I kid you not, we wrote these words in 2014:
Microsoft has tried to dumb down its Control Panel with a simple UI over the years, rather than a list of options, but there’s still a number of settings that don’t exist in the new PC Settings app. “Why do I have to go the PC settings to forget a network and Control panel to change IP settings? Can’t this all be done from a single place?” It’s a fair criticism, and one that Microsoft should look to address with Windows 10.
But the Control Panel still can’t die. The latest features to migrate, as of today’s Technical Preview: clock settings; time servers; formatting for time, number, and currency; UTF-8 language support toggle, keyboard character repeat delay, and cursor blink rate. You can also see mobile app notifications (not just texts and calls and photos) in the relatively recently added Phone Link section of the Start Menu.
Framework has built a name for itself by taking the locked down world of laptops and making them modular, upgradable, and repairable. So it's surprising - and maybe even controversial - the way that Framework has approached its first desktop: it's made a PC that's actually less modular than most.
Don't worry; this isn't a Mac Mini situation, where mere mortals are not meant to touch the innards of such a brilliant little computer. But it's not a traditional small form factor PC, either.
The Framework Desktop is impressively small for what it offers. It's around the size of a couple hardcover novels standing on your desk. Its black-and-silv …
Microsoft devotes most of its time and energy these days to promoting new AI- and Copilot-related features for Windows 11, but the company's Windows Insider builds are still full of small tweaks and changes aimed at improving longstanding Windows features for people who just want to use their PC the way they always have.
New updates that began rolling out to testers in the Windows Insider program yesterday include a couple of small but meaningful changes for Windows power users. First, Microsoft is changing the way the Taskbar works on secondary monitors, allowing users to click it to see the calendar and Notification Center on all monitors, not just the primary display.
Microsoft is also making a change to how the various tabs in the Task Manager measure CPU usage to make it more consistent (and less nonsensical).
© Microsoft
Adobe is finally releasing Windows on Arm versions of Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Media Encoder this week. All four apps are available as public beta versions, but they do lack some features or have some known issues compared to the versions available for Intel-powered systems.
The native ARM64 version of Premiere Pro won’t currently include support for third-party extensions, raw video files like ProRes, or the hardware-accelerated playback and export of H.264 and HEVC in MP4. Those are some big missing features that Adobe is looking to make available in a future release, but the company won’t deliver the Loudness Radar effect, export to Wraptor DCP, import & export of GoPro CineForm content, or the export to the P2 Movie format in beta or final versions of Premiere Pro for Windows on Arm.
There are some known issues with Adobe After Effects for Windows on Arm, too. It also lacks ProRes support, alongside the inability to import or export ARRIRAW, SWF, GoPro CinePro, JPEG20000 in MXF, and WMV. Currently, you can’t import MotionJPEG and MKV in the beta version of After Effects, and there’s also no hardware-accelerated playback and export of H.264 and HEVC in MP4. Adobe notes that third-party plug-ins for After Effects will have to be updated for this Windows on Arm version, so there’s no support for these just yet.
There are similar features missing from the native Windows on Arm version of Audition and Media Encoder, which are both also available in beta this week.
Adobe first released an Arm beta version of Photoshop for Windows in late 2020, but the company has taken far longer to get Premiere Pro and After Effects recompiled natively for ARM64. Owners of Qualcomm-powered Copilot Plus PCs have had to use the emulated version of Premiere Pro over the past year, which didn’t have enough performance for more demanding video editing tasks.
In the summer of 2024, corporate anti-malware provider CrowdStrike pushed a broken update to millions of PCs and servers running some version of Microsoft's Windows software, taking down systems that both companies and consumers relied on for air travel, payments, emergency services, and their morning coffee. It was a huge outage, and it caused days and weeks of pain as the world's permanently beleaguered IT workers brought systems back online, in some cases touching each affected PC individually to remove the bad update and get the systems back up and running.
The outage was ultimately CrowdStrike's fault, and in the aftermath of the incident, the company promised a long list of process improvements to keep a bad update like that from going out again. But because the outage affected Windows systems, Microsoft often had shared and sometimes even top billing in mainstream news coverage—another in a string of security-related embarrassments that prompted CEO Satya Nadella and other executives to promise that the company would refocus its efforts on improving the security of its products.
The CrowdStrike crash was possible partly due to how anti-malware software works in Windows. Security vendors and their AV products generally have access to the Windows kernel, the cornerstone of the operating system that sits between your hardware and most user applications. But most user applications don't have kernel access specifically because a buggy app (or one hijacked by malware) with kernel access can bring the entire system down rather than just affecting the app. The bad CrowdStrike update was bad mostly because it was being loaded so early in Windows' boot process that many systems couldn't check for and download CrowdStrike's fix before they crashed.
© Aurich Lawson / Ars Technica
Yesterday, Microsoft confirmed that it's not abandoning the home console market just yet. In a short video teaser, Xbox President Sarah Bond highlighted a "strategic multi-year partnership with AMD" that will include "our next-generation Xbox consoles in your living room and in your hands." But while we know that the "in your hands" part will include devices like the Windows-powered ROG Xbox Ally, there are still few specifics about what exactly Microsoft has planned for its future living room consoles (aside from what Bond calls "the next generation of graphics innovation").
Reading between the lines a bit, though, we wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft was getting ready to finally tear down the thinning wall separating gaming PCs and gaming consoles. A Windows-based, living room-focused Xbox capable of running generic Windows games could accentuate Microsoft's strengths in PC gaming while papering over many of the company's recent struggles in the home console market.
The once-bright line separating PC gaming and TV-based console gaming has been deteriorating for years. On the hardware side, bespoke console chips and development environments long ago gave way to PC-like architectures that are simpler and easier for developers to work with. And on the PC interface side, efforts like Steam's Big Picture mode and SteamOS as a whole have strived to make playing on a PC with a handheld controller into a more console-like experience.
© Aurich Lawson | Getty Images
By late 2021, major updates for Windows' built-in Notepad text editor had been so rare for so long that a gentle redesign and a handful of new settings were rated as a major update. New updates have become much more common since then, but like the rest of Windows, recent additions have been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of generative AI.
In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further, allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).
Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft's AI credits. Per this support page, users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.
Signal is taking proactive steps to ensure Microsoft’s Recall feature can’t screen capture your secured chats, by rolling out a new version of the Signal for Windows 11 client that enables screen security by default. This is the same DRM that blocks users from easily screenshotting a Netflix show on their computer or phone, and using it here could cause problems for people who use accessibility features like screen readers.
While Signal says it’s made the feature easy to disable, under Signal Settings > Privacy > Screen Security, it never should’ve come to this. Developer Joshua Lund writes that operating system vendors like Microsoft “need to ensure that the developers of apps like Signal always have the necessary tools and options at their disposal to reject granting OS-level AI systems access to any sensitive information within their apps.”
Despite delaying Recall twice before finally launching it last month, the “photographic memory” feature doesn’t yet have an API for app developers to opt their users’ sensitive content out of its AI-powered archives. It could be useful for finding emails or chats (including ones in Signal) using whatever you can remember, like a description of a picture you’ve received or a broad conversation topic, but it could also be a massive security and privacy problem.
Lund notes that Microsoft already filters out private or incognito browser window activity by default, and users who have a Copilot Plus PC with Recall can filter out certain apps under the settings, but only if they know how to do that. For now, Lund says that “Signal is using the tools that are available to us even though we recognize that there are many legitimate use cases where someone might need to take a screenshot.”
If you’re like me and you have a bit of an uncontrollable potty mouth, Microsoft has got you covered with its latest Windows 11 feature. The software maker is changing the way its profanity filter for voice typing works on Windows 11 soon, so you can disable the filter and let all your nasty swear words be free like nature intended.
Microsoft has started testing this change in the Dev and Beta Channel with Windows Insiders, by adding a new toggle inside voice typing’s settings interface that lets you either filter profanity and replace it with asterisks or have it type out your profanity like any other words. I’m personally ****ing excited about this one, because voice typing currently filters out profanity with the incorrect amount of asterisks, which makes me swear even more.
Alongside the profanity filter changes, Microsoft is also allowing Surface Pen owners to configure the button on the stylus to trigger the new Click to Do feature that started rolling out today. Click to Do provide actions for the text or images that are on your screen, so you could click your stylus button and summarize text or quickly remove an object from an image.
These features are all being tested with Windows Insiders, and I’d expect to see them appear for Windows 11 users in the coming months.
We knew Microsoft was about to launch Recall for real this time, and now the software maker is making it available to all Copilot Plus PCs. Recall, a feature that screenshots almost everything you do on a Copilot Plus PC, will be available today alongside an improved AI-powered Windows search interface and a new Click to Do feature that’s very similar to Google’s Circle to Search.
Recall was originally supposed to launch at the same time as Copilot Plus PCs in June last year, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security researchers. Microsoft then planned to start publicly testing Recall in October, but pushed it back again to November to have more time to secure it further. Microsoft has now spent the past 10 months overhauling the security of Recall and making it an opt-in experience that you don’t have to enable if you’re concerned about the privacy implications.
“When we introduced Recall, we set out to address a common frustration: picking up where you
left off,“ explains Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows Experiences at Microsoft. Recall is designed to improve how you search your PC, but taking snapshots that are categorized so it’s easy to search for vague memories instead of file names.
I spent a few weeks testing Recall last year and found it was creepy, clever, and compelling. Technologically it’s a great improvement to the Windows search interface, because it can understand images and content in a much more natural way. But it does create a privacy minefield because you’re suddenly storing a lot more information on your PC usage, and you still need to manage blocked apps and websites carefully.
Kevin Beaumont, one of the security researchers that first raised alarm bells over Recall, has been testing the final version recently and found that “Microsoft has made serious efforts to try to secure Recall.” The database is now encrypted, Recall attempts to filter sensitive data by default, and the feature is now an opt-in experience.
Beaumont does note that filtering sensitive apps and websites can be hit-and-miss though, and occasionally even buggy. He also says that you can access Recall through a simple four-digit PIN unlock option with Windows Hello, instead of it forcing more secure facial recognition or a fingerprint. Microsoft’s Recall website claims “you must have at least one biometric sign-in option enabled for Windows Hello, either facial recognition or a fingerprint, to launch and use Recall.”
Alongside Recall, Windows search is also getting some AI improvements on Copilot Plus PCs today. You can now use the File Explorer, Windows search box, or settings with natural language queries. That means instead of searching for file names or specific settings, you can now describe images or documents and get results. If you’re looking for an image of a brown dog you know you have saved somewhere, you can just ask for “brown dog” rather than having to know the file name or date the image was created.
Microsoft is also rolling out Click to Do today, which works a lot like Google’s Circle to Search. You activate it by using the Windows key + left mouse click, and it will provide actions for the text or images that are on your screen. This includes summarizing text or being able to quickly remove an object from an image.
Recall, the improved Windows search, and Click to Do will all be available today across all Copilot Plus PCs, but the text actions in Click to Do are currently limited to Qualcomm-powered devices, with AMD- and Intel-powered Copilot Plus PCs getting this feature “in the next few months.” Recall and Click to Do should be available in a variety of languages and regions, but Microsoft says both features won’t be available in EU countries and Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway until later this year.
Security and privacy advocates are girding themselves for another uphill battle against Recall, the AI tool rolling out in Windows 11 that will screenshot, index, and store everything a user does every three seconds.
When Recall was first introduced in May 2024, security practitioners roundly castigated it for creating a gold mine for malicious insiders, criminals, or nation-state spies if they managed to gain even brief administrative access to a Windows device. Privacy advocates warned that Recall was ripe for abuse in intimate partner violence settings. They also noted that there was nothing stopping Recall from preserving sensitive disappearing content sent through privacy-protecting messengers such as Signal.
Following months of backlash, Microsoft later suspended Recall. On Thursday, the company said it was reintroducing Recall. It currently is available only to insiders with access to the Windows 11 Build 26100.3902 preview version. Over time, the feature will be rolled out more broadly. Microsoft officials wrote:
© Andrew Cunningham
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