Sofia Elizabella Wyciślik-Wilson

AI services are more than a trend, they are a phenomenon, and every technology company wants to get in on the action. Microsoft is no exception; the company has just announced that its Azure OpenAI Service is now generally available, giving access to a far wider audience.

Microsoft is pushing Azure as "the best place to build AI workloads", and part of this involves harnessing the power of GPT-3-powered natural language. On the horizon is ChatGPT, which is described as "a fine-tuned version of GPT-3.5 that has been trained and runs inference on Azure AI infrastructure".

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The company behind NortonLifeLock, Gen Digital, has issued a warning to customers about a security breach that took place in December. Hackers used a credential-stuff attack to gain access to hundreds of thousands of Norton Password Manager accounts.

Gen Digital says that its own systems were not compromised, but warns affected customers that "we strongly believe that an unauthorized third party knows and has utilized your username and password for your account".

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Towards the end of last week, Microsoft confirmed an issue that stemmed from a flawed Microsoft Defender for Endpoint ASR rule that results in the deletion of app shortcuts from the Start menu, desktop and taskbar.

The company issued an update to prevent the problem from arising again, but said that there was no alternative but to manually recreate any shortcuts that had been lost. Now though Microsoft has released a PowerShell script that will automatically recreate some -- but not all -- deleted shortcuts. The company has also released a trio of advanced hunting queries (AHQs) to help with the issue.

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If you are a Tweetbot user who found yourself unable to access Twitter, you're not alone. Tweetbot, along with various other third-party Twitter clients stopped working on Thursday, it seems as though this is the result of an intentional block by Twitter.

Although the company has yet to say anything to either confirm or deny that third-party access to the Twitter API has been blocked, it is something that has been confirmed in leaked internal communication from Twitter engineers. One says: "third-party app suspensions are intentional".

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In a future update to Chrome, Google will give users the option of having extensions enabled or disabled on a site-by site basis.

This is an option that some browser extensions -- notably ad-blockers -- feature as standard, but the update will expand this so it applies to all add-ons. With a few clicks it will be possible to quickly disable all extensions for a particular site for the purposes of compatibility, privacy or performance.

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Users of Microsoft Defender for Endpoint have been experiencing what has been described as a "weird issue" that not only caused shortcuts to be deleted from the Start menu, desktop and taskbar, but also led to issues with Office apps.

The problem was traced to a flawed Microsoft Defender for Endpoint ASR (attack surface reduction) rule, and while Microsoft has now released a fix, this is not without problems of its own. Users are being warned that any shortcuts that have disappeared will need to be manually recreated.

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The writing has been on the wall for Groove Music for quite some time now, with Microsoft having resurrected Media Player as a replacement in Windows 11.

Now, as expected, the company is doing the same for Windows 10 users. Microsoft is bringing the same Media Player app found in Windows 11 to the older operating system, migrating users away from the Groove Music app.

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Microsoft has been gradually evolving Windows 11, and the insider builds are where much of the innovation is to be found. But even for eager users who install the latest builds as soon as they are available, sometimes a little extra legwork is needed.

And this is true of two hidden search features -- one for the taskbar and one for the Start menu. These secret options can only be enabled using a special third party tool, and they give a very interesting glimpse into what Microsoft has planned for Windows 11 in the future.

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They have been a very long time coming, but there are finally Apple TV and Apple Music apps available for Windows 11, meaning that PC users now have an alternative to the web versions of the services.

Both apps are listed as being "preview" versions -- essentially betas -- so what you see now is not necessarily the finished product. Apple has also launched a preview of the Apple Devices app, which can be used to manage iPhones and iPads from Windows 11.

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Anyone with an Xbox Series X or S can expect to see a software update from Microsoft in the near future that will change the way their console uses energy-saving power modes.

The company has announced that it is rolling out an update that should dramatically reduce power consumption when an Xbox is not in use. The update will switch consoles to using Shutdown (energy saving) mode, which Microsoft says can cut power usage by up to 20 times.

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Back in October, Microsoft announced plans to launch Microsoft Teams Premium, a paid-for version of its meeting and collaboration software. Now we know that the Premium tier is due to launch next month, and that as of February some of the features and options that are currently available to everyone for free will only be available to Premium users.

Although a precise launch date has not yet been revealed, Microsoft has told partners that the current schedule has Microsoft Teams Premium launching in "early February 2023". The company has also said that "some Teams features will move from Teams licenses to Teams Premium licenses".

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Microsoft has announced a new low-cost Microsoft 365 tier, giving access to a cloud storage boost and more. Priced at just $1.99 per month, Microsoft 365 Basic includes 100GB of cloud storage, removes advertising from the mobile and web versions of Outlook, and also includes access to the free web-based versions of various Office components.

Microsoft 365 Basic is replacing the current OneDrive Standalone 100GB plan, with existing users being automatically migrated later this month. Microsoft is quick to point out that while there is no change to plan costs, there are now more benefits for the same price -- including technical support for Windows 11.

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For anyone who has been put off upgrading to Windows 11 because of the way it looks, there could be some good news. While there is not a complete redesign of the operating system on the cards, there are supposedly plans to revamp the aesthetics of a key component -- File Explorer.

We have already seen Microsoft giving File Explorer some attention with the arrival of the somewhat polarizing tabbed interface. Now news has been leaked by reliable source FireCube Studios which says we can look forward to another major update as some point in the future.

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Microsoft has released the KB5022287 update for Windows 11 21H2, as well as the KB5022303 update for Windows 11 22H2.

Both updates are mandatory and, like this month's updates for Windows 10, include fixes for Local Session Manager (LSM) and ODBC issues. There is also a fix for a blue screen 0xc000021a error and numerous security patches.

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Less that two weeks into 2023, Microsoft has released the first cumulative updates of the year for Windows 10.

The KB5022282 and KB5022286 updates are available for Windows 10 versions 1809, 21H1, 21H2 and 22H2. Among the bugs addressed are an issue with the Local Session Manager (LSM) as well as fixing a Microsoft Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) problem.

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