Thousands of Windows machines are experiencing a Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) issue at boot today, impacting banks, airlines, TV broadcasters, supermarkets, and many more businesses worldwide. A faulty update from cybersecurity provider CrowdStrike is knocking affected PCs and servers offline, forcing them into a recovery boot loop so machines can’t start properly. CrowdStrike is widely used by many businesses worldwide for managing the security of Windows PCs and servers.
Category: Microsoft
The Copilot Plus PC Era is ... Here?
Tom Warren, writing at The Verge:
Happy Windows on Arm day. Microsoft is launching its Copilot Plus PCs today, with Qualcomm-powered chips inside. If you’re wondering where our reviews are, Microsoft and most of its OEM partners haven’t seeded devices ahead of today’s launch because of Microsoft’s Recall… recall. I have started testing a Surface Laptop today, and we’ll have a full review of this new Windows on Arm hardware as soon as possible.
Recalled ⇢
Microsoft is planning to launch its new Copilot Plus PCs next week without its controversial Recall feature that screenshots everything you do on these new laptops. The software maker is holding back Recall so it can test it with the Windows Insider program, after originally promising to ship Recall as an opt-in feature with additional security improvements.
“We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security,” says Microsoft in an updated blog post. “When Recall (preview) becomes available in the Windows Insider Program, we will publish a blog post with details on how to get the preview.”
Researcher: Windows 11 Recall a ‘Disaster’ ⇢
Windows 11’s Recall feature has garnered a lot of attention since being announced, and much of that has focused on the potential privacy implications of software that basically tracks everything you do on your PC.
Cybersecurity expert Kevin Beaumont has taken a look at the feature, and uhhhhhh:
Microsoft told media outlets a hacker cannot exfiltrate Copilot+ Recall activity remotely.
Reality: how do you think hackers will exfiltrate this plain text database of everything the user has ever viewed on their PC? Very easily, I have it automated.
Sam Altman Now Works at Microsoft (Update: Maybe?) ⇢
Microsoft is hiring former OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and co-founder Greg Brockman.
Altman was fired from OpenAI on Friday after the board said it “no longer has confidence in his ability to continue leading OpenAI.” After a weekend of negotiations to potentially bring Altman back to OpenAI, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced that both Altman and Brockman will be joining to lead Microsoft’s new advanced AI research team. Altman will have the CEO title of this new group.
Even More Style Guides
Speaking of Microsoft branding, a reader emailed me links to both its and Google’s style guides, to go along with Apple’s.
Ah Yes, Branding ⇢
Tom Warren, reporting on the news that Microsoft rebranding “Bing Chat” to bring it more in line with the company’s other AI-powered products, which wear the far superior “Copilot” name:
“Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise will now simply become Copilot,” explains Colette Stallbaumer, general manager of Microsoft 365. The official name change comes just a couple of months after Microsoft picked Copilot as its branding for its chatbot inside Windows 11. At the time it wasn’t clear that the Bing Chat branding would fully disappear, but it is today.
Word Turns 40 ⇢
From its humble beginnings, Word has gone on to become one of the most popular office tools in the world, and pretty much everyone is familiar with it in one way or another. So, to celebrate its 40th birthday, we decided to take a look at how we got here and also share where we’re going.
Tonya and I have a long history with Word. Although we primarily used WriteNow at Cornell University during our undergraduate years from 1985 through 1989, we often helped users with Word while working in Cornell University’s public computer rooms. Two years after we graduated, a college friend of Tonya’s encouraged her to apply for a job at Microsoft. She was hired and spent the next two years doing phone and online support for Word 4 and Word 5. (So many people considered Word 5 to be the pinnacle of the app’s history that Tonya later penned two April Fools’ spoof articles about it: “ Microsoft Word 5.1 for Mac OS X,” 1 April 2003, and “ Microsoft Word 5.1 Returns… to the iPad,” 1 April 2011.) She also helped edit the manual for Word 6, Microsoft’s first attempt at a cross-platform version. I applied for a position as a Word program manager and got an interview but was not offered the job due to my lack of design skills, a rejection I took as a compliment, given my low opinion of Word’s interface.
Windows XP Activation Algorithm Cracked ⇢
The high school version of me would have been all over this.
I Asked Bing to Make Some macOS Wallpapers
I love macOS wallpapers, so when I saw that Bing had incorporated image creation into its probably-not-going-to-kill-us-all-but-maybe AI tools, I took it for a spin with this prompt:
Make some wallpapers in the style of Mac OS wallpapers from Jaguar, Panther and Tiger
I got these back:
That’s not really what I had in mind, so while the AI’s reading of my prompt made me laugh, I decided to try again:
Microsoft Blesses Parallels as Official Way to Run Windows on Apple Silicon Macs ⇢
Andrew Cunningham, writing at Ars Technica:
In the absence of a version of Boot Camp that runs on Apple Silicon Macs, the best way to run Windows on them has been to use a virtualization app like Parallels or (more recently) VMware Fusion. The problem is that, until now, the Arm version of Windows that runs on Apple Silicon Macs hasn’t technically been allowed to run on anything other than Arm PCs that come with it due to Microsoft’s licensing restrictions.
On Art and Stage Manager ⇢
Federico Viticci, writing at MacStories:
There is no doubt in my mind that the essence of iPadOS – how menus appear, lists scroll, buttons are tapped, heck, even what a pointer should look like – has been designed with more taste, thought, and care than anything in Windows 11. There is no checklist that can quantify when an interface “feels” nice. The iPadOS UI, particularly in tablet mode, feels nicer than any other tablet I’ve tried to date.