The Hot Take: I'm gonna take a guess because we don't own it, we just license it is why.
More games are taking advantage of the free-to-play model, and Microsoft is building systems designed to deliver ads without disrupting the gaming experience. According to Respawn First, the system would first give players some ad-free playtime, which could either be based on time or in-game progress, such as levels and bosses. Once this expires, the company will then open a window and briefly serve âpromoted content.â However, this system will not just show ads out of the blue. Instead, it will work with the game engine so that they will onlyâŚ
The Register reports:
When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for the Rust tooling team, during a keynote talk today at this year's annual RustConf, being held this week in MontrĂŠal.âŚ
The Hot Take: Must be bad if they're not giving any details.
Microsoft has fixed a maximum-severity vulnerability in Entra ID that attackers were already exploiting in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2026-69836, the vulnerability carries the maximum CVSS score of 10.0 and could allow an unauthenticated attacker to execute code remotely in Microsoft's cloud identity service. Microsoft disclosed the flaw on Thursday, along with the unwelcome news that exploitation had already been detected. Entra ID, formerly known as Azure Active Directory, sits at the heart of identity and access management for MicrosoftâŚ
The Hot Take: Need to get those private details of everyone's life....
Microsoft told Windows Latest that it accidentally shipped the AI-powered OneDrive Photos app on Windows 11 more broadly than it should have, which explains why enterprise PCs where the app doesnât even work now have to deal with it.
Iâm told that Microsoft is going to âfix it,â which possibly suggests that the app will be rolled back, but I think itâll stay on most PCs. If you havenât seen the app yet, hereâs what it looks like out of the box (yes, it has access to all your folders by default):
âOneDrive Photosâ isnât exactly newâŚ
The Hot Take: Sorry I prefer privacy on my own cloud. GTFOH.
As Windows Latest first reported, Microsoft is quietly installing âOneDrive Photosâ on PCs, and our tests show that itâs tied to the OneDrive sync client, which is already pre-installed on Windows. Initially, I assumed that only consumers would be getting the app, but it turns out that itâs being pushed to enterprise customers as well.
Windows Latest spoke to IT admins and found that Microsoft is forcing the OneDrive Photos app onto enterprise PCs, including those that use Microsoft Intune. Worse, OneDrive Photos works only with a personalâŚ
The Hot Take: Just deeper and deeper into our lives.... I dropped OneDrive because the "backup" nag screens. Thankfully I have Synology NAS with Drive client to replace it.
The year is 2026, and Iâm still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menuâs All apps list for an app I donât remember installing. This time, itâs Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo editor and viewer for Windows 11 that nobody asked for.
While searching for Microsoft Photos, a new app called âOneDrive Photosâ showed up in my results out of nowhere, and it appears to have arrived either via a Windows Update or an update for the OneDrive sync client on Windows.
For thoseâŚ
New Outlook is âpainful and drives me crazy,â one user told me as their organization prepared to ditch Outlook Classic. But does that mean Microsoft will hold off on its plans to force New Outlook? Certainly not. According to Microsoftâs roadmap, it still plans to move all Classic Outlook users to New Outlook starting in March 2027, and weâre not that far away now.
New Outlook for Windows has been around for almost three years, as it was first rolled out to testers in 2023. Fast-forward to 2024, and Microsoft released New Outlook forâŚ
The Hot Take: M$ is the only one to give us Ads on Windows 11....
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install automatically without notifying users. Ars Technica reports: Following Gamers Nexus' video, a Microsoft representative stated that the LG Monitor App Installer will no longer show pop-up ads for McAfee. InâŚ
The Hot Take: Software development world is condensing fast with Ai....
Microsoft is expected to announce another round of layoffs soon. Less than 2.5% of the company's workforce will be affected, according to sources that spoke with Business Insider. Due Microsoft's size, even that small percentage means thousands of people will be affected.An SEC filing from June 30, 2025 showed Microsoft had about 228,000 employees. That figure has fluctuated since then, but it gives a gauge of the size of Microsoft's full-time workforce.Division cuts & AI infrastructureThis round of layoffs will affect thousands of rolesâŚ
The Hot Take: Interesting features, we'll see if they pull me from eM Client which has all these now. Minus .pst files.
Outlook âNew,â which is based on Outlook.com, is far from a decent email client. While it has come a long way, the new Outlook doesnât feel as good as the Classic version, and it still lacks many features most users want. Microsoft now says itâs adding advanced support for Mail Merge, .PST, and a new single view for all accounts to the new Outlook app.
Outlook for Windows and web is getting the All accounts view in August 2026
I asked Microsoft for more details, and it told me that Outlook on Windows 11 (and 10) will get support for aâŚ