The folks over at Microsoft seem to be very committed to doing "good". Not only does the company produce products that make the world better (Windows, Skype, and Office to name a few), but through its noble Winsiders4Good initiative, Dona Sarkar and other Microsoft employees are aiming to improve people's lives using technology.

Today, Microsoft announces yet another way that it is helping humanity. The Windows-maker makes its "largest ever" purchase of wind energy -- 237 megawatts. In other words, the company will be using less fossil fuels, and reducing its overall carbon footprint.

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Black Friday is just around the corner, and Microsoft is already talking about what special offers it's going to have on the big day. Whether you're looking for a new desktop PC, an Xbox One S, or a Surface, you could save yourself hundreds of dollars.

In fact, if you are in the market for a Surface device, there's never been a better time to consider making the leap -- you could save up to $430. Microsoft is also offering the Xbox One S at its lowest price ever, and there are savings to be made on games and much more.

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In a white paper and blog post, Microsoft makes the claim that changes introduced in Windows 10 Anniversary Update make it the most secure version of Windows ever. The company is particularly proud of its ability to fight ransomware, but also points to security features such as Credential Guard and Windows Hello.

Microsoft says that Windows Defender -- recently complained about by Eugene Kapsersky -- is to thank for this. Cloud-based protection and faster updates mean protection is more effective than ever.

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Those who have followed me over the years know that I came somewhat late to the mobile computing party. I didn’t buy my first smartphone until 2014 -- an el-cheapo Samsung Galaxy Avant running Android 4.4.2. However, after languishing in the hinterlands of abandoned devices (Samsung never bothered to updated the Avant’s OS past "KitKat"), I finally bit the bullet and this past August splurged on a Galaxy S7 (I went for the nondescript black model to discourage phone thieves).

No question, the Galaxy S7 is a wonderful "piece of kit" (as my UK friends would call it). It’s fast, has plenty of RAM (4GB), and is expandable via microSD card (unlike its immediate predecessor, the Galaxy S6). But while it runs circles around my old Avant in terms of performance, I found the phone’s TouchWiz-enhanced Android 6.0 Marshmallow UI to be uninspiring.

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Data breaches can be hard to detect and are often missed by traditional cyber security approaches, allowing attackers to spend a long time inside a network.

One way of combating this is to catch attackers out by deploying decoys that mimic desktops, servers, printers and other technology present in a network. But until recently this approach was only available to large organizations.

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Philips Hue light bulbs could be vulnerable to a cyber attack, according to researchers who have developed a proof-of-concept worm capable of spreading from bulb to bulb with the power to turn the lights on and off.

The researchers efforts at gaining access to the connected light bulbs was detailed in their paper titled IoT Goes Nuclear a ZigBee Chain Reaction. The worm they created was able to gain access to the Philips Hue devices by exploiting hard-coded symmetric encryption keys that are used to control devices over Zigbee wireless networks.

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Unless you’ve been hiding away from the world of computing for the last few years, you’ll have come across Hadoop.

Apache Hadoop, to give it its full name, is an open source framework designed to handle the storage and processing of large amounts of data using low-cost commodity hardware. Since its initial release in 2011, it has become one of the most popular platforms for handling big data.

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Starting today, Google is rolling out an updated version of Google Play Music, its streaming music service. The company says that the update sees the use of machine learning to create contextual playlists based on where listeners are and what they are doing.

The latest version of Google Play Music is more "assistive" than ever, with Google making much of the personalized playlists it is able to automatically create.

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Your PC suddenly locks up. Nothing responds. The screen turns black. It looks like disaster…

But no. There’s a beep from the speaker, your screen comes back to life, and a message explains that your display driver stopped responding, but had now recovered.

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If you like some background noise while working on your PC then it can be tempting to play music, stream video, maybe just turn on the TV. But that can be distracting, and you might not get as much work done as you’d hoped.

Halotea Free generates ambient soundscapes instead -- birdsong, rain, white noise -- which help you tune out distractions and concentrate on whatever you’re doing.

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Donald Trump said in no uncertain terms that he believed the US election was rigged. If he had lost, he would have almost certainly contested the result, making claims of vote influencing, media bias and who knows what else.

But the reality is that Trump won, and this means that it is Hillary Clinton who is left pointing the finger of blame for losing. Unsurprisingly, it's the FBI that finds itself named as being responsible, with Clinton referring to letters from FBI director James Comey relating to the investigation into her use of a personal email server as the reason for her loss.

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In the wake of the election of Donald Trump as Barack Obama's successor as president of America, Mark Zuckerberg has spoken out to deny claims that Facebook in any way influenced the result of the US election.

Criticism of Facebook has taken various forms. One of the key complaints is that its news algorithms serve to create an echo chamber, exaggerating the already-present confirmation bias effect. But there are also concerns that fake news is a serious problem on the platform.

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The emoji lexicon is one that continues to grow month after month, year after year. Once little more than a collection of smiley faces and a few symbols, there are now emoji representing just about everything imaginable -- and they're even considered works of art.

At the moment, Unicode is considering which of a number of proposed new emoji should be added to the collection in 2017. Included in the list of proposals are a swearing face, a vomiting face, an exploding head, emo hair, a breastfeeding mother, a hajib wearer and a couple of naked sauna users.

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Claims of anti-competitive behavior are incredibly common in the world of tech; Google finds itself on the defensive on just about a weekly basis. Microsoft is certainly no stranger to accusations of anti-competitiveness, most notably for bundling Internet Explorer in older versions of Windows. But now it's Microsoft's approach to security that's in the firing line.

Eugene Kaspersky (yes, that one: the Russian security expert and CEO of Kaspersky Lab) has fired a vitriolic tirade at Microsoft in which he complains about how Windows Defender works in Windows 10. Windows 10 has been lambasted for many reasons since it launched, and things are not really improving as we near the launch of Windows 10 Creators Update. Kaspersky is so furious about the way in which Defender operates that he has written a lengthy and bitter blog post entitled: "That's It. I've Had Enough!"

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A "terrible error" has been blamed for the accidental virtual killing of a number of Facebook users, including none other than Mark Zuckerberg. Thousands of users of the social network logged into their accounts to find out they were dead after Facebook experienced a strange bug.

The accounts of many people were memorialized as friends were invited to "remember and celebrate" the lives of the "deceased". The mistake led to Facebook users having to reassure friends and family that they were OK and remained alive and kicking.

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