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Brave released new benchmark data asserting its desktop browser consumes 44% less CPU, 28% less memory, and 10% less energy than Chrome, Edge, and Firefox, while loading full pages about 20% faster. The company attributes the gains largely to blocking ads, trackers, and analytics scripts that would otherwise generate extra background processing after the visible page content loads.
Following a proof-of-concept with 172 employees, Switzerland's Federal Council has expanded testing of the German open-source suite openDesk to 3,000 government workstations, about 7% of the federal workforce. The pilot, running alongside Microsoft 365, aims for full migration by end of 2027, while the country's Cyber Command plans to fully replace Microsoft 365 with openDesk by October 2026.
A long-time Bing Wallpaper user reported that the desktop app displayed a full-screen advertisement for a Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts box set instead of the usual daily wallpaper image. The user said this was the first time they had encountered such an ad after years of regular use, and initially suspected their system had been infected with adware.
An internal Microsoft email from January 2003, later made public through litigation records, shows Bill Gates recounting a frustrating attempt to download Windows Movie Maker and a Digital Plus pack from Microsoft's own website. Gates described slow load times, a confusing list of 45 unfiltered download options, failed searches for 'moviemaker' and 'movie maker,' and being redirected to Windows Update just to find the software.
CloudSEK researchers infiltrated the admin panel of a phishing-as-a-service tool called BigBear 2.0 and found it had harvested over 5,000 Microsoft 365 credentials from 258 organizations. The kit uses an Evilginx2-based adversary-in-the-middle proxy to intercept usernames, passwords, and session cookies even after victims complete multi-factor authentication, letting attackers replay stolen sessions to hijack accounts.
At IFA 2026, Microsoft's Mark Linton said an internal Windows 11 build shows notable gains in boot speed and Windows Hello responsiveness, alongside earlier promises that the OS will run well on 8GB machines. No timeline for public rollout or performance data was shared, and the changes haven't yet reached testing channels.
Microsoft is expanding GitHub Copilot's coding agent to manage more of the software development pipeline, including setting up Windows development environments, running linters and tests, and opening pull requests for human review. GitHub also added agent support for Windows Subsystem for Linux, helping teams that build on Windows but test or deploy on Linux. Microsoft Distinguished Engineer David Fowler said on X that 'typing code is absolutely over,' pointing to a shift in what developers actually spend time doing.
The Swiss Federal Chancellery is spending CHF 9 million to test the openDesk open-source suite as a replacement for Microsoft 365 across 3,000 federal employees, roughly 7% of the workforce, with migration targeted for completion by end of 2027. The pilot follows a proof-of-concept with 172 employees that rated document editing and email positively but flagged limitations in large-scale video conferencing, and it will run alongside Microsoft 365 rather than replace it immediately.
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming their journalism was used without permission to train AI models and is often reproduced verbatim in chatbot responses. Microsoft was named as a defendant because its Copilot tool relies on OpenAI's technology, and the outlets are seeking destruction of any copied works, datasets, and models built from them.
Windows 11 users can build their own scheduled notifications using the built-in Task Scheduler tool, without installing any extra software. By creating a basic task, choosing a recurrence pattern, and entering a message via the 'msg' program with custom text, users can trigger personalized reminders at set times or events.
Microsoft researchers identified a large phishing operation that inserts invisible Unicode 'Tags' characters inside finance-related keywords—splitting words like 'funding' into fragments—to slip past email filters that scan for suspicious terms. The campaign peaked at 2.37 million daily messages in late February and, despite a drop in volume by May, remains active, with Defender for Office 365 tracing it to 148 finance-themed sender domains.
The Seattle Times and Newsday have filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging their journalism was used without permission to train AI models like ChatGPT and Copilot. The suit claims these tools consume original reporting and generate imitative outputs that could financially undermine the news organizations that created the source material.