I know I should be loving this idea as a sign of human progress. Why, then, am I a little concerned? Please forgive this apparently tangential meandering, but when you’ve been used to something being done a certain way, it’s often hard to imagine a successful alternative. Yet here we are – or, more precisely, here are a lot of people in Chicago – about to face one of the more severe inevitabilities of our modern world: McDonald’s is removing humans from taking your order at the drive-thru, in favor of a machine....

Insta360 claims the GO 2 is the world’s smallest action camera, measuring thinner than a smartphone and weighing about six times lighter than competing action cams – without sacrificing the size of the image sensor. It’s loaded with high-quality features, too. With FlowState Stabilization, the action cam can keep your shots steady during intense activities. Plus, the GO 2’s horizon leveling algorithms keep the video upright even when you’re going upside down or rolling from side to side....

The presentation is available on the Facebook page of the AI Lab. The AI Lab’s proposition, displayed on its Facebook home page, is “Through the power of artificial intelligence, we will enable a world where people can easily share, create, and connect physically and virtually, with anyone, anywhere.” Zuckerberg called artificial intelligence “perhaps the most important foundational technology of our time.” Zuckerberg said the company is unveiling something called “Project CAIRaoke,” which Zuckerberg described as “a fully end-to-end neural model for building on device assistants....

The lawsuits, which were filed anonymously in the UK and US, allege that the Facebook platform widely disseminated anti-Rohingya hate speech and misinformation while also helping users incite violence, which culminated in the rape, death, and torture of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya. The Rohingya people are a Muslim minority that has historically lived in present-day Myanmar, but have faced persecution and human rights violations from the local government and extremist Buddhists in the country....

I’m not sure exactly when Android apps will start showing up in the revamped Microsoft app Store. Microsoft plans to make the new Store available for Windows 10 and 11 this fall, and Windows 11 is slated to roll out starting this holiday season and into early 2022 for new and existing Windows 10 users who have devices that meet the new hardware qualifications. It’s worth noting this isn’t the first time that Microsoft has tried to get Android apps on Windows....

DDoS attacks harness the connectivity of many compromised devices and direct packets of data at a specific target, such as a website or internet service, with the aim of knocking it offline. Massive DDoS attacks measured in Tbps are becoming more common. According to Alethea Toh, a product manager on the Microsoft Azure networking team, Microsoft stopped two other DDoS attacks that exceeded 2.5 Tbps in December. SEE: A winning strategy for cybersecurity (ZDNet special report) The record-breaking 3....

The tech giant’s first bit of advice for admins using Windows Group Policy to manage enterprise Windows 10 and Windows 11 devices is don’t mess too much with the defaults. Admins shouldn’t try too hard to customize device security patching and feature updates because the defaults are “often the best”, according to Microsoft. This focus on defaults keeps users happy and productive, while ensuring devices are patched and up to date....

User Privacy at Stake “We’ve heard the feedback, and today we’re responding by making changes to the product to further bolster privacy for customers”, Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, announced yesterday in a blog post. He outlined the changes Microsoft is making to protect individual privacy, while still giving organizations data-driven insights. Users and privacy advocates feared that managers would misuse Productivity Score. They could, for example, measure and track the productivity of specific employees, rather than the organization as a whole....

Cybercriminals are leveraging the new Cryware attack vector to transfer financial assets from hot wallets to their accounts — an act that is irreversible on the blockchain. A chart published by the Microsoft team shows a sharp rise in Cryware attacks in December 2021. What Is “Cryware”? According to Microsoft researchers, Cryware attacks may involve the use of “regexes” to identify vulnerable hot wallet data such as private keys, seed phrases, and wallet addresses — all of which are fundamental to access a hot wallet....

Drift to the Microsoft 365 roadmap, and you can observe what’s just around the corner. And what’s around the corner right now may shiver your timbers. Here, you see, is something entitled: “Microsoft Viva: Praise History in Microsoft Viva Insights.” Perhaps, like me, you praise history all the time. You thank it for trying to teach us things that we happily ignore. This Teams update, to be rolled out in November, teaches us something few employees will be able to ignore....

The Redmond giant’s latest round of patches, usually released on the second Tuesday of each month in what is known as Patch Tuesday, includes fixes for six critical vulnerabilities, 15 remote code execution (RCE) bugs, information leaks, and elevation of privilege security flaws, as well as issues that could lead to spoofing and tampering. Products impacted by November’s security update include Microsoft Azure, the Chromium-based Edge browser, Microsoft Office – as well as associated products such as Excel, Word, and SharePoint – Visual Studio, Exchange Server, Windows Kernel, and Windows Defender....

Microsoft’s supercomputer, with a benchmark speed of 30 Petaflops per second (Pflop/s) is still well behind China’s Tianhe-2A and the US Department of Energy’s IBM-based Summit supercomputer, but it’s the only major cloud provider with a supercomputer ranked in the top 10 in the high-performance computing (HPC) Top500 list. Voyager-EUS2 was the only new entrant in the Top500’s top 10 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers, which was led by Japan’s Fugaku with 7....

I’m conscious that in the tangible future, the artists formerly known as humans will be a touching hybrid of flesh and chips. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when Microsoft’s researchers came along to slightly hasten the despairing future. It all seemed so innocent and so very science-y. The headline of the researchers’ paper was creatively opaque: “Neural Codec Language Models are Zero-Shot Text to Speech Synthesizers.” What do you imagine this might mean?...

On Thursday, the FTC announced that it will be suing Microsoft, which makes the Xbox gaming console. The agency said Microsoft’s $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard would harm competition by potentially denying rival console makers’ access to Activision Blizzard’s massively popular content. ALSO: Microsoft’s giant bet on Activision Blizzard is its ticket to the metaverse To support its case, the FTC said that Microsoft has a record of acquiring gaming content, such as ZeniMax’s, and using it to suppress competition from rival gaming consoles....

“When you have a meeting and someone shares content, you can now click on participant videos in gallery view to swap the content with gallery,” Microsoft explains. The content sharing feature is available in public preview, so it may still have bugs, but it does allow users in the 49-person gallery mode to click on participant videos in gallery view to share content across the virtual room. Microsoft introduced the 49-person grid view in late 2020, six months after users complained that the then-9-person view was not enough for large lockdown meetings....

Microsoft has kicked off the rollout of the new Teams experience for Surface Hub, its interactive whiteboard for conference rooms that are built to play well with Teams. Surface Hub 2S is available with a 50-inch and 85-inch display with built-in Windows 10 and Teams. According to Microsoft, the new Teams Rooms for Surface Hub will replace the legacy Surface Hub Teams app globally over the next four weeks. It’s available to customers in Commercial, GCC and GCC High environments....

The Teams search function should now be more consistent with search in other Microsoft products and deliver faster results, according to a Microsoft blogpost. The update is generally available. Microsoft has redesigned four search pages and introduced a new version of the “All”, “Messages”, “People”, and “Files” filtering tabs. Results should be more relevant since Microsoft is using AI to ensure results are influenced by the people and content users engage with most in Teams and other Microsoft 365 applications....

The Gaming homepage is personalized with news on upcoming and newly released games, live streams, and more. The page includes personalized Xbox content and access to their Xbox Cloud Gaming library for users who sign in with their Microsoft accounts.The new Games menu for Edge, which offers free-to-play casual and arcade games, plus one-click access to games like Microsoft Solitaire and other exclusive Edge games.Clarity Boost is designed to provide clearer graphics while gaming in Microsoft Edge on Windows....

It’s clear from the spec sheet that the Lenovo-owned company is expecting the latest Razr to directly compete with this year’s top Android flagships, something which its past Razr revivals haven’t really done. The device ships with the same Qualcomm Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 processor Samsung chose for its Flip 4, as well as the same 8GB of RAM and 128GB base storage option. More: How to pre-order Samsung Galaxy Z Flip 4 and all the best deals The Razr 2022’s internal display has also grown since its last iteration, absorbing some of its bezels to sit at 6....