Microsoft

Little over three weeks after the first Windows Blue leak, another build makes its way onto the interwebs. Windows Blue build 9369 is now available (we will not tell you where, but you can easily find it). But are you really surprised? Every time there's a new version of Windows in development a leaked build somehow surfaces in the darker corners of the Internet. We can almost say that it's tradition and just a matter of time before the next one arrives.

One company—Taiwan's Foxconn—makes a staggering 40 percent of the world's consumer electronic devices.

Starting now, Microsoft will be getting paid a toll on a large number of those devices. The company's long patent-licensing campaign has landed its biggest client yet in licensing Foxconn, formally named Hon Hai Precision Industry Co. Foxconn has agreed to take a license for any product it produces that runs Google's Android or Chrome operating systems.

Dell remains committed to Microsoft's Windows RT, despite the poor market reception to the OS and a decline in prices of related tablets.

The company has "future generations" of its XPS 10 tablet, which runs Windows RT, under development, said Neil Hand, vice president at Dell. The upcoming tablets will be lighter and faster, though Hand did not provide any further details on release dates or specifications of the XPS 10 successor.

 Ever since the consumer preview of Windows 8 was available, some users of the operating system have complained that there's no way to boot to the desktop instead of the Start screen. If recently discovered information is accurate, however, that may be changing in Windows 8.1.

Microsoft has withdrawn a security patch that was issued as part of its Patch Tuesday bulletin earlier this week because Windows 7 users were experiencing crashes after installing it.

The update, named KB2823324, addressed a moderate level vulnerability for the Windows 7 file system kernel-mode driver. However, Microsoft acknowledged bugs in the update in its Security Response Centre on Thursday following complaints from users that were experiencing a "blue screen of death" and an infinite reboot loop after installing the update.

Microsoft today said it will ship nine security updates next week, two rated "critical," to patch Internet Explorer (IE), Windows, SharePoint Server, Office Web Apps and the company's anti-malware software in Windows 8 and RT.

One security expert put his money on the IE update as the most important of the pending, in part because he expects Microsoft to fix the flaws revealed a month ago at the Pwn2Own hacking contest.

On April 2, Microsoft announced availability of Exchange 2013 Cumulative Update 1 (CU1), which provides both bug fixes and new feature updates to Microsoft's latest on-premises Exchange release.

Microsoft's Skype subsidiary didn't hand over any user content to law enforcement, according to the software giant's first ever report on how it deals with official requests for data.

As previously reported), Microsoft's transparency report revealed that Redmond received 75,378 requests from law enforcement agencies worldwide last year, involving 137,424 user accounts.

An early build of Windows Blue, the next version of Windows, has leaked online on the same day that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer celebrates his 57th birthday. Build 9364, a partner version that was originally compiled on March 15th, has been made available on file sharing sites and includes some of the new changes that Microsoft is building into its significant Windows 8 update.

Following the lead set by Google and Twitter, Microsoft has published its first transparency report, tabulating the number of requests for customer data made by law enforcement around the world, the number of responses given, and what kind of information was included in those responses.