Microsoft just put out a blog post about Windows 10’s quality, and it’s very defensive. Microsoft doesn’t explain what happened with the October 2018 Update at all, nor does it promise to change the development process in the future. The only real commitment is to more transparency and improved communication going forward.

A Utah-based hacker who targeted several of the big gaming networks, including PlayStation Network and Xbox Live, temporarily knocking them offline and boasting about it, is facing a 10-year jail sentence. The U.S. Attorney's Office for the Southern District of California announced earlier this week that Austin Thompson, 23, had entered a guilty plea for one count of damage to a protected computer following an investigation by the FBI's San Diego field office.

With the next generation of gaming consoles on the horizon, Microsoft Studios has been gobbling up high-profile developers, and it's continuing that trend today with the acquisition of Fallout: New Vegas studio Obsidian Entertainment and Wasteland 2 company inXile Entertainment.

Microsoft is being sued for a security seal on the Xbox One console that can scare consumers into thinking that opening the device will void the warranty. Earlier this year, the Federal Trade Commission sent warning letters to six companies, including Microsoft, telling them that they were violating the federal Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act, a 1975 law that forbids manufacturers from tying warranty coverage to the use of that company’s repair parts. Now, the company is being sued by a customer and this will be tested in court.

Microsoft president Brad Smith fears facial recognition. Too bad his company makes it.

Big tech is getting in on blockchain in a big way. Microsoft has launched a cloud-based blockchain development kit powered by Azure. “This kit extends the capabilities of our blockchain developer templates and Azure Blockchain Workbench, which incorporates Azure services for key management, off-chain identity and data, monitoring, and messaging APIs into a reference architecture that can be used to rapidly build blockchain-based applications,” Microsoft blockchain engineering lead Marc Mercuri said.

Microsoft worked with Blockworks to design a miniature version of its refreshed campus using Minecraft. The game provides an unconventional but fitting platform for architectural renderings.

Buggy updates point at deeper problems.

Microsoft is talking the opposite position from Google, which said it would not provide cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology to the Defense Department.

It came as a mild surprise when Microsoft announced Saturday that it was purchasing not just one but two mid-sized studios with a focus on role-playing games. But as strange as it seems on the surface, the deal makes perfect sense for all three parties. At the end of a relatively uneventful Xbox showcase in Mexico City on Saturday afternoon, head of Microsoft Studios Matt Booty announced that his company planned to buy Obsidian (Fallout New Vegas) and Inxile (Wasteland). The former we already knew about—Kotaku broke the news last month—but the latter seemed odd.

That's why the news last week that Microsoft had joined OIN and agreed to freely license all of its patents to every other member in the pool is so shocking. Microsoft's Erich Andersen, who now holds the role that Gutierrez held a decade ago, admitted quite frankly in his blog post about this decision that many will be surprised, but it represents a real "evolution" in the way Microsoft thinks about Linux. I would say that's an understatement.

Bill Gates is paying tribute his late friend, Paul Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with him in 1975. Allen passed away at the age of 65 on Monday from complications from non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer that kills nearly 20,000 people a year. At the time of his death, Allen was listed by Forbes as the 44th richest person in the world with a net worth of $20.3 billion.

In early June, some Xbox owners fired up their consoles and were greeted with an ad supporting the election campaign of conservative Canadian politician Doug Ford. Ford, who was the Progressive Conservative Party candidate and has been compared to Donald Trump, rode a wave of reactionary populism and won his bid to become premier of Ontario that same month. According to a Microsoft spokesperson, “The ad was limited in scope, region and timing, running for a few days last June. We regularly seek input from the community and decided to remove the ad.”

Some see this as a giant leap forward for Microsoft and open source. A few, however, see Microsoft's open-source patent move as just more of the same old, same old.

Microsoft wants everything to run on Windows. Google wants everything to run on the web. (And what does Apple want?)

Microsoft is including Google's mitigation for the Spectre Variant 2 speculative execution side-channel attack in the next release of Windows 10, currently codenamed 19H1. One of the great worries about the Meltdown and Spectre CPU flaws -- aside from attackers exploiting them -- has been that mitigations for the attacks could have a severe impact on performance, ranging between five and 30 percent.

Before Windows 10, a clean install of Windows only included the bare essentials a user would need to get started using their PC. That included software built by Microsoft, such as Mail, Paint, and its web browser, and it never included "bloatware" or "trialware" that one might find on hardware purchased from a third-party OEM that preloaded all kinds of crapware.

How Windows is supported and sold is changing. Or should I say ‘sold’?

Twenty-four people were arrested for allegedly duping customers of Microsoft by impersonating as the company's tech support experts, police said Friday. Based on a complaint filed by a representative of Microsoft India, Nripendra Kashyap, a case was registered in the Cyber Crime Cell, they said. In his complaint, Mr Kashyap alleged that numerous illegal Delhi-based call centres...

Microsoft adds three new models to its Surface lineup as well as a new consumer Surface All Access purchasing plan.

Microsoft halted the Windows 10 October 2018 Update because it was deleting some people’s files. Now, Microsoft has fixed the problem and explained what happened.

Microsoft is planning to bring its own exclusive Xbox games, published through Microsoft Studios, to the company’s Xbox Game Pass subscription. Future games, including Sea of Thieves, will be available via subscription on the same day they’re available to purchase at retail stores or through the Microsoft Store. “The number one request from our customers... was to get new blockbuster games into Game Pass,” explains Microsoft’s games chief, Phil Spencer, in an interview with The Verge.

I’m getting sick of Windows 10’s auto-installing apps. Apps like Facebook are now showing up out of nowhere, and even displaying notifications begging for me to use them. I didn’t install the Facebook app, I didn’t give it permission to show notifications, and I’ve never even used it. So why is it bugging me?

Lundgren wanted to provide buyers of used computers a restore disc of Windows, so they wouldn't throw their computers away. Microsoft, and the government, objected.

Researchers create a machine translation system that translates sentences of a test set of news articles from Chinese to English as well as a human.

In a laboratory in Copenhagen, scientists believe they are on the verge of a breakthrough that could transform computing. A team combining Microsoft researchers and Niels Bohr Institute academics is confident that it has found the key to creating a quantum computer. If they are right, then Microsoft will leap to the front of a race that has a tremendous prize - the power to solve problems that are beyond conventional computers.

A young, Harvard-educated tech entrepreneur goes before Congress and gets a grilling about his company’s business practices. Sound familiar?

"After 43 years, this is the first day that we are announcing, and will be distributing, a custom Linux kernel," said Microsoft President Brad Smith.

For the first time, Microsoft has released its own Linux kernel in a new Linux-based product: Azure Sphere.

Microsoft is launching a $25 million initiative to use artificial intelligence to build better technology for people with disabilities such as autism, deafness or dyslexia.

Since buying the internet phone service in 2011, Microsoft has signed up corporations like GE and alienated long-time Skypers.

The Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC), slated to launch "later this year," looks almost incomplete at first glance. The clean, confusing-looking slab, nearly the length and width of an Xbox One S, has no joysticks. The usual selection of Xbox inputs has been reduced down to a few menu buttons, a D-pad, and two black, hand-sized pads.

Microsoft has reportedly been in talks to acquire code repository GitHub, according to Business Insider. GitHub received a valuation of $2 billion following the closure of a $250 million funding ro…

Bloomberg is reporting that Microsoft has acquired GitHub, and will announce the deal on Monday. Github is an online service that allows developers to host their code in the cloud using the popular Git source management system, invented by Linux founder Linus Torvalds in 2005. In addition to being home to the overwhelming majority of open source projects, it’s also used by developers within companies to privately collaborate on software.