The latest rotten deeds of Microsoft may be found below, mixed within positive Linux and Open Source news.
UK antitrust suit hits Microsoft with claim for $1.25B in cloud fees damages
Microsoft is in the crosshairs of a U.K. competition class action-style lawsuit that’s seeking £1 billion (around $1.25 billion at current exchange rates) in damages. It revolves around accusations related to fees the software giant charged businesses and other organizations for licensing Windows Server when they were customers of rival cloud computing platforms.
Microsoft’s AI ‘Agents’ Aim to Take over Many Human Duties
The idea behind AI agents is to give them the ability to take over whole business processes with little or no guidance from people. In a statement last month, Microsoft said it was preparing for a world where every organization would have a collection of AI agents to perform different business activities.
Microsoft 365’s Android PDF Viewer Is Showing Ads, Even If You’re Subscribed
Over the course of 2024, Microsoft has been rolling out ads for all kinds of products, including Windows 11. However, the company isn’t done yet. Some people are reporting that the PDF reader that comes with Microsoft 365 for Android is now showing ads across the top, despite them paying monthly for the service.
Microsoft Windows Warning—Do Not Install This App On Your PC
Microsoft’s mission to push Chrome users to the Edge has made plenty of headlines. And it now seems that if it can’t convince users to switch browsers, switching search engines is the next best thing. Chrome is clearly less trouble if Bing is being used. That’s the implication behind the latest warning hitting Windows users around the world, as a Microsoft app is accused of secretly decrypting Chrome tracking cookies, installing Bing search, and of course driving users to switch to Edge.
Everything you need to know about the Microsoft outage
Life is getting back to normal for users of Microsoft 365, Outlook, and Microsoft Teams after significant outages yesterday that affected users worldwide. Earlier this morning, Microsoft said it had restored functionality for all impacted services except Outlook on the web, and that it was monitoring and troubleshooting to fully recover.
Microsoft Word and Excel AI data scraping slyly switched to opt-in by default — the opt-out toggle is not that easy to find
It is not a secret that Microsoft’s Office has Connected Experiences which analyze content created by users. However, according to @nixCraft, an author of Cyberciti.biz. Microsoft’s Connected Experiences feature automatically gathers data from Word and Excel files to train the company’s AI models. This feature is turned on by default, meaning user-generated content is included in AI training unless manually deactivated. However, this deactivation is a very convoluted process. Microsoft has yet to comment on the information, so take it with a grain of salt.