In its game, two contestants face off to deliver jokes that appear on-screen. If their opponent laughs, they get a point, and the person with the most laughs at the end of six rounds wins. The idea is to highlight that so much of comedy comes not from the joke itself, but the delivery. However, the Comedy Center faced a challenge in determining when a player was laughing or not....

Rob Lefferts, the director of program management for Windows Enterprise and Security, spoke to TechCrunch and said the security landscape is changing. Microsoft understands that hackers are now organized and funded. To combat threats and mitigate them, the company is putting increased effort on Windows 10 security. Lefferts points out that 96 percent of attacks are distinct. Custom attacks are becoming more common, meaning the likelihood of zero days is increasing....

As you may know, the Surface Duo and Surface Neo are dual screened folding book devices. Both present a different form factor. On Android and the Duo, this could present issues. Google’s platform already does merely an average job when porting apps to tablets. With the dual screens, how will apps look? Microsoft says existing applications will work on both the Duo (from Google Play) and Neo (for the Microsoft Store)....

That is changing this week. For the first time, Microsoft is telling users how long they can expect to get firmware support on their hardware. This is important information for all Surface owners, but especially for those who are on devices that are a few years old. “In response to requests from customers for more detailed lifecycle information to help plan and manage hardware and software deployments, Surface is offering additional guidance on our driver and firmware updates,” the Microsoft Docs website explains....

Windows Server will get a new update through the first half of 2020. As such, Microsoft is moving it in line with its Windows 10 upgrade, which is 20H1. In its blog post, Redmond points out PowerShell will get a performance increase of 30 percent. Moreover, Windows Server will also receive a 40 percent smaller container base image size. “This [reduced container size] should be a big win for scaling applications in production, CI/CD [continuous integration/continuous development], and any other workflow that benefits from faster startup or pulls uncached images,” the announcement says....

More specifically, that is when the company will begin depreciating the service and support will be phased out gradually from there. The removal of Basic Auth on the Exchange Online multi-tenant will happen worldwide from October 1. Microsoft is taking a unique approach by contacting tenants directly to tell them when the removal date will happen for them. Once Microsoft reaches out, the tenant will have seven more days until Basic Auth is disabled completely....

Indeed, Ligman says the company will give away “millions” of eBooks at no cost. If you are unfamiliar with the giveaway, it is worth noting that these are Microsoft-specific eBooks. That means you are not going to be downloading the latest James Patterson. Instead, these are Microsoft eBook downloads that cover the company’s various platforms and products. Ligman says categories include: “Windows 10, Office 365, Office 2016, Power BI, Azure, Windows 8....

Previously, devs had to run different versions of Edge via virtual machines or Windows 10 PCs. However, the Redmond giant has heard that many to have easy access to Edge and has decided to do something about it. BrowserStack with Edge Features For those unfamiliar, BrowserStack provides an intuitive testing experience for over 36,000 companies via cloud-based browser instances. Edge will now be added to that list. Devs can sign into BrowserStack and use the Live and Automate services free of charge....

According to the company, all the three Microsoft Excel features are only available to Microsoft 365 customers. In other words, non-subscribers will see no difference. Microsoft says it is removing the features because not enough people are using them anymore. That is probably true, but also bad news for any of the remaining customers who do use the features. The first of those features is Money. If you are unfamiliar with this tool, it is a dynamic template that allows users to automatically connect their bank information directly to Microsoft Excel....

Perhaps the most noteworthy fix is a patch for a zero-day memory-corruption flaw that has already been exploited. Tracked as CVE-2020-0674 the vulnerability is denoted as critical and allows hackers to take over systems through remote code-execution attacks. Microsoft says the exploit is a remote code execution that gives bad actors the ability to access a system with the same privileges as someone logged in. If that access is on an admin account, the access would be total....

For those who missed it, Microsoft announced its return to the flight sim franchise at E3 2019. The game presents near-photo realistic graphics, with weather and satellite data powered by Azure. It presents more realistic cities, busier airports, beautiful weather, wildlife, and more. Enthusiasts have been waiting for this game for a very long time, but it’s worth noting these builds won’t be all fun and games. Each will be time-gated with only a small slice of the game’s functionality....

Today, Microsoft Garage has raised a curtain on a new experimental Android application. Called “Read My World”, the tool has been developed by a group of eight Microsoft interns. The goal of the app is to promote greater literacy through object identification. Read My World identifies objects within images and other content and then audibly pronounces the objects for the user. The Microsoft Garage team behind the app say the tool is an improvement on adult literacy programs, which the interns say are not always helpful....

Thanks to a Microsoft engineer, it may have found a better solution. The bug lies in the way Chrome pre-reads its DLLs via ImagePreReader, taking a few seconds for Chrome.dll and 1.33 second for chrome_child.dll. According to Microsoft’s Joel Laughlin, Google could prevent memory mismanagement by improving the browsers DLL prefetcher. “The current method of opening the DLL as a file and reading it into RAM causes two copies of the DLL to be in RAM....

Not just that, the company says the delay is indefinite as it has listened to customer feedback and will now continue with Outlook REST API. Customers and partners told Microsoft they were not ready to say goodbye to the API and move to Microsoft Graph. While Microsoft is putting an indefinite hold on the deprecation, the company is warning customers it will happen eventually. In fact, Microsoft says the Outlook REST API will go into the sunset in 2023 but does not provide a specific date....

However, which the Redmond facilities will be complete open, that does not necessarily mean staff will be at full capacity. Instead, employees who have arrangements to permanently change their work habits can continue on their new schedules: Essentially, Microsoft will maintain its hybrid workplace initiative: “Our Washington state work sites will move to our sixth and final stage of the hybrid workplace model, effective Feb. 28, 2022. From this date, employees will have 30 days to make adjustments to their routines and adopt the working preferences they’ve agreed upon with their managers....

Admittedly, Microsoft openly stopped supporting Internet Information Service 6.0 in July 2015. This cut off coincided with the end of support for Windows Server 2003. The company, as always, advised users still on IIS 6.0 to upgrade to newer versions. However, it is still estimated that millions of websites still use the outdated software. Windows Server 2003 still has a sizeable footprint, meaning IIS 6.0 is still on corporate networks....

Furthermore, bad actors could control a web server that supports Windows Integrated Authentication (WIA). Discovered by the Preempt team, which says all versions of Windows are at risk. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s existing mitigations do not protect against the NTLM Relay flaw. Preempt says the NTLM Relay is becoming among the most used attack methods for exploiting Active Directory infrastructure. Below are Microsoft’s existing mitigations and the reasons they don’t prevent NTLM Relay attacks: Message Integrity Code (MIC) was created to stop bad actors from meddling with NTLM messages....

Users now looking for emulators on the Windows Store will find they have been removed entirely. This includes the popular Universal Emulator app which allowed old Nintendo and Sega games to be played on new devices. Microsoft has already hinted at this decision when it blocked Universal Emulator on Xbox One. At the time, the company reasoned it was because it was not created through [email protected] It seems there was a wider motive in play, a complete crack down on emulators on the Windows Store....

For everyone thinking Microsoft was done in the mobile space as a hardware brand, that’s now not the case. However, Microsoft says this is a communication device, but it should not be called a smartphone. Surface chief Panos Panay says this is very much a PC that does the smartphone abilities too. That’s because phones have limits, according to Panay. As the name suggests, the Surface Duo runs on two screens....

Mark Simos, lead cybersecurity architect for Microsoft’s Enterprise Cybersecurity Group, wrote a blog about the solution developed with NIST. Called “Critical Cybersecurity Hygiene: Patching the Enterprise Project”. NIST is part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. Microsoft says working with the body allows for a smoother patch experience, which it calls patch hygiene. The company says the program was initiated following the WannaCry attacks. Many organizations were left vulnerable to the attack simply because their machines were not patched....