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Microsoft announced a new accessibility feature for its browser to improve the user experience for visually impaired people. Edge now automatically generates image captions so that screen readers can describe visual content for those who depend on assistive technologies. Image captions or "alt text" is a crucial part of the accessible web that often gets ignored, and Microsoft wants to fix this problem by providing auto-generated captions.
 
Microsoft uses Azure Cognitive Services to analyze and describe pictures with missing "alt text." When Edge detects an unlabeled image, it sends it to Microsoft's servers for processing. Machine learning algorithms can work with the most common formats, such as JPEG, PNG, GIF, WEBP, and others, to provide descriptive summaries in 5 languages. Besides, Microsoft can analyze text on images in more than 120 languages.

Microsoft appears to be testing a new type of ad inside File Explorer on Windows 11. Microsoft MVP and Twitter user Florian Beaubois discovered an ad in the latest test build of Windows 11, prompting users to check out the Microsoft Editor. While the ads might have appeared for some Windows 11 users, Microsoft says it was a mistake.
 
Microsoft says Windows 11 File Explorer ads were ‘not intended to be published externally’

New AGESA update will add official support for A320, B350, and X370 boards.

New CPUs (and one APU) use Zen 2 and Zen 3 to plug the gap in AMD's lineup.
 
That's changing soon. AMD is releasing a slew of processors priced between $99 and $299 that should be suitable for new budget builds or upgrades to existing PCs. The Ryzen 5000-series chips are all based on AMD's aging-but-still-current Zen 3 architecture, while the cheapest chips re-use the 2019-era Zen 2 architecture to keep prices low.

Windows 11 users may soon see more ads in the system's default file browser File Explorer. The ads were spotted by Twitter user Florian (@flobo09) who published the following screenshot on the social messaging service.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Spider-Man: No Way Home' tops the chart, followed by ‘The Adam Project'. 'Blacklight' completes the top three.

The popular third-party YouTube client Vanced for Android is being discontinued. The developers announced the decision on the official Twitter account and through other channels.

Vanced was a popular YouTube app for Android
 
The popular Vanced YouTube app is being discontinued, after a legal threat from Google. The creators of Vanced have revealed the project will be shut down in the coming days, with download links set to be removed. While the app will continue to work for anyone who currently has it installed on Android, without any future updates it’s likely to stop working at some point soon. The Vanced owners say they’ve had to discontinue the project “due to legal reasons.”

Microsoft Edge users who use the browser on mobile or low-performance devices may enable efficiency mode to improve the browser's performance.
 
Previously called Performance Mode, efficiency mode is available as an option under system and performance in the Edge settings. The main idea behind efficiency mode is not a new one: put tabs that have not been used for a certain amount of time to sleep to free up memory and reduce CPU usage.

This week, Microsoft introduced the new Search highlights feature in the released Insider build for its Windows 11 operating system. Search highlights extend the operating system's search functionality with "notable and interesting moments" that highlight what is "special" about the day, or content from organizations.
 
Search highlights changes the Windows Search startpage significantly. Currently, Windows 11 users get a list of top apps to launch directly and quick search links that open web results.
 
Under the new Windows Search home interface, users get a larger list of recent apps that they opened, and an even larger area with content that is provided by Microsoft. Users who are not signed-in to a work or school account get web content such as trending searches, as well as daily global or regional highlights.

We are at the close of another week of March, which means that it is time to *drum roll* recap everything that went on in the world of Microsoft in the past few days! It was quite an exciting week with some unexpected news items related to Windows development and lots of gaming news. Find out more in our weekly digest for March 5 - March 11!

With it being the second Tuesday of the month it means it’s Patch Tuesday. Two of the operating systems receiving updates today are Windows 7 (KB5011552) and 8.1 (KB5011564). The improvements and known issues in both of these updates are quite extensive so we’ll copy verbatim what Microsoft had to say.

Microsoft has released its Patch Tuesday update for Windows 11 designated as KB5011493. Upon installing this update, Windows 11 users will be on OS Build 22000.556. Typically, Windows Update should install this patch automatically but if you’re a bit impatient you can go ahead and open Windows Update to try to get the update to install manually.

It's the second Tuesday of the month which means it's Patch Tuesday time again. As such, today Microsoft is rolling out the monthly security update for February 2022 (also called "B release") on Windows 10 for the latest versions, 20H2, 21H1, and 21H2. The new updates are being distributed under KB5011487, bumping up the builds to 19042.1586, 19043.1586, and 19044.1586.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Blacklight' tops the chart, followed by ‘The King's Man'. 'Scream' completes the top three.

Finding your stuff in the cloud just got easier.
 
If you use Google Drive to store, share, and sync your files in the cloud or in Google Docs, Sheets, and Slides, you're familiar with its straightforward, intuitive interface: Everything is clearly laid out and easy to access, and on-screen clutter is kept to a minimum.
 
But as you pack more and more stuff into your cloud locker, it can become difficult to keep track of everything. With storage capacities going up to tens of gigabytes, you might well have files stored on the web that you haven't accessed for quite some time.

Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Mozilla Foundation announced a joint effort to improve browser interoperability to ensure Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox provide the same reliable and consistent web experience.

A post on web.dev details how the four companies, alongside other contributors, will work on a new interoperability benchmark for modern browsers called Interop 2022. The ultimate goal is to reduce “pain points” for developers and help them focus on building their web experiences instead of working around various inconsistencies in browsers.

Threat actors are using stolen NVIDIA code signing certificates to sign malware to appear trustworthy and allow malicious drivers to be loaded in Windows.
 
This week, NVIDIA confirmed that they suffered a cyberattack that allowed threat actors to steal employee credentials and proprietary data.
 
The extortion group, known as Lapsus$, states that they stole 1TB of data during the attack and began leaking the data online after NVIDIA refused to negotiate with them.

Google removed the ability to remove default search engines in Chromium recently, and integrated the change in Chrome 97, which it released in January 2022.
 
All web browsers come with a set of search engines, called default search engines, that users may start using right away.  Google's Chrome browser comes with Google as the default search engine, but also with a handful of other search engines, including Microsoft's Bing and DuckDuckGo.

The latest version of Rufus, a tool to create bootable USB Flash drives, supports bypassing Windows 11 system requirements during Inplace upgrades.

rufus-3.18-windows-inplace-upgrade-bypas

Rufus is one of those handy open source tools that let you create bootable media. You can use it to create Windows installation media among other things, to upgrade or install Windows on devices.

Up until now, Rufus supported the bypassing of Windows 11 system requirements when installing Windows 11 from scratch. The new release, Rufus 3.18, adds support for bypassing the restrictions while doing Inplace upgrades.

After reports that Samsung has been throttling the Galaxy S22 range of devices through their Game Optimizing Service, the company has issued a statement promising a fix. 

A new iPhone SE? Sure. But what about the M2 chip?

On March 8, Apple will stream its first product unveiling event since October. While the unveiling likely won't be as bombastic as the huge fall events last year, there's a real possibility that more (and more exciting) products will be introduced next week than at some prior spring events.

A couple of days ago, Google Chrome 99 hit general availability with a bunch of Chromium enhancements. Now, Microsoft's Edge browser has reached the same version with a bunch of backend and frontend improvements.
 
For starters, people who use multiple profiles in Edge can now create a custom list of websites for each profile. When you launch a website mentioned in your custom lists, Edge will automatically open it in your preferred profile.

At CES 2022, AMD unveiled its Ryzen 6000 Rembrandt mobile APUs. One of the key features of Rembrandt is the addition of Microsoft's new Pluton security processor making Ryzen 6000 the first do so in the market.
 
Pluton was first introduced by Microsoft back in 2020 with AMD, Intel, and Qualcomm as its partners. Hence, naturally after the AMD announcement of Pluton integration, one would expect Intel too to make a similar announcement sooner or later.

100,000 misconfigured servers are creating a new way to knock sites offline.
 
Last August, academic researchers discovered a potent new method for knocking sites offline: a fleet of misconfigured servers more than 100,000 strong that can amplify floods of junk data to once-unthinkable sizes. These attacks, in many cases, could result in an infinite routing loop that causes a self-perpetuating flood of traffic. Now, content-delivery network Akamai says attackers are exploiting the servers to target sites in the banking, travel, gaming, media, and web-hosting industries.
 
These servers—known as middleboxes—are deployed by nation-states such as China to censor restricted content and by large organizations to block sites pushing porn, gambling, and pirated downloads. The servers fail to follow transmission control protocol specifications that require a three-way handshake—comprising an SYN packet sent by the client, a SYN+ACK response from the server, followed by a confirmation ACK packet from the client—before a connection is established.