An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Android is slowly entering the RISC-V era. So far we've seen Google say it wants to give the up-and-coming CPU architecture "tier-1" support in Android, putting RISC-V on equal footing with Arm. Qualcomm has announced the first mass-market RISC-V Android chip, a still-untitled Snapdragon Wear chip for smartwatches. Now Google has announced a timeline for developer tools via the Google Open Source Blog. The last post is titled "Android and RISC-V: What you need to know to be ready."

Getting the Android OS and app ecosystem to support a new architecture is going to take an incredible amount of work from Google and developers, and these tools are laying the foundation for that work. First up, Google already has the "Cuttlefish" virtual device emulator running, including a gif of it booting up. This isn't the official "Android Emulator" -- which is targeted at app developers doing app development -- Cuttlefish is a hardware emulator for Android OS development. It's the same idea as the Android Emulator but for the bottom half of the tech stack -- the kernel, framework, and hardware bits. Cuttlefish lets Google and other Android OS contributors work on a RISC-V Android build without messing with an individual RISC-V device. Google says it's working well enough now that you can download and emulate a RISC-V device today, though the company warns that nothing is optimized yet.

The next step is getting the Android Emulator (for app developers) up and running, and Google says: "By 2024, the plan is to have emulators available publicly, with a full feature set to test applications for various device form factors!" The nice thing about Android is that most app code is written with no architecture in mind -- it's all just Java/Kotlin. So once the Android RunTime starts spitting out RISC-V code, a lot of app code should Just Work. That means most of the porting work will need to go into things written in the NDK, the native developer kit, like libraries and games. The emulator will still be great for testing, though.

Google says it'll issue a system update to fix a major storage bug in Android 14 that has caused some users to be locked out of their devices. Ars Technica reports: Apparently one more round of news reports was enough to get the gears moving at Google. Over the weekend the Issue tracker bug has been kicked up from a mid-level "P2" priority to "P0," the highest priority on the issue tracker. The bug has been assigned to someone now, and Googlers have jumped into the thread to make official statements that Google is looking into the matter. Here's the big post from Google on the bug tracker [...]. The highlights here are that Google says the bug affects devices with multiple Android users, not multiple Google accounts or (something we thought originally) users with work profiles. Setting up multiple users means going to the system settings, then "Multiple users," then "Allow multiple users," and you can add a user other than the default one. If you do this, you'll have a user switcher at the bottom of the quick settings. Multiple users all have separate data, separate apps, and separate Google accounts. Child users are probably the most popular reason to use this feature since you can lock kids out of things, like purchasing apps.

Shipping a Google Play system update as a quick Band-Aid is an interesting solution, but as Google's post suggests, this doesn't mean the problem is fixed. Play system updates (these are alternatively called Project Mainline or APEX modules) allow Google to update core system components via the Play Store, but they are really not meant for critical fixes. The big problem is that the Play system updates don't aggressively apply themselves or even let you know they have been downloaded. They just passively, silently wait for a reboot to happen so they can apply. For Pixel users, it feels like the horse has already left the barn anyway -- like most Pixel phones have automatically applied the nearly 13-day-old update by now. Users can force Play system updates to happen themselves by going to the system settings, then "Security & Privacy," then "System & updates," then "Google Play system update." If you have an update, you'll be prompted to reboot the phone. Also note that this differs from the usual OS update checker location, which is in system settings, then "System," then "System update." The system update screen will happily tell you "Your system is up to date" even if you have a pending Google Play system update. It would be great to have a single location for OS updates, Google Play System/Mainline updates, and app updates, but they are scattered everywhere and give conflicting "up to date" messages.

"Windows 11's last major update, 22H2 introduced native support for managing RAR archives, eliminating the need for third-party software," writes Slashdot reader jjslash. "This enhancement is part of the OS's broader capability improvements for handling various archive file formats." TechSpot reports: Microsoft finally introduced native support for RAR archives earlier this year, just three decades after the format's official introduction in 1993. Windows 11 development is now progressing at an accelerated pace, therefore support for a whole lot of new (ancient) archive formats is coming soon.

Microsoft recently released KB5031455, an optional, feature-rich preview cumulative update for Windows 11, refreshing the list of archive formats natively supported in the OS. Windows 11 22H2 and later versions can now manage files compressed in the following archive types: .rar, .7z, .tar, .tar.gz, .tar.bz2, .tar.zst, .tar.xz, .tgz, .tbz2, .tzst, .txz. Support for password-encrypted archives is not available yet.

Redmond programmers added support for the aforementioned archive files thanks to the libarchive library, an open source project designed to develop a portable, efficient C library that can "read and write streaming archives" in a variety of formats. Libarchive supports additional archive types (Lzh, Xar) that could eventually come to Windows 11 as well.

Microsoft's dedicated OS for embedded and pocket devices, Windows CE, has reached the end of its support lifetime. From a report: Windows CE -- and there's never been an official explanation of what the WinCE-inducing name stood for -- debuted in November 1996, just a few months after Windows NT 4, the first version of NT with the Explorer desktop from Windows 95. Earlier this month, as reported by HPC Factor, the last ever version, CE 8, branded Compact Embedded 2013, reached its end of support.

In 2011, Microsoft said it would be replaced by a unified platform based on Windows 8, but we know how well that went down. By 2020, the official migration path was set -- to a container on top of Win10 IoT. Its fortunes have always fluctuated. In 1999, we asked does MS care about WinCE? By 2003, we reported that eTForecasts said it would outship PCs. Indirectly, the researchers were right -- smartphones did end up massively outselling PCs. They just weren't Microsoft ones.

Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes: OpenBSD 7.4 has been officially released. The 55th release of this BSD operating system, known for being security oriented, brings a lot of new things, including dynamic tracer, pfsync improvements, loads of security goodies and virtualization improvements. Grab your copy today! As mentioned by Phoronix's Michael Larabel, some of the key highlights include:

- Dynamic Tracer (DT) and Utrace support on AMD64 and i386 OpenBSD
- Power savings for those running OpenBSD 7.4 on Apple Silicon M1/M2 CPUs by allowing deep idle states when available for the idle loop and suspend
- Support for the PCIe controller found on Apple M2 Pro/Max SoCs
- Allow updating AMD CPU Microcode updating when a newer patch is available
- A workaround for the AMD Zenbleed CPU bug
- Various SMP improvements
- Updating the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) graphics driver support against the upstream Linux 6.1.55 state
- New drivers for supporting various Qualcomm SoC features
- Support for soft RAID disks was improved for the OpenBSD installer
- Enabling of Indirect Branch Tracking (IBT) on x86_64 and Branch Target Identifier (BTI) on ARM64 for capable processors

You can download and view all the new changes via OpenBSD.org.

AlmaLinux is creating a Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) without any Red Hat code. Instead, AlmaLinux OS will aim to be Application Binary Interface (ABI) compatible and use the CentOS Stream source code that Red Hat continues to offer. Additional code is pulled from Red Hat Universal Base Images, and upstream Linux code. Benny Vasquez, chairperson of the AlmaLinux OF Foundation, explained how all this works at the open-source community convention All Things Open. ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols reports: The hardest part is Red Hat's Linux kernel updates because, added Vasquez, "you can't get those kernel updates without violating Red Hat's licensing agreements." Therefore, she continued, "What we do is we pull the security patches from various other sources, and, if nothing else, we can find them when Oracle releases them." Vasquez did note one blessing from this change in production: "AlmaLinux, no longer bound to Red Hat's releases, has been able to release upstream security fixes faster than Red Hat. "For example, the AMD microcode exploits were patched before Red Hat because they took a little bit of extra time to get out the door. We then pulled in, tested, and out the door about a week ahead of them." The overall goal remains to maintain RHEL compatibility. "Any breaking changes between RHEL and AlmaLinux, any application that stops working, is a bug and must be fixed."

That's not to say AlmaLinux will be simply an excellent RHEL clone going forward. It plans to add features of its own. For instance, Red Hat users who want programs not bundled in RHEL often turn to Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL). These typically are programs included in Fedora Linux. Besides supporting EPEL software, AlmaLinux has its own extra software package -- called Synergy -- which holds programs that the AlmaLinux community wants but are not available in either EPEL or RHEL. If one such program is subsequently added to EPEL or RHEL, AlmaLinux drops it from Synergy to prevent confusion and duplication of effort.

This has not been an easy road for AlmaLinux. Even a 1% code difference is a lot to write and maintain. For example, when AlmaLinux tried to patch CentOS Stream code to fix a problem, Red Hat was downright grumpy about AlmaLinux's attempt to fix a security hole. Vasquez acknowledged it was tough sledding at first, but noted: "The good news is that they have been improving the process, and things will look a little bit smoother." AlmaLinux, she noted, is also not so much worried as aware that Red Hat may throw a monkey wrench into their efforts. Vasquez added: "Internally, we're working on stopgap things we'd need to do to anticipate Red Hat changing everything terribly." She doesn't think Red Hat will do it, but "we want to be as prepared as possible."

The Android ecosystem is hurtling toward a RISC-V future. From a report: The puzzle pieces for the up-and-coming CPU architecture started falling into place this past year when Google announced official RISC-V support in Android and plans to make it a "tier 1 platform" on equal footing with Arm. With the OS support underway, what we need now is hardware, and Qualcomm is stepping up to announce the first-ever mass-market RISC-V Android SoC. It doesn't have a name yet, but Qualcomm says it's developing a "RISC-V Snapdragon Wear" chip in collaboration with Google. The company says it plans to "commercialize the RISC-V based wearables solution globally including the US." For Google and Qualcomm, this chip represents everyone's first swing at a commercial RISC-V Android project, and as far as we can tell, it's the first announced mass-market RISC-V Android chip ever. Qualcomm says the groundwork it and Google lay out "will help pave the way for more products within the Android ecosystem to take advantage of custom CPUs that are low power and high performance."

RISC-V represents a big threat to the Arm CPU architecture that currently dominates all mobile devices. RISC-V architecture is open source, which can make it cheaper and more flexible than Arm. If companies want to design their own chips, they can do that without paying a licensing fee to Arm. Since the architecture is open source, it's possible to create a fully open source chip. If you're a chip-design firm, you can make your own proprietary chip designs and license them, making you a competitor to Arm's chip-design business. RISC-V is also a way to sidestep all of the various problems with Arm.

Windows Central: According to my sources who are familiar with the matter, Windows 11 is now in use on over 400 million monthly active devices. Internal Microsoft data seen by Windows Central reveals that Windows 11's active device usage just recently surpassed 400 million and is steadily climbing to reach half a billion by early 2024. As noted in our Windows 11 review, the OS has been on the market since October 2021, meaning it's taken Microsoft around two years to reach 400 million monthly active devices with Windows 11. This is a significantly slower rate than Windows 10, which reached the same number in just over a year (and eventually 1 billion users by early 2020). Still, factoring in both platforms' very different launch parameters is essential.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Neowin: The various versions of Windows have used Kerberos as its main authentication protocol for over 20 years. However, in certain circumstances, the OS has to use another method, NTLM (NT LAN Manager). Today, Microsoft announced that it is expanding the use of Kerberos, with the plan to eventually ditch the use of NTLM altogether.

In a blog post, Microsoft stated that NTLM continues to be used by some businesses and organizations for Windows authentication because it "doesn't require local network connection to a Domain Controller." It also is "the only protocol supported when using local accounts" and it "works when you don't know who the target server is." Microsoft states:

These benefits have led to some applications and services hardcoding the use of NTLM instead of trying to use other, more modern authentication protocols like Kerberos. Kerberos provides better security guarantees and is more extensible than NTLM, which is why it is now a preferred default protocol in Windows. The problem is that while businesses can turn off NTLM for authentication, those hardwired apps and services could experience issues. That's why Microsoft has added two new authentication features to Kerberos.
Microsoft's blog post calls it "the evolution of Windows authentication," arguing that "As Windows evolves to meet the needs of our ever-changing world, the way we protect users must also evolve to address modern security challenges..." So, "our team is building new features for Windows 11."

• Initial and Pass Through Authentication Using Kerberos, or IAKerb, "a public extension to the industry standard Kerberos protocol that allows a client without line-of-sight to a Domain Controller to authenticate through a server that does have line-of-sight."

• A local Key Distribution Center (KDC) for Kerberos, "built on top of the local machine's Security Account Manager so remote authentication of local user accounts can be done using Kerberos."

• "We are also fixing hard-coded instances of NTLM built into existing Windows components... shifting these components to use the Negotiate protocol so that Kerberos can be used instead of NTLM... NTLM will continue to be available as a fallback to maintain existing compatibility."

• "We are also introducing improved NTLM auditing and management functionality to give your organization more insight into your NTLM usage and better control for removing it."

"Reducing the use of NTLM will ultimately culminate in it being disabled in Windows 11. We are taking a data-driven approach and monitoring reductions in NTLM usage to determine when it will be safe to disable."

Keumars Afifi-sabet reports via TechRadar: Lenovo has the green light to see a portfolio of new enterprise-focused devices powered by Esper Foundation -- a custom Android operating system -- and bundled with a complementary mobile device management (MDM) platform. The firm's first device running Esper Foundation is the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70a, an all-in-one desktop PC fitted with an up to 12th-Gen Intel Core i9 CPU, alongside 16GB DDR4 RAM and up to 512GB SSD. It'll be followed by the Lenovo ThinkCentre M70q, M90n-1 IoT, and the ThinkEdge SE30 v2 machines by the end of 2023. Esper Foundation is based on Android 11 and has customizable branding, peripheral compatibility, quarterly security patches, and three years of support. The MDM system, meanwhile, remotely deploys, manages, and updates devices from a single view.

By integrating a custom version of Android in its PCs, Lenovo is banking on the Esper Foundation OS appealing to businesses as an alternative to Windows, as well as Google's own ChromeOS. With platforms like Esper's, there may well be a means to find a rival to compete with Windows in the enterprise, particularly in highly niche industries such as the retail, hospitality, and healthcare industries -- at which Esper Foundation is directed. "This collaboration is another step forward in Lenovo's drive to meet changing customer demand across retail, hospitality, healthcare, and other industries," said Johanny Payero, Lenovo's director of global advanced solutions marketing and strategy. "Dedicated devices are proliferating across several key industries, and our new joint solution with Esper allows us to deliver the best of Android with the consistency and predictability of Lenovo's x86 devices."

Hell freezes over and pigs fly south to their winter feeding grounds. Microsoft has published guidance on how to download and install Linux. From a report: The Seattle-area proprietary OS vendor has published a helpful guide entitled "How to download and install Linux," inspiring reactions from incredulity to amusement. In the humble opinion of The Reg FOSS Desk, it really isn't bad at all. Microsoft suggests four alternative installation methods: using Windows Subsystem for Linux 2, using a local VM, using a cloud VM, or on bare metal. It almost feels cruel to criticize it, but it seems that this really amounts to two methods. WSL version 2 is a VM. It's right there in the screenshots, where it says:

Installing: Virtual Machine Platform
Virtual Machine Platform has been installed.

So the choices boil down to either on the metal, or in a VM. That leaves only the question of what kind of VM: the built-in one, an add-on VM, or a cloud VM. Perhaps the subtext of the article is something more subtle. Could it be a tacit admission that you might need a free-of-charge OS for your PC? The Windows 10 upgrade program that began back in 2015 was meant to end a year later. In fact, it didn't. We described a documented workaround in 2016, but the free upgrades continued to work, even in 2020. Which? magazine reported it was still working in July 2023.

Thomas Claburn reports via The Register: Microsoft has stopped developing VBScript after a 27-year relationship and plans to remove the scripting language entirely in a future Windows release. The Windows biz said on Monday that VBScript, short for Visual Basic Scripting Edition, has been deprecated in an update to its list of "Deprecated features for Windows client." "VBScript is being deprecated," Microsoft said. "In future releases of Windows, VBScript will be available as a feature on demand before its removal from the operating system."

VBScript debuted in 1996 and its most recent release, version 5.8, dates back to 2010. It is a scripting language, and was for a while widely used among system administrators to automate tasks until it was eclipsed by PowerShell, which debuted in 2006. "Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition brings active scripting to a wide variety of environments, including Web client scripting in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Web server scripting in Microsoft Internet Information Service," Redmond explains in its help documentation. Unfortunately, Microsoft never managed to get other browser makers to support VBScript, so outside of Microsoft-exclusive environments, web developers tended to favor JavaScript for client-side tasks.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Here's how your computer should work, according to Mustafa Abdelhai, the co-founder and CEO of a startup called Deta. Instead of a big empty screen full of icons, your desktop should be an infinite canvas on which you can take notes or watch movies or run full apps just by drawing a rectangle on the screen. Instead of logging in to a bunch of cloud services over which you ultimately have no control, you should be able to download software like PC users did 20 years ago, and the stuff you download should be completely yours. All your apps should talk to each other, so you can move data between them or even use multiple apps' features simultaneously. You should be able to use AI to accomplish almost anything. And it should all happen in a browser tab.

For the last couple of years, the Berlin-based Deta has been building what it calls "the personal cloud computer." The product Deta is launching today is called Space OS, and the way Abdelhai explains it, it's the first step in putting the personal back in the personal computer. "Personal computing took a dive at the turn of the century," he says, "when cloud computing became the big thing. We all moved to the cloud, moved our data, and we don't own it anymore. It's just somebody else's computer." Deta wants to give it back. [...]

Deta's idea is both a very new one and a very old one. It harkens back to the early days of computers when you bought software in a box at a store and installed it on your computer. The cloud era, of course, made computing vastly easier and more powerful but also systematically ate away at the idea that you could control anything on your devices. It's an interesting thought experiment, actually: if every cloud service shut down tomorrow, what would be left on your phone or your laptop? Odds are, not much. Deta's trying to undo that a bit, to embrace the cloud and the expansive universe of apps while giving you back the feeling that your computer -- and everything on it -- is yours and no one else's. Because your computer should be yours -- even if it's on somebody's server.

Alongside the Pixel 8 and Android 14, Google today launched the new Pixel Watch 2 -- a $350 second-gen smartwatch featuring a faster processor, overhauled sensor array, and longer battery life. The Verge reports: At a glance, the main difference is that the screen sits flush with the digital crown, where the original had a slight cutout. Another change imperceptible to the naked eye: the body is now made of 100 percent recycled aluminum instead of stainless steel. The result is a slightly lighter watch, but not by much. The Pixel Watch weighed 36 grams, while the Pixel Watch 2 is 31g. That's a bit disappointing, considering the Watch 2's price remains the same as last year. We're looking at the same 41mm case size and OLED display on top. But flip the watch over, and you'll find a completely different sensor array. Instead of a single line of LEDs, there are now multiple LEDs and photodiodes to take measurements from several angles and positions. That then feeds into an algorithm that Fitbit CEO James Park says is 40 percent more accurate for vigorous activities.

This year, Google also added a skin temperature and continuous electrodermal activity (EDA) sensor. Both help enable proactive stress tracking, which Fitbit introduced with its Sense 2. The EDA sensor detects minuscule amounts of sweat, which can help determine bodily stress when combined with metrics like heart rate variability, heart rate, and skin temperature. As with the Sense 2, you're supposed to get a slightly delayed notification when a stressful event has been detected. You're then encouraged to log how that event made you feel. Battery life was a major pain point when the Pixel Watch first launched. Park acknowledges that you couldn't use the always-on display on the first-gen watch if you wanted that 24-hour battery life. This time around, he says that the team has worked hard to make sure the Pixel Watch 2's 306mAh battery can get 24 hours with the always-on display enabled. Users should also be able to get a 50 percent charge in 30 minutes and a full day's worth in 75 minutes. Helping that should be Wear OS 4 -- which Google says ought to extend battery life -- and the new, more power-efficient Qualcomm Snapdragon W5 processor. (Speaking of Wear OS 4, Google says that, at first, it'll be exclusive to Pixel Watch 2.) Other features include the ability to automatically record workouts and do heart rate zone training; a new Safety Check feature that will alert your loved ones of your location after a preset timer expires (e.g. taking an Uber across town or going on a late-night walk); and support for Google services like Gmail, Google Wallet, and Calendar.

You can learn more about the Pixel Watch 2 here.

Android 14 is out today, along with a new Pixel phone. The OS is shipping to supported Pixel devices now, which means the Pixel 4a (5G) and every variant of the Pixel 5, 6, and 7, plus the Fold and Tablet. From a report: The big feature this year is a somewhat customizable home screen. You can pick from several different lock screen clock styles and customize the two bottom app shortcuts. This feels like a response to iOS 16's lock screen widgets (a feature Android used to have back in the 4.2 days) but not nearly as customizable. It's honestly hard to highlight a second Android 14 feature because this is one of the smallest Android releases ever. The first feature Google mentions in its blog post is a new wallpaper picker. On the Pixel 8, Android now has a built-in text-to-image AI wallpaper maker, presumably a feature that lets the Android team adhere to Google's "mandatory AI" company mandate. There's also a new monochrome theme if you're tired of all those "Material You" colors.

Google's newest flagship phone is finally official. The Pixel 8 and Pixel 8 Pro were both unveiled today, with the headline changes being a whopping seven years of updates, flat screens across the board, new CPUs, and a $100 price increase. The Pixel 8 Pro is officially $999, while the Pixel 8 is $699. ArsTechnica: As for specs, the Pro display is a 6.7-inch, 120 Hz, 2992x1344 OLED. Google is branding this display "Super Actua" because it's one of the brightest phone displays on the market at 1600 nits for HDR content and 2400 nits in sunlight mode. That beats the sunlight modes on the S23 Ultra (1750 nits) and iPhone 15 Pro Max (2000 nits) but not the Xiaomi 13T Pro (2600 nits). The storage situation here isn't great. The Pixel 8 Pro has 12GB of RAM and storage tiers of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB. Most other phones in this price range start at 256GB, and the 8 Pro uses slower UFS 3.1 storage instead of the speedy UFS 4.0 a lot of phones ship with now. The 8 Pro battery is 5050 mAh, and there's 30 W wired charging. Wireless charging will hit 23 W on the Pixel charging stand, while Qi chargers will only hit 12 W (it would be great if Qi2 would get its act together). Both phones have IP68 dust and water resistance. On the software update support lifecycle: This year, there is finally something tangible to point to -- 7 years of OS updates. Unlike with previous models, there are no games being played here, as Google says there are "7 years of OS, security, and Feature Drop updates." That's more major OS updates than even iPhone owners are getting, with the iPhone X getting iOS versions 11-16.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Apple decides to end update support for your Mac, you can either try to install another OS or you can trick macOS into installing on your hardware anyway. That's the entire point of the OpenCore Legacy Patcher, a community-driven project that supports old Macs by combining some repurposed Hackintosh projects with older system files extracted from past macOS versions. Yesterday, the OCLP team announced version 1.0.0 of the software, the first to formally support the recently released macOS 14 Sonoma. Although Sonoma officially supports Macs released mostly in 2018 or later, the OCLP project will allow Sonoma to install on Macs that go back to models released in 2007 and 2008, enabling them to keep up with at least some of the new features and security patches baked into the latest release.

Liam Proven writes via The Register: Steam OS is the Arch-based distro for a handheld Linux games console, and Valve is aggressively pushing Linux's usability and Windows interoperability for the device. Two unusual companies, Valve Software and Igalia, are working together to improve the Linux-based OS of the Steam Deck handheld games console. The device runs a Linux distro called Steam OS 3.0, but this is a totally different distro from the original Steam OS it announced a decade ago. Steam OS 1 and 2 were based on Debian, but Steam OS 3 is based on Arch Linux, as Igalia developer Alberto Garcia described in a talk entitled How SteamOS is contributing to the Linux ecosystem.

He explained that although Steam OS is built from some fairly standard components -- the normal filesystem hierarchy, GNU user space, systemd and dbus -- Steam OS has quite a few unique features. It has two distinct user interfaces: by default, it starts with the Steam games launcher, but users can also choose an option called Switch to Desktop, which results in a regular KDE Plasma desktop, with the ability to install anything: a web browser, normal Linux tools, and non-Steam games.

Obviously, though, Steam OS's raison d'etre is to run Steam games, and most of those are Windows games which will never get native Linux versions. Valve's solution is Proton, an open-source tool to run Windows games on Linux. It's formed from a collection of different FOSS packages, notably: [Wine, DXVK, VKD3D-Proton, and GStreamer]. The result is a remarkable degree of compatibility for some of the most demanding Windows apps around [...]. You can view Garcia's 49-page presentation here (PDF).

An anonymous reader shares a report: In December 2022, we published a short PSA, reminding users they could still activate Windows 11 and 10 with valid Windows 7, 8, and 8.1 keys. This practice dates back to 2015 when Microsoft launched Windows 10 with a one-year free upgrade window. Besides letting Windows 7/8 users upgrade for free to Windows 10, Microsoft allowed activating its newest OS using keys from the previous releases.

Upgrade from Windows 7 and 8 to Windows is no longer possible, and it now seems that Microsoft is removing the loophole to prevent users from activating Windows 11 with old Windows license keys. As spotted by Deskmodder, Microsoft published a message on the Device Partner Center, notifying customers that the installation path to obtain free upgrades from Windows 7 and 8 to more recent Windows versions is no longer available. What it means is that you can no longer update from Windows 7/8/8.1 to Windows 10 or 11.

Microsoft is releasing one of its biggest updates to Windows 11 today. It includes access to the new Windows Copilot, AI-powered updates to Paint, Snipping Tool, and Photos, RGB lighting support, a modernized File Explorer, and much more. From a report: Windows Copilot is the big new feature for this Windows 11 update, bringing the same Bing Chat feature straight to the Windows 11 desktop. It appears as a sidebar in Windows 11, allowing you to control settings on a PC, launch apps, or simply answer queries. Microsoft is integrating Copilot into many parts of Windows, too. Copilot will essentially exist as an AI-powered digital assistant, much like Microsoft's vision for Cortana. While Microsoft shut down the Cortana app inside Windows 11 last month, Copilot looks like it's very much Microsoft's big push into AI.

Microsoft is also adding AI-powered features to Paint, Snipping Tool, and Windows 11's Photos app. Microsoft Paint is getting Photoshop-like features, with support for transparency and layers. [...] File Explorer is getting a more modern look with this Windows 11 update. The updated File Explorer UI includes a modern home interface with large file thumbnails and a carousel interface that can surface recent files and favorited ones. These changes make File Explorer blend in better with the overall Windows 11 design.