Microsoft

India's banking system seems woefully obsolete when it comes to the technology powering its various appliances, and the country's central bank has had enough. The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) gave local banks a year's time to get some basic security measures in place at ATMs across the country, and to upgrade those machines still running on Windows XP.

Microsoft may be willing to offer extended custom support for older versions of its OS for those who need it - and are willing to pay - but XP is now nearing its 17th birthday, and reached end of support more than five years ago.

As part of Microsoft's $7.5 billion purchase of cloud source code repository GitHub, the company is installing a new CEO. Once the deal closes (which is expected to happen later this year), out will go GitHub co-founder Chris Wanstrath and in will come Nat Friedman. Friedman is the former CEO of Xamarin, the cross-platform .NET implementation that Microsoft bought in 2016.

 When it comes to the $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella urged software developers to "judge us by the actions we have taken in the recent past, our actions today and in the future."

Microsoft is buying GitHub for $7.5 billion dollars, and predictably, there's a developer backlash.

GitHub, though notionally a for-profit company, has become an essential, integral part of the open-source community. GitHub offers free hosting for open-source projects and has risen to become the premiere service for collaborative, open-source development: the authoritative source repository for many of these projects, with GitHub's own particular pull-request-based workflow becoming a de facto standard approach for taking code contributions.

With the new era of Windows as a service, Microsoft is rolling out changes to the operating system twice a year. Many of those changes will allow you to improve your security posture and offer more security choices. You no longer have to wait for a new operating system to deploy new security features.

Below is a summary of all the new security features and options in Windows 10 version 1803, which I call the privacy edition. Bookmark this article, because we will be adding new security features as Microsoft releases future Windows updates.

Microsoft has launched some new features in its Excel spreadsheet software that will boost its power. But will that only be for the benefit of users?

In its blog post about the new functionality, Microsoft says that there are “many reasons” why people might be interested in writing JavaScript custom functions, and gives the following examples:

• Calculate math operations, like whether a number is prime.
• Bring information from the web, like a bank account balance.
• Stream live data, like a stock price.

Microsoft’s May Patch Tuesday fixes include two critical remote code-execution vulnerabilities, both of which are under active attack.

The most serious of the two is tied to a Windows 10 VBScript engine and can be triggered when a victim visits a malicious website.

Since Microsoft and Amazon announced plans to integrate their respective personal digital assistants last summer, there's been almost no official update on the status of the partnership.

It seems, however, like there's finally movement happening. An April 27 update to the Cortana support page mentions "Cortana and Alexa."

"Cortana and Alexa are still getting to know each other. Soon you'll be able to ask Alexa to buy things, add items to your shopping list, access your Alexa skills, and more," says the brief update on the page. Yes, "soon" is vague. But it's something....

Microsoft today started to push out the free Windows 10 April 2018 Update. As always, this will be a gradual rollout, meaning not everyone will get the latest and greatest Windows 10 update on day one. Microsoft will slowly ramp up the release via Windows Update starting next week, but there’s no guarantee on the timing of when you will get it. If you don’t want to wait, you can get the latest and greatest update today.

Microsoft has posted the results of the third quarter of its 2018 financial year, running up until March 31, 2018. Revenue was $26.8 billion, up 16 percent year on year; operating income was $8.3 billion, up 23 percent; net income was $7.4 billion, up 35 percent; and earnings per share was $0.95, up 36 percent.