News

In this episode of First Ring Daily, Brad Sams and Paul Thurrott discuss Microsoft’s attempt to sell Bing to Apple, and Google’s recent hardware announcements ahead of the company’s event next week.

Microsoft Teams continues to improve the meeting experience, and starting next month the collaboration platform is getting a new Town Halls feature with support for up to 10,000 attendees. The new virtual event experience will replace the Teams Live Events functionality, which is set to retire on September 30, 2024. With Town Halls, commercial customers…

Security researchers have discovered that hackers are now employing a new zero-point font obfuscation technique to target Microsoft Outlook users. Unlike traditional phishing emails that try to evade automated detection, this novel approach aims to deceive recipients by making emails appear more trustworthy. In a recent report published by the SANS Internet Storm Center, cybersecurity…

Microsoft Mesh integration in Teams is set to launch in public preview in October. The upcoming release should bring a wave of fresh meeting experiences to Microsoft Teams users, including avatars, 3D meeting environments, spatial audio and audio zones, interactive games, and live reactions. Microsoft Mesh is a new mixed-reality platform that was announced back…

Microsoft’s latest release, Windows Terminal 1.19 Preview, is making waves in the developer community with its array of new features, including Suggestions UI, Broadcast Input, and Web Search. Windows Terminal 1.18 is also available as a stable release with all the capabilities that were previously available in preview. Windows Terminal Preview 1.19 brings a new…

Microsoft is gearing up to introduce support for Personal plans in Microsoft Planner. These new Personal plans will provide users with a more tailored approach to managing tasks, granting creators exclusive ownership and access to their plans. Microsoft Planner is a popular task management service that allows enterprise teams to create, assign, and organize work…

Microsoft released yesterday a big update for Windows 11 version 22H2 with over 200 new features. The company announced this update during its special event last week, and one of the main highlights is the new Copilot assistant that can be pinned right on the desktop.  Copilot provides access to the same Bing Chat experience…

Microsoft has announced some important updates for its Defender for Cloud solution. This latest release introduces a new unified cloud data security dashboard and sensitive data discovery capabilities that promise to improve how organizations protect corporate data. First off, Microsoft has launched a new data security dashboard in public preview for its Defender for Cloud…

Microsoft is set to retire its Azure Database for MariaDB service, making way for Azure Database for MySQL – Flexible Server. This shift was announced yesterday, with the service scheduled for deprecation on September 9, 2025. Azure Database for MariaDB is a relational database service based on the open-source MariaDB Server engine. It offers a…