Microsoft

Microsoft has hit a hardware home run that surprised even the people in Redmond. The Surface Hub conference room PC turns out to be selling like hotcakes, surpassing everyone's expectations.

Windows 10’s aggressive data-collection capabilities may concern users about corporate spying, but enterprises have control that consumer-edition Windows users do not: Administrators can decide how much information gets sent back to Microsoft.

But enterprises need to think twice before turning off Windows telemetry to increase corporate privacy. That’s because doing so can decrease the effectiveness of Windows 10’s security features.

In terms of delivering public cloud services, an Azure customer recently taught Microsoft a lesson in running a tight ship.

Ian Duffy, a software engineer at online retailer Zalando, had set out to create a secure, custom Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) machine image to be deployed on both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. During the process, he discovered a vulnerability that could have provided an attacker root access to virtual machines.

Microsoft's claim that Windows 10 made obsolete an important enterprise anti-exploit tool was inaccurate, said a security analyst at the center that coordinates with the United States' cyber-alert organization.

Linux-based desktop operating systems can sometimes be incredible for productivity and security, but they can be deficient from a feature and application perspective too. Windows 10 and macOS Sierra, for instance, are chock-full of some exciting software that is simply not available on Linux, such as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, although alternatives (LibreOffice and Gimp for example) can sometimes be passable.

The latest Windows 10 insider build brings a change that puts the Windows PowerShell in the spotlight, as it replaces the super-popular Command Prompt in some essential parts of the operating system.

Command Prompt has been around for as long as we can remember, but starting with Windows 10 build 14971, Microsoft is trying to make PowerShell the main command shell in the operating system.

Microsoft has a long tradition of publishing Security Bulletins to share information about patches and security fixes that it releases. But starting next year this is going to change.

As of February 2017, Microsoft will make use of the newly launched Security Updates Guide database. This, on the face of it, sounds like a great idea -- a searchable database of information -- but it changes the way information is presented and is unlikely to be well-received by users.

Although Donald Trump’s presidential campaign never netted much support from tech companies, at least one company is now congratulating him on his election victory.

“Every president-elect deserves our congratulations, best wishes and support for the country as a whole. The peaceful transition of power has been an enduring and vital part of our democracy for over two centuries, and it remains so today,” Microsoft chief legal officer Brad Smith wrote in a blog post.

Earlier this year, Microsoft made a splash at its Ignite conference for IT professionals when it announced that it has been racking cards of programmable chips together with servers in its cloud data centers.

The chips, called field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), can be reconfigured after being deployed to optimize them for particular applications such as networking and machine learning.

In April this year, Microsoft made Azure Container Service generally available. Today, November 7, Microsoft announced it is open sourcing the engine at the heart of ACS.

Azure Container Service (ACS) allows developers to orchestrate applications using Apache Mesos or Docker Swarm. ACS also enables users to migrate container workloads to and from Azure without code changes, according to Microsoft.