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Welcome to the latest edition of Microsoft Weekly where we recap all the important stuff that happened in the world of Microsoft within the past few days. This time we have updates regarding Windows 11, the future of Windows as a whole, and some enhancements for IT admins and developers.

If you're looking to buy a Windows 10 license online, you might want to hurry up — by the end of this month, Microsoft will officially stop offering Windows 10 licenses on its website.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish' tops the chart, followed by 'The Menu'. ‘Avatar: The Way of Water' completes the top three.

The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Welcome to a new edition of Microsoft Weekly where we recap everything important that happened in the Microsoft-verse in the past seven days. Finally, we have a jampacked week full of interesting news items related to Windows updates, some upcoming Windows features, as well as Microsoft 365 enhancements. Without further ado, let's dive into our latest digest covering January 8 - January 13!

It hasn’t taken long. Following its launch on November 30th last year, a little over a month and a half ago, official reports are coming in from cybersecurity researchers that are seeing malware and ransomware that has either been created from scratch or augmented by ChatGPT.

I’ve written about AI and ChatGPT ad nauseum of late, but we’ve yet to cover all the amazing uses for this product. Without too much of a lengthy intro, here are 10 incredible things you likely didn’t know you could do with ChatGPT. 
 
The list below is all thanks to @thesyedhuq on Twitter, who recently went on a ChatGPT deep dive, exploring every facet of its capabilities. With the appropriate credit given, let’s get into it, shall we?

It is probably fair to say that this holiday season hasn't been the best time for AMD. First, the company had to acknowledge that its recently released Made By AMD (MBA) reference 7900 XTX cards were indeed affected by vapor chamber issue that was leading to very high hotspot temperatures of around 110°C. And now there may be more trouble brewing as Radeon RX 6000 series GPUs are said to be bricking when using the latest WHQL signed 22.11.2 driver.s

Microsoft today released the first Patch Tuesday updates for the year. And while for Windows 10 and Windows 11, these will be the first of many, for Windows 7 and 8.1, it was the final release as Extended Security Support (ESU) ended today. While Patch Tuesday updates are mostly security patches, today's release on Windows 11 has a couple of hidden features inside.
 
Spotted by Windows enthusiast and detective PhantomOcean3, the new build has the new Taskbar search that was introduced in Beta channel build 2262x.1037.

Google Chrome version 108 arrived well over a month ago, and now it's time for Chrome 109 to be rolled out to consumers. Although Chrome releases are generally separated by a four-week gap, the break was longer this time around due to the holiday season. Regardless, Chrome 109 is now rolling out, it's a significant release because it's the last version of the browser to support Windows 7 and 8.1. Microsoft itself dropped support for both the operating systems quite recently.
 
Interestingly, the latest release of Chrome also packs Cookies Having Independent Partitioned State (CHIPS), which is Google's alternative to third-party cookies, something that it is deprecating within a couple of years. This implementation has an opt-in mechanism for developers to subscribe to the top-level site, which Google claims should enable "non-tracking-related" use-cases and won't be restricted to cross-site cookie blocking.

Microsoft has released a new update for Windows Subsystem for Android - a software engine that makes it possible to run Android apps on modern Windows 11-based computers - in the Windows Insider program. Version 2211.40000.11.0 is available for download in all Windows Insider channels, delivering customers a new Android version and multiple improvements, such as faster boot, better mouse clicks input, improved clipboard and app resizing, etc.

Today is Microsoft's January 2023 Patch Tuesday, and with it comes fixes for an actively exploited zero-day vulnerability and a total of 98 flaws.
 
This is the first Patch Tuesday of 2023, and it fixes a whopping 98 vulnerabilities, with eleven of them classified as 'Critical.'

It’s the second Tuesday of the month, so that can mean only one thing: it’s Patch Tuesday. The update you’re looking out for this month is KB5022303, once it’s installed on your computer, your OS Build should be 22621.1105. Given that much of the last month has included holidays, it’s not too surprising that the highlights in this update are a bit scarce.

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 (also called "B release") for January 2023 on Windows Server 20H2, and Windows 10 for the latest versions, 21H1, 21H2, and 22H2. The new updates are being distributed under KB5022282, bumping up the builds to 19042.2486, 19044.2486, and 19045.2486.

Microsoft has released the final Windows 7 (KB5022338) and Windows 8.1 (KB5022352) Patch Tuesday updates. Both include improvements but unfortunately also some known issues which will now never be addressed.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'The Menu' tops the chart, followed by 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish'. ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.  

These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

Some users think 2022 was not the best year for Microsoft's desktop operating system. It took a while for Windows 11 to surpass the now-dead Windows 7, and the significantly steeper hardware requirements surely do not help the OS crank up its rollout speed. Another stumbling block is questionable feature changes (with even more questionable excuses from Microsoft) that make Windows 11 less attractive for those with eligible hardware. You can also add to the list Microsoft's failed promise to deliver a single update per year—no one knows when and how many updates Windows 11 will receive.

Welcome to the first edition of Microsoft Weekly for 2023. As most of our readers may be aware, Microsoft Weekly is a digest where we recap every important news related to the tech giant from the past seven days. This time, we have some updates related to Windows 11 builds, as well as a bunch of enhancements for Teams and Outlook. Let's dive into the latest Microsoft Weekly edition covering January 1 - January 6!

Researchers have found it surprisingly easy to upload malicious Visual Studio Code extensions to the VSCode Marketplace, and discovered signs of threat actors already exploiting this weakness.
 
Visual Studio Code (VSC) is a source-code editor published by Microsoft and used by roughly 70% of professional software developers worldwide.
 
Microsoft also operates an extensions market for the IDE, called the VSCode Marketplace, which offers add-ons that extend the application's functionality and provide more customization options.
 
Some of these extensions have tens of millions of downloads, so if there was an easy way to spoof them on the platform, malicious actors could quickly attain a respectable number of victims.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Avatar: The Way of Water' tops the chart, followed by 'Violent Night'. ‘Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.  

These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into the piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

Welcome to the final edition of Microsoft Weekly for this year and what a year it has been. Just like last time though, we have a relatively shorter digest today owing to the holidays season, expect news inflow to pick up again from next week. This time, we recap some news about Windows that might make you feel nostalgic, an interesting feature coming to Notepad, and some app updates. Without further ado, let's dive into our latest digest covering December 24 - December 30!

'House of the Dragon' is the most-pirated TV show released on torrent sites in 2022. The popular 'Game of Thrones' prequel dethroned 'Wandavision', which topped the chart last year. Amazon's 'The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power' takes the second spot at a respectable distance.
 
At the end of every year, we take a look at the most-downloaded TV episodes among torrenting pirates.

Windows 11 is becoming more popular among regular users, gaming audiences, and business customers every month. Although Microsoft has already released several feature updates with much-needed changes (more to come in early 2023), Windows 11 still has some notable shortcomings. Also, Microsoft cannot please everyone, so it is natural to expect relative discontent among those willing to ditch Windows 10.
 
If you are already in the Windows 11 team or just plan to upgrade, here are 11 apps (in no particular order) we consider must-haves on Microsoft's latest OS. They improve existing features or add something Windows 11 lacks (they also work perfectly fine on Windows 10).

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery' tops the chart, followed by ‘Violent Knight'. 'Black Adam' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Every week we take a close look at the most pirated movies on torrent sites. What are pirates downloading? 'The Fabelmans' tops the chart, followed by ‘Black Adam'. 'The Banshees of Inisherin' completes the top three.
 
The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

We are racing towards the end of the year and the tech news isn't slowing down at all. If anything, it's picking up even more pace. Join us as we recap the latest news items from the Microsoft universe, which include information about even more bugs and their respective fixes, a bunch of Windows updates, and also some app updates for good measure. Without further ado, let's dive into our weekly digest for December 10 - December 16!