Microsoft

Google is once again dropping the same bomb on Microsoft – disclosing a vulnerability publicly after the company failed to patch it in time.

The Redmond software giant was expected to a send a security update on Patch Tuesday last week. However, it failed to do so and said that the updates will now be released “as part of the planned March Update Tuesday,” on March 14, 2017 – a whole month after they were supposed to go live.

Privacy fears abound with Windows 10, with individuals and privacy groups continually questioning the company's motives in gathering user data. The threat of a court case in Switzerland resulted in Microsoft making changes to Windows -- in addition to the privacy changes it had already made.

But for European privacy watchdogs, the latest batch of changes are still not enough. The Article 29 Working Party voices concern about the settings that are in place by default, the lack of control users are given over data collection, and a general lack of transparency.

Git, the open source distributed version control system created by Linus Torvalds to handle Linux's decentralized development model, is being used for a rather surprising project: Windows.

Microsoft will have Windows Holographic developer kits at Game Developers Conference (GDC) 2017, according to a video on the company's Channel 9 site that was spotted by MSPoweruser. GDC will run February 27 to March 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

The Windows 10 Creators Update, currently anticipated to be released in April, will include a wealth of new 3D, virtual, and augmented reality capabilities. This will be used with a range of relatively cheap headsets such as the one Lenovo showed at CES.

Microsoft today announced it had acquired Maluuba, a Canadian artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing technology firm. Financial terms were not disclosed.

Citing the company's progress in speech and image recognition, Microsoft is now setting its sights on "literate machines," according to Harry Shum, executive vice president of Microsoft's Artificial Intelligence and Research Group.

We've talked a lot about how Microsoft managed to shoot Windows 10 (and consumer goodwill) squarely in the foot by refusing to seriously address OS privacy concerns, and by using malware-style tactics to try and force users on older versions of Windows to upgrade. While Microsoft's decision to offer Windows 10 as a free upgrade to Windows 7 and Windows 8.1 made sense on its surface, the company repeatedly bungled the promotion by making the multi-gigabyte upgrade impossible to avoid, which was a huge problem for those on capped and metered broadband connections.

Capping an AI-themed week at Microsoft, the company released MS MARCO, a data set of 100,000 questions and answers that researchers can use to train their artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

The software maker's own researchers based MS MARCO, short for Microsoft Machine Reading Comprehension, on anonymized data gleaned from the real-world queries posed to the company's Bing search engine.

Adobe Flash continues its long, slow fade from the mainstream. The latest step is today's announcement that the next release of Microsoft Edge will disable Flash by default, giving users control over whether and when Flash-based content runs.

The feature will appear in upcoming Insider Preview builds and will be released to the general public in the Windows 10 Creators Update, due to arrive in early 2017.

Microsoft has quietly fixed a software update it released last week, which effectively prevented Windows 10 users from connecting to the Internet or joining a local network.

It's unclear exactly which automatic update caused the problem or exactly when it was released—current (unconfirmed) signs point to KB3201845 released on December 9—but whatever it was appeared to break DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), preventing Windows 10 from automatically acquiring an IP address from the network.

Microsoft has patched a backdoor in Skype for Mac OSX that would allow an attacker to log and record Skype call audio, retrieve user contact information, read the content of incoming messages, create chat sessions, modify messages, and carry out other malicious activity.

The backdoor provided nearly complete access without authentication to Skype on OS X, and appears to have been around since at least 2010, security vendor Trustwave said in an advisory this week.