Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

The UK Government has signed a major deal with Microsoft which will see organizations across the country get access to more powerful AI tools. Speaking at the company’s Microsoft AI Tour London event, the pair revealed a five-year partnership which they hope will give public sector firms the chance to utilize the latest in Microsoft technology, including the Copilot AI platform.

Microsoft Word has been accused of “censoring” the term “maternity leave” because it is not inclusive enough. Writers using the software are instead advised to type “birth-related leave”, “parental leave” or “childbirth leave” when referring to the time off work that a woman can take after childbirth.

Experts warn of concerns over product agreement with government following the tech group’s UK boss being appointed an adviser on industrial strategy.

Microsoft has notified customers that it’s missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions.

Google is looking to offer a native Terminal app for Android, possibly with Android 16. The Terminal app will allow installation of a Linux VM with full GUI and GPU acceleration along with other sysadmin features including disk resizing, port forwarding, and partition recovery. This is an extension of Google’s earlier project of allowing Chrome OS to run on Android using the Android Virtualization Framework.

While there is a case for Edge over Chrome with regards to malware protection, it feels somewhat askew for a Microsoft product that competes with Chrome to be recommended in a security advisory for a CVE disclosed by Microsoft, now riding a wave of Chrome generated publicity.

Microsoft is investigating an Outlook bug causing desktop app crashes, high system resource usage, and preventing users from logging into their accounts.

The company has announced that the free version will no longer be able to sync with Google Calendar. Additionally, Microsoft is doing away with location sharing, which displayed your live location to folks in your contact list. The company is also nixing the Safe feature, which allowed you to store sensitive information like banking information and personally identifiable data in Teams and access it across mobile devices. Tasks, which shared to-do items with your contacts and work groups, is getting the ax as well. Mini Teams, the feature that placed a compact chat window directly on the desktop, is being discontinued as well.

​Microsoft says this month’s Patch Tuesday cumulative updates fix a known issue that causes Windows servers to disrupt Remote Desktop connections in enterprise networks after installing the July Windows Server security updates.

Today is Microsoft’s October 2024 Patch Tuesday, which includes security updates for 118 flaws, including five publicly disclosed zero-days, two of which are actively exploited. This Patch Tuesday fixed three critical vulnerabilities, all remote code execution flaws.