Microsoft

Qualcomm’s Snapdragon sponsorship deal with Manchester United will go beyond the front of the jerseys. During select matches this season, Qualcomm can also extend its branding to the rear of Manchester United’s new jerseys. Qualcomm has selected Microsoft’s Copilot Plus logo for the FA Community Shield match tomorrow, its key ally in making Windows on Arm a reality.

CrowdStrike blamed testing software for taking down 8.5 million Windows machines last month, but now a full root cause analysis offers more details. The main issue was a mismatch between the input fields expected by CrowdStrike’s Falcon driver and the ones supplied in a content update. CrowdStrike is now promising to better test updates and is using two independent third-party software security vendors to review its sensor code and release processes.

The newspaper will file an amended complaint by August 12. If the Times wins its suit, adding those works means those two companies are on the hook for a minimum of $7.5 billion in statutory damages alone.

Microsoft is adding Activision’s Crash Bandicoot N. Sane Trilogy to Xbox Game Pass on console, cloud, and PC on August 8th. Mafia: Definitive Edition is also being added to the service on August 13th. Crash Bandicoot is the latest Activision game to arrive on Game Pass, after Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III and Diablo IV.

As we started testing Windows 11 on Arm with new Copilot Plus PCs, we noticed issues with the performance of Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe blocked the x86 software from Snapdragon X Elite laptops before their public launch, but now Windows Central says it’s available under emulation, and is “good enough for a basic video project,” while a planned Arm-native version is still in development.

Multiple Azure services, including Azure DevOps, are down right now. The root cause appears to be a bad firewall configuration, according to sources at Microsoft. “This issue is impacting multiple geographies, mostly in North America and Latin America,” says Microsoft’s official Azure status page. These latest issues come less than a week after a configuration changed caused a similar Azure outage in Europe.

CNBC spotted the update this week in Microsoft’s risk factors with the SEC. These are managed by lawyers to help shield companies from shareholders lawsuits and generally pretty conservative. Still, the change feels like a sign of how OpenAI and its largest investor are drifting apart.

Relatedly, I couldn’t help but notice the number of times Microsoft execs mentioned OpenAI during their earnings call this week: zero.

Xbox president Sarah Bond revealed earlier this year that a new Xbox mobile store would be launching in July. Xbox fan Klobrille discovered an Xbox mobile store webpage recently, which suggests Xbox Insiders will get access first. “Testing has begun for our browser-based mobile store,” says Kari Perez, head of Xbox communications in a statement to The Verge. “Our work is progressing well and we will have more to share in the future.”

Update: Article updated with comment from Microsoft.

“From Llama 3.1, to GPT-4o and GPT-4o mini, to Phi 3 or Mistral Large 2, you can access each model via a built-in playground that lets you test different prompts and model parameters, for free, right in GitHub,” according to GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke. Seems kind of like Microsoft’s take on Hugging Face.

I’m hearing that Obsidian is about to announce an Avowed delay. The team had been targeting a November release, but with Xbox exclusive S.T.A.L.K.E.R. 2 delayed to November, things are getting stacked for Xbox games in the all-important holiday season. More on the Avowed delay and Xbox employees being back under one roof in this week’s issue of Notepad.

Microsoft employees are getting an extra bonus that will work out to between 10-25 percent of the value of their regular annual bonus, according to an internal memo seen by The Verge. The announcement comes at the end of Microsoft’s fiscal year, as the company’s cloud and AI efforts have continued to improve its stock price. The bonus will also help with employee retention in a competitive AI market.

The company claims its triple laser PX3-PRO is the world’s first UST projector to be “Designed for Xbox.” What that means isn’t entirely clear given the Xbox can’t take advantage of the projector’s 240Hz maximum refresh rate.

More useful may be the $3,499.99 PX3-PRO’s ability to automatically optimize its settings for gaming when it detects a console powering up.

Delta was hit particularly badly by the CrowdStrike outage that impacted millions of Windows-based machines earlier this month. Now, CNBC reports that Delta has hired an attorney to seek damages from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft after it had to cancel nearly 7,000 flights due to the IT outage. The outage may have cost Delta up to $500 million.

Along with CrowdStrike’s post incident review, this has Microsoft telemetry data and some explanations (performance, tamper resistance) for the kernel driver architecture that crashed millions of Windows systems.

Microsoft has called for locking down that access, and this post again brings up alternate options:

...security vendors can use minimal sensors that run in kernel mode for data collection and enforcement limiting exposure to availability issues. The remainder of the key product functionality includes managing updates, parsing content, and other operations can occur isolated within user mode where recoverability is possible.

Believe it or not, there’s another blue screen that’s popping up on some Windows machines. Microsoft says some Windows 11 devices will see a blue BitLocker recovery screen at boot after installing the July 2024 Windows security update. The issue isn’t widespread, but those impacted will have to enter a recovery key to get a PC to boot properly. A fix is on the way.

Microsoft made Secure Boot a requirement for Windows 11, and has been pushing to use the technology to secure against BIOS rootkits for years. Now, researchers have found that Secure Boot has been compromised on more than 200 device models from Acer, Dell, Gigabyte, Intel, and more. Ars Technica reports that an important cryptographic key was published on GitHub in 2022, by “someone working for multiple US-based device manufacturers.”

“However, we understand our work is not yet complete, and we remain committed to restoring every impacted system.,” CEO George Kurtz continued in his post on LinkedIn.

Yesterday, CrowdStrike released a detailed report on the software update that crashed 8.5 million Windows machines, along with some of the changes it plans to avoid similar issues in the future.