On Monday, Microsoft announced plans to offer AI models from Mistral through its Azure cloud computing platform, which came in conjunction with a 15 million euro non-equity investment in the French firm, which is often seen as a European rival to OpenAI. Since then, the investment deal has faced scrutiny from European Union regulators.
After failing for almost a decade to convince Apple to ditch Google and set Bing as Safari's default search engine, Microsoft quietly changed tactics and offered to sell Bing to Apple in 2018, unsealed court documents showed Friday, confirming a Bloomberg report from last year.
According to Google's post-trial brief filed in the US Department of Justice's antitrust lawsuit against the search giant, Microsoft in 2018 dangled perhaps its best offer to Apple: Either "sell Bing to Apple or enter into a joint venture regarding Bing."
Microsoft is already testing Windows 11 24H2, this fall's big new Windows release. The company has already demonstrated a few new features, like 80Gbps USB4 support and Sudo for Windows, and the new version could also give a significant refresh to the Windows installer for the first time since the Windows Vista days.
The hackers who recently broke into Microsoft’s network and monitored top executives’ email for two months did so by gaining access to an aging test account with administrative privileges, a major gaffe on the company's part, a researcher said.
Russia-state hackers exploited a weak password to compromise Microsoft’s corporate network and accessed emails and documents that belonged to senior executives and employees working in security and legal teams, Microsoft said late Friday.
The attack, which Microsoft attributed to a Kremlin-backed hacking group it tracks as Midnight Blizzard, is at least the second time in as many years that failures to follow basic security hygiene has resulted in a breach that has the potential to harm customers.
Despite plenty of misgivings, artificial intelligence—and in particular, generative AI that produces text and images from prompts—continues to be pushed into the hardware and software we use every day.
Microsoft has been active in the space, adding AI chatbot capabilities to its Bing search engine earlier this year, and it's now previewing an early version of its new Copilot AI assistant in Windows 11.
Microsoft has released patches to fix zero-day vulnerabilities in two popular open-source libraries that affect several Microsoft products, including Skype, Teams, and its Edge browser. But Microsoft won’t say if those zero-days were exploited to target its products, or if the company knows either way.
The two vulnerabilities — known as zero-days since developers had no advance notice to fix the bugs — were discovered last month, and both bugs have been actively exploited to target individuals with spyware, according to researchers at Google and Citizen Lab.
Two zero-day flaws in popular Microsoft products including Edge, Teams, and Skype have been discovered and patched, the company has confirmed.
Microsoft addressed CVE-2023-4863, and CVE-2023-5217, which affect the programs’ code libraries used to encode and decode images in the WebP format, and videos with VP8 encoding. The two libraries in question are used, the publication further adds, by a large number of popular software and services, including Safari, Firefox, Opera, various Android web browsers, 1Password, and Signal, but also Netflix, YouTube, and Amazon Prime Video.
Microsoft appears to be testing a built-in cryptocurrency wallet for Edge, according to screenshots pulled from a beta build of the browser. The feature, which the screenshots say is strictly for internal testing, was unearthed by Twitter user @thebookisclosed, who has a history of digging up present-but-disabled features in everything from new Windows 11 builds to ancient Windows Vista betas.
On Monday, Microsoft bundled ChatGPT-style AI technology into its Power Platform developer tool and Dynamics 365, Reuters reports. Affected tools include Power Virtual Agent and AI Builder, both of which have been updated to include GPT large language model (LLM) technology created by OpenAI.
The move follows the trend among tech giants such as Alphabet and Baidu to incorporate generative AI technology into their offerings—and of course, the multi-billion dollar partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft announced in January.
