Linux, Open Source, & anti Microsoft news

​Microsoft is investigating a known issue triggering “Product Deactivated” errors for customers using Microsoft 365 Office apps. According to online user reports on Reddit and Microsoft’s own community website, affected users randomly received these “Product Deactivated” errors in Office apps, prompting confusion and disruptions.

Microsoft had a change of heart, now allowing you to change the Copilot dedicated keyboard button to something else. The brand’s AI assistant didn’t succeed in winning users for many reasons.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a recent podcast revealed that Google earns more revenue from Windows than Microsoft itself. “Google makes more money on Windows than all of Microsoft,” Nadella said, discussing the company’s strategy to reclaim lost market share in the browser space.

Transitioning to a circular economy will transform business and the world, redefining growth by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. Rik Irons-Mclean, Worldwide Sales Enablement Lead Sustainability at Microsoft, told the Climate Leaders Coalition: “The circular economy requires a neutral, scalable and open digital backbone to enable and accelerate transformation, designed with shared-value in mind.

According to the Debricked vulnerability database, CVE-2024-49071 the issue arose because Windows Defender created a “search index of private or sensitive documents,” but it did not “properly limit index access to actors who are authorized to see the original information.”  The issue has been fixed by Microsoft, but not by releasing an update that end users need to install. It has all been fixed behind the scenes at the server end of the equation.

Amazon has reportedly delayed its deployment of Microsoft 365 following a Russia-linked cyberattack where threat actors were believed to have accessed some employees’ email accounts. Amazon has asked Microsoft to make some changes to its software to protect against unauthorized access, including more detailed user activity tracking within the apps.

The spotlight is once again on Microsoft data scraping after allegations surfaced suggesting that user-generated content from Word and Excel might be used to train the company’s AI systems. While Microsoft has denied these claims, stating that customer data from its Microsoft 365 (M365) apps is not used for large language model (LLM) training, the controversy has sparked critical discussions around data privacy, consent, and corporate transparency.

Microsoft has confirmed plans to delete passwords for a billion users. “The password era is ending,” it says, warning those users that “bad actors know it, which is why they’re desperately accelerating password-related attacks while they still can.”

Microsoft really doesn’t want you to install Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, but it provides mechanisms for doing so, primarily for the benefit of corporate customers.

Non-human identity management firm Oasis Security has disclosed the details of an attack that allowed its researchers to bypass Microsoft’s multi-factor authentication (MFA) implementation. The attack method, dubbed AuthQuake, was reported to Microsoft in late June and a temporary fix was rolled out a few days later. The tech giant released a permanent fix in October. According to Oasis, the vulnerability, which is described as critical, could have allowed threat actors to bypass Microsoft’s MFA and gain access to accounts — provided that they had the target’s username and password.