Brussels has accused Microsoft of illegally abusing its dominance in the business-software market at the expense of smaller rivals, following a complaint at the height of the pandemic by US competitor Slack. The European Commission said on Tuesday it found that Microsoft was restricting competition by selling its video-conferencing software …
Read More »Microsoft Will Switch Off Recall by Default After Security Backlash
When Microsoft named its new Windows feature Recall, the company intended the word to refer to a kind of perfect, AI-enabled memory for your device. Today, the other, unintended definition of “recall”—a company's admission that a product is too dangerous or defective to be left on the market in its …
Read More »Microsoft’s Recall Feature Is Even More Hackable Than You Thought
Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella has hailed the company's new Recall feature, which stores a history of your computer desktop and makes it available to AI for analysis, as “photographic memory” for your PC. Within the cybersecurity community, meanwhile, the notion of a tool that silently takes a screenshot of your …
Read More »How to Record Everything on Your Laptop Screen Without Microsoft Recall
Microsoft is continually adding new features to Windows, but the recent announcement of a tool called Recall has raised a few eyebrows: It's designed to work like browsing history does in your web browser, but for everything on your PC. Whenever you need to retrace your steps on the Windows …
Read More »Everything Microsoft Announced at Today’s Surface Event
Microsoft's Surface laptops have been underwhelming us in the past few years—they haven't changed drastically since the original launch in 2017. But on the heels of Microsoft Build, the company's annual developer conference, Microsoft finally injected some life into its hardware platform today with a media-only launch event—that wasn't livestreamed—at …
Read More »How to Remove Annoying News Widgets From Windows 11
Windows 11, by default, shows you a bunch of "news" articles when you click the widget icon, the thing on the left-hand side of the taskbar that usually shows you the weather. This block of news articles was, until recently, next to impossible to disable. I am not exaggerating when …
Read More »This Microsoft Add-On Is the Ultimate Windows 11 Customization Tool
There's no shortage of utilities to tweak, customize, and modify Windows, but one of the best utilities is made by Microsoft itself. PowerToys is a free and powerful customization tool for Windows 11, and well worth installing if you want to see what's possible beyond the default settings and layouts …
Read More »Here Are the Google and Microsoft Security Updates You Need Right Now
It’s the shortest month of the year, but February updates have been hitting the ground at lightning speed, with Microsoft, Ivanti, and Fortinet all patching zero-day flaws in their products. Zoom and Cisco also just squashed serious bugs, so it’s a good idea to check your software versions and update …
Read More »How to Actually Clean Install Windows 11
PCs, for a long time, had a bloatware problem. The major PC manufacturers—Dell, Asus, Acer, and the like—had a bad habit of including "free trials" of software like Norton AntiVirus on new devices. The software companies paid to be included. This got so bad in the late 2000s that many …
Read More »Microsoft Shows Off New Surface Laptops and AI-Enhanced Windows
Microsoft held a media event in New York City this morning. The company used the occasion to show off two new laptops from its house-made Surface line as well as a slew of AI-powered enhancements coming to Windows 11 later this month. The hour-long presentation was not livestreamed, but we …
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