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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.

Chrome 98 landed a month ago and since the Stable release channel shifted to a four-week release cadence recently, it is now time for Chrome 99 to ship. There aren't a whole bunch of new features present in this build, but that makes sense given that Google is very close to the Chrome 100 milestone.
 
For starters, Chrome 99 will change the implementation of the JavaScript (JS) adoptedStyleSheets specification. This previously used the FrozenArray backing array but will now leverage ObservableArray. The new methods will make it easier to mutate JS arrays. While this is all quite technical, the arguably interesting thing for our readers would be that changes to this specification have been debated between Microsoft, Mozilla, Apple, and Google since 2018.

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

We are at the end of the last week of February, which means that it's once again time for a Microsoft Weekly roundup. This time, we have news related to Windows 11 (obviously), Microsoft Edge, OneDrive, and more. Without further ado, let's dive into our weekly digest for February 19 - February 25!

Wars never change.
 
There are many types of war. Some are direct wars, some are proxy wars, some are cyber wars, some are propaganda wars.
 
Wars too are not new. We know about the two great wars, they are neither first ones nor the only ones. Wars have been fought in mediaeval times, ancient times and even times before that. They might, going by track records, continue in future too.
 
Wars are not limited to current situation either. Wars have happened in Europe, they have happened in Americas, wars have happened in Arab countries, they have happened in Africa, they have happened in Asia. There is not a large location in the world which has not seen any type of war.

Scene cracking group CODEX is officially shutting down. The iconic tag has taken the cracking world by storm over the past eight years. The group was able to crack even the toughest copy protections, which instilled fear in many game publishers and respect among many of its peers.

Windows 11 has some pretty tough requirements to meet for older PCs but Microsoft does offer a way for enthusiasts to download the OS on their machine. Although you can sign a waver and bypass all warnings to install Windows on unsupported hardware, there have been reports that this will leave your machine in an "unsupported" state where you may not even receive security updates.

Microsoft has been pushing users towards cloud technologies for a while now and the company told it up a notch when it announced that Windows 11 Home users will need an internet connection to complete the setup of their new device.

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

We are the end of yet another week of 2022, which means that it is time to recap all the important things that happened in the world of Microsoft in the past few days. This time, we have some news that developers may find interesting, some Windows 11 news for Insiders, and a farewell to a Windows mascot. Let's dive in to our weekly digest for February 12 - February 18!

Tucked away toward the bottom of the changelog is one unwelcome addition: like the Home edition of Windows 11, the Pro version will now require an Internet connection and a Microsoft account during setup.

Following a massive acquisition by Microsoft, games such as Call of Duty and Crash Bandicoot will soon find a new home. Microsoft said today that it is acquiring Activision Blizzard Inc., one of the world’s largest gaming studios.
 
The transaction set a new record in the gaming industry, costing Microsoft a hefty US$68.7 billion, or nearly $100 billion in Australian dollars. Once completed, Microsoft will have control of over 30 video game firms. Microsoft will then be the world’s third-largest gaming studio, trailing only Sony and Tencent.

Google has already promised a way to mirror Android chat apps on your computer 

Google’s January outline revealed plans to spend 2022 trying to make the Android and Chrome OS experience match Apple’s ecosystem integrations, including a feature that would mirror a messaging app from your Android phone on your Chromebook. Thanks to 9to5Google, which did some digging in the recently-released Android 13 developer preview, we might have an early look at what that feature will look like.

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

There are lots of things to enjoy in the new Windows 11. But what makes the new OS more fun is the set of hidden features you can access on it, and you can use them to aid you in your work productivity. If you are unaware of the existence of these hidden gems, you can try them now.

Windows 11 is the new face of the Microsoft operating system, and it started its phased rollout in October 2021. According to Microsoft, it will stop its support on Microsoft 10 after 2025, so there’s still enough time for you to enjoy the good ol’ Win10 OS you love. And if you already have Windows 10 and you’re ready for an update, you can get Windows 11 for free. Before that, however, what should you expect in this new OS offered by Microsoft? Most importantly, how does Windows 11 compare to its predecessor?

Having a new operating system is just as exciting as having a new device in your hand. This is one of the reasons why the release of Windows 11 made a remarkable noise in October 2021. And if you are one of those who have new computers possessing the new OS, you’re probably enjoying the new interface and capabilities. But for those who are still clueless about them, here are the best Windows 11 features you should know:

If you have been following Intel's 12th Gen Alder Lake CPUs, you probably are aware that the processors are a hit, at least for gaming, where even the entry-level i3-12100F is easily able to keep up with some of the best AMD has to offer. This means the pressure is on AMD to put out some good competitive parts.
 
At CES 2022, AMD already announced that it is launching the Ryzen 7 5800X3D (image below) that packs the new 3D V-Cache technology in Spring this year.

Almost all the ads were for new electric vehicles, which seems like progress.

For some people—mostly those who aren't football fans—the commercials that accompany the Super Bowl are as important as the game itself. In 2022, we got a conflicting vision of the future—almost all the automakers showed off new electric vehicles as they try to wean themselves off dirty fossil fuels, a move surely counteracted by all the energy-sucking crypto startups also shilling their wares with on-screen QR codes between downs.

The latest version of Ventoy, an open source tool to create multi-boot USB devices using disk images, introduced support for booting from local disk images.

Ventoy is a useful tool in itself. Launched in early 2020, Ventoy allows users to create bootable media on USB devices. A core differentiating factor between Ventoy and solutions such as Rufus is that Ventoy users place disk images, e.g., ISO or IMG files, on the USB device. Additionally, Ventoy supports placing multiple disk images on the device to create multi-boot USB devices.

Microsoft is enabling a Microsoft Defender 'Attack Surface Reduction' security rule by default to block hackers' attempts to steal Windows credentials from the LSASS process.
 
When threat actors compromise a network, they attempt to spread laterally to other devices by stealing credentials or using exploits.
 
One of the most common methods to steal Windows credentials is to gain admin privileges on a compromised device and then dump the memory of the Local Security Authority Server Service (LSASS) process running in Windows.

We are at the close of yet another week, which means that it is time to recap everything that happened in the world of Microsoft in the past few days. It is safe to say that this was one of the busiest weeks of the year so far in this space. Read on to find why this was so in our weekly digest for February 5 - February 11.

The Windows 11 taskbar is slowly getting better

If, like me, you’ve missed the taskbar time and date on multiple monitors in Windows 11, you’ll be pleased to hear it’s returning. Microsoft is finally bringing this functionality back after shipping Windows 11 last year without the ability to see the time or date on secondary displays.
 
“We added the clock and date to the taskbars of other monitors when you connect other monitors to your device,” reads the release notes for a new Windows 11 build that has just been released to Release Preview testers. It’s good to see one of the many missing taskbar features returning to Windows 11, but there are still plenty more that Microsoft needs to address.

The new update is now available for Windows 10 21H2, version 21H1, and version 20H2 As per the official release notes, Microsoft has published two main cumulative updates for Windows 10 - KB5010342 and KB5010345.