, ending a feature that allowed Microsoft 365 subscribers to send documents directly to their Kindle e-readers and preserve complex formatting through fixed layouts.

The company updated its documentation to announce that beginning February 9th, 2026, the Send to Kindle feature will no longer work across Web, Wi … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Turns Copilot Chats Into a Checkout Lane
Microsoft is embedding full e-commerce checkout directly into Copilot chats, letting users buy products without ever visiting a retailer’s website. “If checkout happens inside AI conversations, retailers risk losing direct customer relationships – while platforms like Microsoft gain leverage,” reports Axios. From the report: Microsoft unveiled new agentic AI tools for retailers … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Cancels Plans To Rate Limit Exchange Online Bulk Emails
Microsoft has canceled plans to impose a daily limit of 2,000 external recipients on Exchange Online bulk email senders. From a report: The change was announced in April 2024, when Microsoft said that it would add new External Recipient Rate (ERR) limits starting January 2025 to fight spam, with plans to begin enforcing the limit on cloud-hosted … ⌘ Read more

‘Everyone Hates OneDrive, Microsoft’s Cloud App That Steals Then Deletes All Your Files’
Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage service has drawn renewed criticism for a particularly frustrating behavior pattern that can leave users without access to their local files after the service automatically activates during Windows updates.

Author Jason Pargin recently outlined the problem: Windows updat … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Office Is Now ‘Microsoft 365 Copilot App’
Longtime reader joshuark shares a report: As spotted by Bluesky user DodgerFanLA, going to Office.com now greets you with the following helpful explainer: “The Microsoft 365 Copilot app (formerly Office) lets you create, share, and collaborate all in one place with your favorite apps now including Copilot.*”

Never has an asterisk been more relevant to me than following the wor … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft is Slowly Turning Edge Into Another Copilot App
Microsoft has started testing a “significant” visual overhaul for Edge in its Canary and Dev Channel preview builds, and the redesigned interface borrows heavily from the design language that first appeared in the company’s standalone Copilot app rather than the Fluent Design system used across Windows 11, Xbox, and Office.

The updated look touches context menus, … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s Risky Bet That Windows Can Become The Platform for AI Agents
“Microsoft is hoping that Windows can once again serve as the platform where it all takes off,” reports GeekWire:

A new framework called Agent Launchers, introduced in December as a preview in the latest Windows Insider build, lets developers register agents directly with the operating system. They can describe an agent through wh … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think they are Windows users, going by the lack of attention to detail, and the fact they love DFS. Ha!

Has Microsoft Discontinued Offline Activation of Windows?
An anonymous reader shared
this report from Neowin:

Offline Windows activation has been possible to do using the phone. However, it looks like Microsoft has quietly killed off that method as users online have found that they are no longer able to activate the OS using it… [As documented by Windows user Ben Kleinberg on his YouTube channel], Now when trying … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft CEO: Time To Move ‘Beyond the Arguments of Slop vs Sophistication’
The tech industry needs to move “beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication” and develop a new “theory of the mind” that accounts for humans now equipped with “cognitive amplifier tools,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in a year-end reflection blog. The post frames 2026 as yet another “pivotal year for AI” – but one that “ … ⌘ Read more

Unexpected Surprise: Windows 11 Outperforming Linux On An Intel Arrow Lake H Laptop
Typically when receiving any review hardware preloaded with Microsoft Windows I tend to run some Windows vs. Linux benchmarks just as a sanity test plus it still seems to generate a fair amount of interest even though the outcome is almost always the same: Linux having a hefty performance advantage over Windows especially in the more demanding creator-type workloads. As an unexpected twist and time consuming puzzle the past two … ⌘ Read more

‘One of America’s Most Successful Experiments Is Coming to a Shuddering Halt’
The six-decade flow of highly skilled Indian immigrants to the United States – a migration pattern that produced some of the country’s highest-earning households, several Nobel laureates, and the CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and Pepsi – appears to be grinding to a halt amid rising anti-Indian rhetoric from Republican offici … ⌘ Read more

NTFSPLUS Linux Driver Renamed To Just “NTFS” With Latest Code Restructuring
One of the unexpected Linux kernel surprises of 2025 was NTFSPLUS being announced as a new driver for Microsoft’s NTFS file-system with better performance and more features compared to the classic read-only NTFS driver or the “NTFS3” kernel driver that Paragon Software submitted upstream. That NTFSPLUS driver has continued expanding its feature set and robustness and sent out today was the third iteration of the patches. Now this driver is s … ⌘ Read more

New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows’ ‘Modern Standby’
Phoronix reports on “an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list” proposing “a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the ‘Modern Standby’ functionality found with Microsoft Windows…”

Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain co … ⌘ Read more