
Search results for '@C +!I' - Page: 13
| ITBrief - 15 May (ITBrief) HR-Bible has launched an AI-driven HR platform using Microsoft Copilot to simplify HR tasks, aiming to make HR accessible and affordable for all businesses. Read...Newslink ©2025 to ITBrief |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Space Marine II now has official mod support baked into the base game, fresh from the devs’ hands to your eyeballs. This is big news, albeit for a very particular kind of fan. Allow me to give you some necessary context.
Space Marine II is based in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Which, in terms of pop culture settings, is about as deep as it gets. Starting with a tabletop strategy game that was itself a spinoff, the setting has been going strong since the late 80s, with ten editions of the main game, all with deep accompanying lore; several alternate games (ditto); hundreds of novels; and dozens of video games. All of that is, to a greater or lesser degree, canon to the game’s story. A story that takes place across literally millions of planets and tens of millions of years, dozens of human and alien species, psychic magic, demons, and sci-fi tech, all rolled together in one miserable, glorious heap of grimdark fiction.
Focus Entertainment
It’s a lot. I think it’s very possible that Warhammer 40K might have the most information and lore of any media property, ever. It is so deep and so wide that it makes Star Trek look like Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys. (What? Exactly.) And here’s the crazy thing: That’s just the official material.
As a tabletop war game that also includes building, painting, and customizing your own incredibly delicate, tiny, and expensive army, 40K attracts the kind of fan who loves to literally get their hands dirty. You can spend thousands of hours and a small fortune painstakingly choosing your perfect fighting force, assembling them, and showing off your skills.
And a lot of players aren’t content to simply go along with the game’s official story; they’d rather invent their own “chapters” or “factions” of the game’s various sci-fi legions. They do the same with the fiction itself. There are decades of fan content, an entire culture, surrounding this game, its stories and lore, and even its basic mechanics. I’m not exaggerating when I say you could spend the rest of your life obsessed with Warhammer 40,000 and still never see everything there is to see.
Here’s one of my favorites, playing off the Ork’s latent psychic powers. 40K’s space Orks aren’t smart enough to make things like cars or spaceships, but because they believe a car-shaped thing should work like a car, it does. They also believe that painting a car red makes it go faster. For them, it actually does.
Space Marine II knows this, knows that its most dedicated fans want to dive into all of that headfirst. While a single video game can only encapsulate a fraction of the full breadth of 40K’s official material and can’t even begin to accommodate all the unofficial stuff, it includes an impressive customization tool that lets you equip and “paint” your giant, grimdark supersoldier in an incredible variety of ways. It’s exactly the sort of thing that makes a 40K fan’s heart go pitter-patter.
But for the most dedicated 40K fan, that’s still not enough. Which is why the game now has official, native support for player-created mods. It’s a formula that’s worked well for tons of PC games, from Skyrim to Cities Skylines to Baldur’s Gate III. But because of Warhammer 40K’s unique relationship with both its own medium and its fans, it’s inevitable that an explosion of user-generated content is coming.
Within the first release of the official Integration Studio, modders will get access to tools for making new levels, new modes, new NPCs and enemy behavior, and even the base game’s logic. But that’s just the bones of what players can make. They can recreate essential moments from 40K fiction, like, say, the Fall of Cadia or the throne room battle of the Horus Heresy. (That would be roughly equivalent to the bombing of Pearl Harbor or the Charge of the Light Brigade, for those not in the know.) They can add in iconic allies and enemies, from an Avatar of Khaine to Ciaphas Cain. They could bring in some Exodite Eldar and play as an alien elf riding a dinosaur, which Games Workshop has yet to give players in the real game.
And again, that’s just emulating the stuff from the official fiction. Warhammer 40K fan content goes hard and crazy, often leaning into the setting’s most ridiculous elements or its largely forgotten satirical bent. (The humans and Space Marines are unequivocally and almost universally bad guys, if not necessarily the Bad Guys, something that’s often overlooked in the video games.) I can’t wait to see Buzz Lightyear marines, or the Angry Marines, or the best unofficial chapter: the Space Maids, who go around in pink maid dresses giving aid and comfort to the armies of the Imperium.
This is a joke. But also it isn’t. The Space Maids have semi-official lore, as official as fan content can get. They have divisions of their army with documented insignias, and they have a “Primarch” or founder like all the other Space Marine chapters/legions. They’re based on cutesy anime tropes, including lots of catgirls and baked goods. They’re wonderful.
Space Maid Marines are coming to Space Marine II. It is inevitable, and it’s going to be glorious. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Yesterday was Patch Tuesday, and Microsoft provided security updates that addressed 77 new vulnerabilities, with five security vulnerabilities in Windows already being exploited in the wild, and several others in Windows and Office being labeled as “critical.”
Microsoft offers sparse details on the vulnerabilities in the Security Update Guide, but Dustin Childs goes into more detail in Trend Micro’s ZDI blog with an eye for admins who manage corporate networks.
The next Patch Tuesday is expected to happen on June 10th, 2025.
Security vulnerabilities in Windows
A large number of the vulnerabilities—44 this time—are spread across the various Windows versions (10, 11, and Server) for which Microsoft still offers security updates. Although Windows 7 and 8.1 are no longer mentioned in the security reports, they could still be vulnerable. If your system requirements allow it, you should upgrade to Windows 11 24H2 before October to continue receiving security updates.
Zero-day Windows vulnerabilities
According to Microsoft, there are already attacks on a total of five security vulnerabilities in Windows, with the CVE-2025-30397 remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability standing out. If Edge is your default browser, all it takes is a click on a crafted link to force Edge to switch to Internet Explorer mode (a legacy feature that remains in all Windows versions because the MSHTML platform is still used by some older apps).
The other zero-day vulnerabilities include EoP (Elevation of Privilege) issues, which attackers can use to give their code higher authorizations, even system rights. Typically, such vulnerabilities are used in combination with an RCE vulnerability. This allows infiltrated code to be executed with full system rights, which ransomware groups love to do.
These vulnerabilities affect the Windows Common Log File System Driver (CVE-2025-32701, CVE-2025-32706), the Ancillary Function Driver for WinSock (CVE-2025-32709) and the Desktop Window Manager core library (CVE-2025-30400).
Critical Windows vulnerabilities
Microsoft has identified two closely related vulnerabilities in the Remote Desktop Client as critical (CVE-2025-29966, CVE-2025-29967). If a user connects to a malicious RDP server, code can be injected and executed. Also, the RCE vulnerability CVE-2025-29833 in the Virtual Machine Bus requires the authorizations of a logged-in user to be exploited.
Security vulnerabilities in Office
Microsoft has fixed 18 vulnerabilities in its Office product family, including 17 RCE vulnerabilities. Two use-after-free vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-30377 and CVE-2025-30386) are classified as critical. For these two RCE vulnerabilities, the preview window is an attack vector, meaning it can allow a successful attack when a prepared file is displayed in the preview. The user doesn’t even have to click on it or open it.
Microsoft categorizes the other vulnerabilities as high risk. Nine of these RCE vulnerabilities are in Excel, three affect SharePoint, plus one each in PowerPoint and Outlook. With these vulnerabilities, a successful attack requires a user to open a specially prepared file. Malicious code can then be executed with user rights.
Security vulnerabilities in cloud services
On May 8th, Microsoft fixed six security vulnerabilities in Azure, Dataverse, and Power Apps that were classified as critical. These include CVE-2025-29813 (an EoP vulnerability in Azure) and two other Azure vulnerabilities. Microsoft customers don’t need to take any action. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)In addition to gobbling up most of the internet, ChatGPT now wants access to your OneDrive and SharePoint files, too.
It makes sense. One of the earliest uses of AI was to summarize documents and folders of documents, and there’s only so many times you can ask it whether Spider-Man would beat Wonder Woman in a fair fight. It would be more productive for AI to collate and make sense of your own personal information, assuming you want to grant access to it.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT can now connect to your OneDrive or SharePoint document libraries, assuming you’re a paid ChatGPT Plus, Pro, or Team user who lives outside the EEA, Switzerland, and the UK (via Windows Central). You’ll obviously have to connect ChatGPT and give it permission to start poring over your cloud documents.
Specifically, you’ll need to enable ChatGPT’s “Deep Research” function, which normally scours the web for information. Now, it appears you can specify which folders in Microsoft’s cloud services to make accessible to ChatGPT on a once-and-done basis. Click the “down arrow” to select either OneDrive or SharePoint, then log in to the Microsoft services. You can also go to ChatGPT Settings, then Connected Apps, Connectors, and click Connect next to Microsoft OneDrive (work/school).
From a privacy perspective, you’re sharing the request with both OpenAI and Microsoft. “ChatGPT generates search queries from your prompts to locate relevant information within your connected Microsoft document libraries and sends these queries to Microsoft,” said OpenAI.
Theoretically, this should work similarly to Microsoft Copilot for OneDrive, which launched a year ago. However, Microsoft still says the service is only available to users with a work or school account, and will be added to Microsoft 365 subscribers (Personal or Family) in the coming months. Microsoft also says that Copilot for OneDrive can only work with five files at a time. OpenAI doesn’t specify any limitations at all for ChatGPT.
Things move fast in the AI world and it’s certainly possible that competition will spur Microsoft on. But for now, ChatGPT’s cloud integration looks like a more powerful option. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)We seem to have more video footage and still images than ever before, thanks to smartphones, GoPro cameras and the backlog of older ones collected across a lifetime. Managing all these formats, as well as making sure they look their best, can be a frightening proposition.
Thankfully, Winxvideo AI is a powerful all-in-one solution that not only uses advanced Artificial Intelligence software to upgrade the quality of your content but can rescue old photos and footage too. The newly updated version 4.0 also brings huge improvements to speed, plus a special price offer, so you can save both time and money while you upgrade your photo and video library.
Grab your discount on Winxvideo AI
Powerful AI tools that upgrade your videos
Winxvideo AI comes with an impressive array of features that can turn tired, old, blurry videos into something far more professional. For example, if you have footage of a significant event that was shot on an old device and only displays in low resolution, then the AI upscaling tool can cleverly convert it to 720p ,1080p or even 4K! It offers dedicated AI models for different video types – whether enhancing fine details, smoothing low-detail footage, refining animations, or upscaling photorealistic content.
Digiarty
Winxvideo AI significantly improves video quality thanks to its advanced AI models that remove noise, sharpen footage, and clean up compression artifacts caused by low light or poor equipment. This means that the unimpressive video you shot of an important occasion can instantly look better than you thought possible, and play back in glorious 4K with realistic detail, revealing textures like skin, hair, fur, and fabric with impressive clarity.
Is a great shot spoiled by the camera shaking? No problem, the AI Stabilization capabilities in Winxvideo AI can fix that in only a few clicks. If you find that your video is jerky and stutters due to a low frame rate, that’s fixable too thanks to the AI frame interpolation that can boost frame rates for smooth footage or allow you to convert it to slo-mo instead.
Alongside these tools there’s also a full suite of video editing features so you can put together your own films, remove noise from audio tracks, the option to convert video to and from a wide range of formats, plus the helpful ability to compress file sizes to make them easier to share over email or messaging services.
Restore and enhance photos and images
It’s not only video that you can improve with Winxvideo AI, as it also brings serious enhancements to still images. The AI upscaler technology instantly improves low-quality images by up to 10x, removing noise and blurriness to give you pin-sharp results.If you want to enhance portraits, Winxvideo AI’s Face Recovery restores fine details like eyelashes, pupils, and skin texture, while removing blemishes. It works perfectly for both individual portraits and group photos.
Digiarty
The same thing works on old photographs, which you can scan and then make them look like they were taken yesterday. Should you want to modernize old black and white pictures, then the colorize feature in Winxvideo AI makes this incredibly simple, bringing old images to life with full color versions. Everything is handled by the simple-to-use software that does all the heavy-lifting for you.
Winxvideo AI version 4.0 takes things to a new level
Thanks to big improvements in two of the AI models used in version 4.0, the latest iteration of Winxvideo AI boasts incredible performance gains, with upscaling speeds increased by up to 80% over version 3.9!
Digiarty
Not only that, the finished results also come with enhanced quality and details too. All this, while the CPU/GPU usage has been lowered, so your PC won’t be punished while working on the video or images.
Grab time-limited special deals for Winxvideo AI
This year also marks the 19th anniversary of Winxvideo AI’s creators Digiarty, which is being celebrated by a superb deal on the software where you can buy it for only $29.95, saving you $40 off the normal price. Hurry, though, as this is a time-limited deal to accompany the Digiarty festivities.
With so many useful tools to upgrade your video and photo library, there’s never been a better time to buy Winxvideo AI, and thanks to the special deal there’s never been a cheaper time either.
Save $40 on Winxvideo AI
View Offer Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)The future is here! And in so many ways, it kinda sucks. A new graphics card costs more than a mortgage payment because billionaires are sucking up all the GPUs to boil the planet and make Hayao Miyazaki cry at the same time, and I still don’t have a Marty McFly hoverboard. But at least I can order fast food that literally flies to my door. That’s nice.
In fact, I could order a flying curry delivery if I lived in Charlotte, North Carolina—specifically, within four miles of the Arboretum Shopping Center—where DoorDash is now offering food deliveries via drone. You can choose from a limited selection of local eateries, including Panera Bread, Matcha Cafe Maiko, and Joa Korean. The latest expansion is part of a partnership with drone delivery company Wing. Deliveries are also available in tiny slices of Dallas-Fort Worth and southwest Virginia, after a pilot (ha!) program in Logan City, Australia.
Wing’s drones are autonomous, according to the press release, needing no human pilots. The drones are pretty beefy, too. Promotional photos show a design with no less than 16 propellers spread across two struts and two wings, and it tucks the fast food package up underneath the main body. The bags are loaded by humans while the drone is airborne, and the food is then lowered down on an extensible cable at the destination so the drone doesn’t need to land. It’s pretty neat, though I can think of a lot of ways it could go wrong.
If you happen to live in Charlotte, NC (or the other introductory locations), you can check to see if your address is in the service area on Wing’s website. DoorDash is offering a $1 bowl of Panera mac and cheese for anyone who tries it out in the new area. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Several users are now reporting that Google Search has swapped its classic “I’m Feeling Lucky” button for an “AI Mode” button instead. In some cases, the AI Mode button appears to the right of the search bar with the I’m Feeling Lucky button remaining in its usual spot.
AI Mode is an experimental feature that offers an AI-generated search experience powered by Google’s Gemini 2.0 language model. Google spokesperson Ashley Thompson told The Verge that the search engine’s AI Mode is currently only visible to a limited number of users in Google’s experimental Labs environment.
It’s unclear at this point when—or if—the redesign could become the new standard for Google Search. You can see some examples of the new design in the tweets below:
I see this… AI Mode button next to Google Search. pic.twitter.com/zacHHA5AwH— Glenn Gabe (@glenngabe) May 10, 2025 Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Microsoft is laying off up to 3 percent of its global workforce, reports Bloomberg. With Microsoft having around 228,000 employees at the end of June 2024 (the latest reported number), that’d mean around 6,000 to 6,800 people being let go, according to CNBC.
This confirms the rumors from last month. The layoffs are to take place in different regions across different employee levels and teams. “We continue to implement organizational changes necessary to best position the company for success in a dynamic marketplace,” a company spokesperson told CNBC.
Microsoft plans to cut 1,985 jobs at its Redmond headquarters alone, 1,510 of which will be in the office. One aim is to reduce layers of management, the spokesperson said. Unlike the previous job reduction from January 2025 that hit “low performers,” these layoffs are not performance-related.
It’s currently unknown whether the Xbox games division will also be affected by the layoffs, but Microsoft has repeatedly cut jobs in the Xbox division in recent years.
These job cuts don’t fit with the latest business figures. At the end of April, Microsoft reported a net profit of $25.8 billion for the quarter, which exceeded expectations, and also issued a positive forecast. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Malware is a thing you just have to be aware of. But it’s pretty rare that it can actually damage your computer in a permanent sense — wipe the drive if you’re okay with losing local data, and you can generally get up and running in a day or two. But what if the microcode running on your CPU’s tiny integrated memory becomes infected? One security researcher says he’s done it.
Christiaan Beek of Rapid7 says he has created a proof-of-concept ransomware that can hide inside a CPU’s microcode, building on previous work that emerged when Google required AMD processors to always return “4” when asked for a random number. He claims that modifying UEFI firmware can install an unsigned update to the processor, slipping past any kind of conventional antivirus or OS-based security.
In a statement given to The Register, Beek says that Rapid7 won’t release the tool. However, the implications of this possibility are significant. If your computer’s CPU was infected to that degree, it would technically be possible to recover with official tools from Intel, AMD, et cetera. But it would be so involved, and your system would be so fully compromised, that you might as well just pull a Ron Swanson and yeet that thing.
Malware that can bypass the encryption in UEFI firmware is already known, though it’s a lot more complex and involved than your typical dodgy download. CPU-level ransomware has not been seen “in the wild,” and it seems likely that when and if it emerges, it’ll be a state-level actor that exploits it first. That means your typical user probably won’t be targeted, at least immediately.
Still, maybe keep a remote backup of your important files, just in case. Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  | | PC World - 15 May (PC World)Alongside the latest security fixes, Microsoft just added a number of new features to Windows 11 via the KB5058411 update.
The new Copilot+ AI feature known as Windows Recall and the ability to use Phone Link in the Start menu have been mentioned in previous articles, so we don’t need to mention them again.
One of the best improvements in the update is that Windows Search now supports AI, which means—among other things—that you can now use “natural language” in your search queries to find documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and images.
Get Windows 11 Pro for cheap
Windows 11 Pro
File Explorer also got some boosts, like how it’s now possible to view Microsoft 365 content directly in File Explorer (but requires you to pay for the service). File Explorer should also open files and unpack ZIP archives much faster, and as for the colors in the bars, the shades of blue and green are now darker than before.
Other goodies in the update include Microsoft removing the blue-colored background for shortcuts on the desktop, which users complained about, as well as numerous bug fixes, which should mean that the risk of running into “blue screen” crashes has gone down.
Update KB5058411 should automatically download and install to your system, assuming you’re on Windows 11 24H2. If it hasn’t yet, you should be able to jump-start it with a manual check in Windows Update.
Further reading: Windows 11 24H2 is now auto-downloading on PCs Read...Newslink ©2025 to PC World |  |
|  |  |
|
 |
 | Top Stories |

RUGBY
Black Ferns loose forward Dhys Faleafaga's 15s World Cup hopes have been dashed More...
|

BUSINESS
Urgent care is getting a 164 million dollar boost in this year's budget More...
|

|

 | Today's News |

 | News Search |
|
 |