Microsoft | TechCrunch

Security bug allows anyone to spoof Microsoft employee emails

Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai — Tue, 18 Jun 2024 17:46:52 +0000

A researcher has found a bug that allows anyone to impersonate Microsoft corporate email accounts, making phishing attempts look credible and more likely to trick their targets. As of this writing, the bug has not been patched. To demonstrate the bug, the researcher sent an email to TechCrunch that looked like it was sent from […]

FTC Chair Lina Khan on startups, scaling, and ”innovations in potential lawbreaking”

Connie Loizos — Sat, 15 Jun 2024 07:17:00 +0000

FTC Chair Lina Khan was the youngest person appointed to her position when she assumed the job in 2021. But once her term ends in September — after which she’ll stay until a successor is named — her age might be the last thing that people remember about her reign. It’s more likely that Khan’s […]

Enveda raises $55M to combine ancient remedies with AI for drug discovery

Marina Temkin — Fri, 14 Jun 2024 10:00:00 +0000

For centuries, people chewed willow tree bark to relieve pain, but scientists at chemical firm Bayer didn’t isolate its active ingredient until the 1800s and eventually patented its modified version as Aspirin. Aspirin is just one example of a medicine derived from natural sources. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that around 40% of […]

LinkedIn to limit targeted ads in EU after complaint over sensitive data use

Paul Sawers — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 16:45:08 +0000

LinkedIn has confirmed it will no longer allow advertisers to target users based on data gleaned from their participation in LinkedIn Groups. The move comes more than three months after a collective of civil society groups filed a complaint with the European Commission (EC) over a potential violation of the Digital Services Act (DSA). The […]

Microsoft hit with EU privacy complaints over schools’ use of 365 Education suite

Natasha Lomas — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 09:16:46 +0000

Microsoft’s education-focused flavor of its cloud productivity suite, Microsoft 365 Education, is facing investigation in the European Union. Privacy rights nonprofit noyb has just lodged two complaints with Austria’s data protection authority. The complaints examine the use of Microsoft’s cloud software by schools. The first one focuses on transparency and legal basis issues. noyb says […]

Tech giants form an industry group to help develop next-gen AI chip components

Kyle Wiggers — Thu, 30 May 2024 12:00:00 +0000

Microsoft, Meta, Intel, AMD and others have formed a new group to design next-gen interconnects for AI accelerator hardware.

Microsoft’s Copilot is now on Telegram

Lauren Forristal — Wed, 29 May 2024 15:37:51 +0000

Microsoft’s Copilot, a generative AI-powered tool that can generate text as well as answer specific questions, is now available as an in-app chatbot on Telegram, the instant messaging app. Currently in beta, Copilot for Telegram allows you to talk with the AI chatbot as if you’re having a normal, one-on-one conversation with a friend. It […]

Bing’s API was down, taking Microsoft Copilot, DuckDuckGo and ChatGPT’s web search feature down too

Romain Dillet — Thu, 23 May 2024 09:05:32 +0000

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, was working improperly for several hours on Thursday in Europe. At first, we noticed it wasn’t possible to perform a web search at all. Now it seems search results are loading properly. This outage also affected Bing’s application programming interface (API), which means that other services that relied on Bing weren’t […]

Truecaller partners with Microsoft to let its AI respond to calls in your own voice

Jagmeet Singh — Wed, 22 May 2024 15:25:17 +0000

AI has already started replacing voice agents’ jobs. Now, companies are exploring ways to replace the existing computer-generated voice models with synthetic versions of human voices. Truecaller, the widely known caller ID service, is the latest to take this approach with its announcement that it will now allow customers to use its AI-powered Assistant to […]

Bolster, creator of the CheckPhish phishing tracker, raises $14M led by Microsoft’s M12

Ingrid Lunden — Wed, 22 May 2024 14:54:18 +0000

A dodgy email containing a link that looks “legit” but is actually malicious remains one of the most dangerous, yet successful, tricks in a cybercriminal’s handbook. Now, an AI startup called Bolster that has built a novel approach to tackle that trick has raised $14 million in funding to expand its work, both across a […]

Microsoft wants to make Windows an AI operating system, launches Copilot+ PCs

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 May 2024 21:29:00 +0000

Copilot, Microsoft's brand of generative AI, will soon be far more deeply integrated into the Windows 11 experience.

Microsoft’s new ‘Volumetric Apps’ for Quest headsets extend Windows apps into the 3D space

Aisha Malik — Tue, 21 May 2024 19:20:36 +0000

Microsoft announced on Tuesday during its annual Build conference that it’s bringing “Windows Volumetric Apps” to Meta Quest headsets. The partnership will allow Microsoft to bring Windows 365 and local PC connectivity to Quest headsets, enabling developers to extend their apps into the 3D space. “We’re deepening our partnership with Meta to make Windows a […]

Microsoft upgrades its AI app-building platforms

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Microsoft’s big focus at this year’s Build conference is generative AI. And to that end, the tech giant announced a series of updates to its platforms for building generative AI-powered apps and experiences: Azure AI Studio and Copilot Studio. First, a quick refresher on Azure AI Studio and Copilot Studio. Azure AI Studio is a […]

Microsoft’s Power Automate no-code platform adds AI flows

Frederic Lardinois — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Microsoft wants to put its Copilot everywhere. It’s only a matter of time before Microsoft renames its annual Build developer conference to Microsoft Copilot. Hopefully, some of those upcoming events will be a bit less lackluster than this year’s edition, which lacks any real standout announcements after Microsoft already announced its new Arm-based laptops and […]

Microsoft intros a Copilot for teams

Kyle Wiggers — Tue, 21 May 2024 15:30:00 +0000

Microsoft wants to make its brand of generative AI more useful for teams — specifically teams across corporations and large enterprise organizations. This morning at its annual Build dev conference, Microsoft announced Team Copilot, the latest expansion of its Copilot family of generative AI tech. Unlike Microsoft’s previous Copilot-branded products, Team Copilot isn’t so much […]

Microsoft dodges UK antitrust scrutiny over its Mistral AI stake

Paul Sawers — Fri, 17 May 2024 14:21:33 +0000

Microsoft won't be facing antitrust scrutiny in the U.K. over its recent investment into French AI startup Mistral AI.

EU warns Microsoft it could be fined billions over missing GenAI risk info

Natasha Lomas — Fri, 17 May 2024 11:58:19 +0000

The EU's warning comes after Microsoft failed to respond to a legally binding request for information that focused on its generative AI tools.

Microsoft’s custom Cobalt chips will come to Azure next week

Frederic Lardinois — Thu, 16 May 2024 17:38:53 +0000

Microsoft will launch its custom Cobalt 100 chips to customers as a public preview at its Build conference next week, TechCrunch has learned. In an analyst briefing ahead of Build, Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s executive VP of the Microsoft Cloud and AI group, directly compared Cobalt to AWS’s Graviton chips, which have been available to developers […]

Microsoft is launching its mobile game store in July

Aisha Malik — Fri, 10 May 2024 14:11:09 +0000

Microsoft will launch its own mobile game store in July, the company announced at the Bloomberg Technology Summit on Thursday. Xbox president Sarah Bond shared that the company plans to bring its first-party portfolio, which includes titles like Candy Crush and Minecraft, to the mobile store at launch. Microsoft then plans to open up the […]

Microsoft and OpenAI launch $2M fund to counter election deepfakes

Paul Sawers — Tue, 07 May 2024 11:53:00 +0000

Microsoft and OpenAI have announced a $2 million fund to combat the growing risks of AI and deepfakes being used to “deceive the voters and undermine democracy.” This year will see a record 2 billion people head to the polls in elections spanning some 50 countries, so there are concerns around the influence that AI […]