Windows Secure Time Seeding resets clocks months or years off the correct time. //

Microsoft’s repeated refusal to engage with customers experiencing these problems means that for the foreseeable future, Windows will by default continue to automatically reset system clocks based on values that remote third parties include in SSL handshakes. Further, it means that it will be incumbent on individual admins to manually turn off STS when it causes problems.

Microsoft has never laid out in so many words why it feels it needs to move away from Calibri, though today's announcement implies that Aptos was made with high-resolution, high-density displays in mind. Calibri replaced Times New Roman as the suite's default font in Office 2007, at a time before "Retina" displays and when 1024×768 and 1280×800 screens were still the norm—a ClearType font, Calibri itself was a response to the shift from CRT to LCD screens.

Aptos was created by Steve Matteson, who is also responsible for Windows 3.1's original TrueType fonts (including Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New) as well as Segoe, which has been Windows' default system font since Vista and is also used for Microsoft's current logo. Given Matteson's history with Microsoft, choosing Aptos over the others feels like the safest possible choice.

The main flavor of Aptos is a sans-serif font—described by Matteson as "Helvetica" but with "a bit of a human touch" that makes it "more approachable and less institutional." But like Apple's San Fransisco typeface, Aptos comes in many different styles, including condensed, monospaced, and serifed versions. //

The switch to Aptos begins today for Microsoft 365 subscribers; for people who bought the standalone perpetually licensed Office 2021, Calibri will presumably remain the default. Calibri will remain an option pinned to the top of the former Office apps' font selection menu, along with Times New Roman and Arial.

As for the options that lost the default typeface contest—Tenorite, Skeena, Seaford, and Grandview—they'll all continue to be available in Microsoft's apps as non-default options. Everyone's a winner.

Microsoft Excel's undo / redo feature behaves unlike any other program I know. The undo stack seems to be global across all open files, so that undoing sometimes switches to another file and undoes something you didn't want to undo. And if an edit you want to undo was before an edit in another file, you have no choice but to undo the other file.

I am not the first to complain about this - see "Excel's undo madness", about halfway down.

Besides "edit only one file at a time", is there a way to make Excel's Undo apply to the current file only?

I'm using Excel 2003 if it makes a difference. //

A: Open Excel itself in a new instance

For Excel's main shortcut you could simply add a /x flag after the address in the shortcut's Target field:

"C:\Program Files\...\EXCEL.EXE" /x

It also works for pinned start menu shortcuts in Windows 10 (You need to access the shortcut file in Start Menu\Programs directory)

Open Excel documents in a new instance

This solution works but makes the documents' icon changed which some may find it unpleasant.

To run .xls, .xlsx, .xlsm, etc documents directly in a new instance, you could first create a .bat file with the following content:

@ECHO off
start "" "C:\Program Files...\EXCEL.EXE" /x %1

Then you could simply associate each file format to your .bat file with Always use... checked. [Use a shortcut .lnk to the .bat file and associate the files with the .lnk with correct icon.]

Keep the ability to open files in the current instance
It's still necessary to open files in the current instance if you want to access the other files' content through formulas or VBA. In these cases, you could first open one file and then drag the other file(s) on the opened Excel window.

You could also use File > Open through the opened file. //

MS does this for Excel only due to cross-workbook references. The only way they can maintain integrity of formula relationships in that context is to maintain a single undo history. Further, to make it optional is extremely complicated: how does a user choose whether to have a single history or multiple histories? When would a user choose that? They could make it automatic basing on formula dependencies, but that can easily become impossible to manage logically and performance wise. Remember, they need to deliver a product that WORKS. –
Mr. TA Apr 19, 2016 at 15:47

@Mr.TA: Libre/Apache Office has links between files/sheets and they do undo on a per file/sheet level... just saying (that it is doable, totally doable, if you're not a lazy x -- which apparently seems to be the case with MS developers). –
Erk Feb 7, 2017 at 16:13

I can create cross-document links in Word, while also undoing in a single document. Clearly it can be done. Yes, the link may get broken, but that's my fault. I would greatly prefer that behaviour over this window-jumping undo-hell. –
JMD Jan 19, 2018 at 0:49

But the good news is that Microsoft appears to be backing away from GDI, and its “Xandr” ad system will no longer be using the GDI blacklist to cut off sites.

The Microsoft-owned Xandr, a major advertising company, previously abided by a secret blacklist of conservative news compiled by the Global Disinformation Index, a British organization with two affiliated U.S. nonprofit groups. Now, as Microsoft appears to be taking steps to distance itself from GDI , the company has, for the time being, deleted flags such as “false/misleading” and “reprehensible/offensive” for right-leaning websites, data show.

“I just checked in Xandr’s platform again and can confirm that all rejection flags have been removed from domains,” a senior executive in the ad industry, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly, told the Washington Examiner.

Xandr had labeled 39 conservative domains as, overwhelmingly, “false/misleading,” the Washington Examiner reported on Friday. Townhall, a website under a Christian publisher called Salem Media Group, was flagged as “reprehensible/offensive.”

What are the Outlook.com email limits?
Limits for non-subscribers vary on usage history. The limits for Microsoft 365 subscribers are:

• Daily recipients: 5,000
• Maximum recipients per message: 500
• Daily non-relationship recipients: 1,000

Notes: 

• A “non-relationship recipient” is someone you've never sent email to before.

A long time back, most of the software used to ship with .hlp (WinHelp help format) help files. Since Windows Vista, the legacy .hlp format has been deprecated. To view 32-bit Help files with the .hlp file extension in Windows Vista (and higher — through Windows 8.1), you will need to download and install WinHlp32.exe (KB917607 package) from the Microsoft Download Center.However, this update isn’t available for Windows 10. This article tells you how to restore the missing WinHelp (.hlp) viewer in Windows 10.

As the screenshots below show, Microsoft considers the Intel Pentium 4 661 a supported processor. Intel released the Pentium 4 661 in early 2006, with a solitary core to its name. Apparently, Microsoft forgot to add any Intel Family 15 (Netburst) SKUs in its unsupported processors list for Windows 11.

Hence, the PC Health Check tool sees that the Pentium 4 661 has a 3.6 GHz boost clock, which satisfies one of Windows 11's requirements. Curiously, the tool states that the Pentium 4 661 has two or more cores, even though it lists it as having one.

@Carlos_SM1995 has even got Windows 11 (Build 22000.258) running on a Pentium 4 661. Supposedly, Windows Update still works too, highlighting the ridiculousness of Microsoft's overtures regarding Windows 11 compatibility.

As a benefit of your Microsoft 365 Family or Microsoft 365 Personal subscription, you can create a personalized email address that's associated with your Outlook.com mailbox. For example, yourname@example.com. 

Getting started

1. Sign in to your  premium feature settings in Outlook.com

2. Under Personalized email address, select Get Started.

Tip: If you have a Microsoft 365 Family subscription, people you've shared the subscription with can also set up a personalized email address with your connected domain. After you've set up your domain, people you've shared with will see an option to add a personalized email address in the premium features section of Outlook settings.

Disk2vhd is a utility that creates VHD (Virtual Hard Disk - Microsoft's Virtual Machine disk format) versions of physical disks for use in Microsoft Virtual PC or Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs). The difference between Disk2vhd and other physical-to-virtual tools is that you can run Disk2vhd on a system that’s online. Disk2vhd uses Windows' Volume Snapshot capability, introduced in Windows XP, to create consistent point-in-time snapshots of the volumes you want to include in a conversion. You can even have Disk2vhd create the VHDs on local volumes, even ones being converted (though performance is better when the VHD is on a disk different than ones being converted).

It will create one VHD for each disk on which selected volumes reside. It preserves the partitioning information of the disk, but only copies the data contents for volumes on the disk that are selected. This enables you to capture just system volumes and exclude data volumes, for example.

Virtual PC supports a maximum virtual disk size of 127GB. If you create a VHD from a larger disk it will not be accessible from a Virtual PC VM. ///

Hyper-V does not have the 127GB limitation (?)

Disk2VHD is a practical free tool by Sysinternals, since 2006 a subsidiary of Microsoft Corporation. Sysinternals is well known of their wide range of free tools to manage, troubleshoot and diagnose Windows systems and applications. As the name already tells Disk2VHD is a tool to create a Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) file of an existing Windows system. This VHDfile can then be used to create a virtual machine in Windows Virtual PC (Windows 7) and Hyper-V (Windows 8 and later).

In this tutorial we will download and install Disk2VHD on an existing Windows 10 computer, use it to create a VHD of the current Windows 10 installation on that computer and use the resulting VHD to create a virtual machine on Windows 10 Hyper-V. The virtual machine will be an exact copy of the original Windows installation apart of some hardware and drivers, Hyper-V replacing some hardware with its own virtual devices.

The virtual machine will be fully functional and contain all software, user profiles and settings which were installed and present on the real physical computer and Windows when the VHD creation process was started.

If Microsoft has the most to win, it also has the most to lose – Salesforce's Slack love is as a CRM channel, where it will end up getting the metrics and aggregated channels anyway. Google and Amazon have the reach and the infrastructure to sell conferencing services on the open market, with open access points. And they are creatures built from open standards, unlike Microsoft. Google won mobile by being open. If it showed any sign of understanding conferencing, that'd be nice.

Pinning your hopes on an uneasy alliance getting on a war footing before a focused opponent has already won is not how any sane person would make a better world. But the evidence for hope is there. Just ask the veterans of the last war, and listen when they say – there is a better way. ®

Microsoft Defender Application Guard protects your networks and data from malicious applications running in your web browser, but you must install and activate it first. //

Activation for TPM 2.0 and HVCI were explained before, but now we will look at the activation procedures for Microsoft Defender Application Guard in Windows 10. MDAG uses virtualization-based technology to help safeguard your systems from malicious and criminal websites that you visit with your enabled web browsers like Edge, Chrome and Firefox. //

MDAG is included with Windows 10 Professional, Enterprise and Educational versions by default. MDAG is part of Windows Features for those versions, so we will have to call up the Control Panel. //

The easiest way to get to the screen we need is to type "windows features" into the search box on your Windows 10 desktop. Be sure to select the Turn Windows Features On or Off item from the search results. //

Scroll down the list of features until you see Microsoft Defender Application Guard. Place a check in the checkbox for that item and click the OK button. The MDAG application will install and then ask you to reboot to activate. //

Now that MDAG is installed and activated, it is time to check its settings. Click or tap the Start Menu button and select Settings (gear icon). On the Settings page, select Update & Security and then select the Windows Security item from the left-hand navigation bar, //

From the right windowpane, click the App & Browser Control //

The security settings under MDAG are stricter than many of us are used to, so you may find yourself wanting to make some tweaks. Click the Change Application Guard settings link on this page to see a list of security features that you may want to turn on or off depending on your activity.

Image Composite Editor (ICE) is an advanced panoramic image stitcher created by the Microsoft Research Interactive Visual Media Group. Given a set of overlapping photographs of a scene shot from a single camera location, the app creates a high-resolution panorama that seamlessly combines the original images. ICE can also create a panorama from a panning video, including stop-motion action overlaid on the background. Finished panoramas can be shared with friends and viewed in 3D by uploading them to the Photosynth web site. Panoramas can also be saved in a wide variety of image formats, including JPEG, TIFF, and Photoshop’s PSD/PSB format, as well as the multiresolution tiled format used by HD View and Deep Zoom.

The Microsoft co-founder’s wild lifestyle was well known among his inner circle — but newspapers like the New York Times hid the unflattering reports to continue getting “spoon-fed stories,” James Wallace wrote in the 1997 biography, “Overdrive: Bill Gates and the Race to Control Cyberspace.”

O’Keefe knew Gates had been acquiring farmland for years, mostly through various Cascade subsidiaries. The mogul’s holdings include large tracts in Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, California, and about a dozen other states. With the Washington state acreage and other recent additions to his portfolio, O’Keefe calculated, Gates now owns at least 242,000 acres of American farmland.

“Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, has an alter ego,” O’Keefe wrote: “Farmer Bill, the guy who owns more farmland than anyone else in America.” //

Gates is also quietly funding technology for digital vaccine passports. //

ID2020 is also active in more developed countries such as the US and has partnered with City of Austin, Texas, to provide a blockchain-enabled digital ID platform for the homeless population, as well as to refugees receiving medical treatment from the International Rescue Committee in Thailand.

Now with the sudden onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, this seems to have presented an opportunity to fast track global health into a new era of digital healthcare.

What could go wrong? Well, personal privacy (there’s that word again!), fraud, mass surveillance, and manipulation of information, among other things. But this does not seem to matter to Gates and his wicked schemes for you and your life. //

Finally, Gates remains a proponent of lockdowns, despite much evidence to the contrary that they did not work then, and they will not work now. As states in the U.S. were reopening, he sat down with every legacy media outlet he could to sound the alarm on the dangers of not following the science. Gates was as dogmatic as Dr. Anthony Fauci in his insistence; the problem is, at least Fauci has an M.D. behind his name. Gates does not. He has no medical experience whatsoever. Gates cannot even create software that doesn’t catch viruses. //

If you thought Bill Gates was dangerous while buffeted by a wife (who was equally dangerous, frankly), imagine how much more dangerous he’ll become now that he can truly focus on his dreams of global domination.

As the months and years go by, Microsoft keeps steadily moving away from its old model of PC operating systems, which started with buying Seattle Computing Products' 86-DOS, aka Quick and Dirty DOS in July 1981 and renaming it MS-DOS 1.10, toward Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS). //

Back in the ‘80s, compute power lay on mainframes and Unix-powered mini-computers. PCs were a revolution. But in the 2020s, we're going back to a model where all the real computing happens on the cloud, and your device — even if it’s a $1,399 top-of-the-line iPhone 12 Pro Max — is just a glorified VT-102 dumb terminal.

Update 9/25/20 12:20pm PT: We have added more details to the text below about new information that has surfaced, including that multiple operating systems are impacted and that conspiracy theory material is also embedded in the torrented copies of the leak.

Update #2: A Microsoft representative has now responded to our request for comment, merely stating: “We are investigating the matter.”

Original Article:

Reports have emerged today that the Windows XP source code has been leaked to 4chan, with the leaked code then being posted to a torrent and the Mega file sharing service. Reports have also emerged that independent researchers have since begun analyzing the data, with initial indications that the leak is legitimate. However, there hasn't been an official confirmation from Microsoft as to whether or not the leak contains valid code.

The 42.9 GB leak also reportedly has newly-leaked code for Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows 2000 mixed in with other various source code from previous leaks. It still remains to be seen if the leak includes the entire source code for Windows XP, or just a subset.

Office 365 (Thunderbird) - Configure Modern Authentication

This document describes how to configure modern, 2 factor authentication with new ThunderBird versions

Note: These instructions assume you are running a version of Thunderbird 77.0b1 or later which supports OAuth2 modern authentication.

Today, we are announcing that on October 13th, 2020 we will stop supporting and retire Basic Authentication for Exchange Active Sync (EAS), Post Office Protocol (POP), Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP), and Remote PowerShell (RPS) in Exchange Online. This means that new or existing applications using one or more of these API’s/protocols will not be able to use Basic Authentication when connecting to Office 365 mailboxes or endpoints and will need to update how they authenticate. //

we are making significant investments to our service that include OAuth 2.0 support for POP, IMAP, and background application support for Remote PowerShell MFA module. We will be sharing more information on these new features over the coming months. For more information on OAuth 2.0 and details on how to make the transition, please refer to the following articles:

Microsoft identify platform (v2.0) overview
Getting started with OAuth2 for Microsoft Graph

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/develop/v2-overview

https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/concepts/auth_overview

Microsoft open-sources a key piece of software history, one that would help the company rule personal computers. //

Having re-open-sourced MS-DOS on GitHub in 2018, Microsoft has now released the source code for GW-BASIC, Microsoft's 1983 BASIC interpreter. //

The sources for Microsoft GW-BASIC are the assembly language for the Intel-designed 8088 microprocessor from February 10, 1983. Microsoft has released the GW-BASIC source code because having open-sourced MS-DOS people wanted it to do the same with Microsoft BASIC.

While becoming open-sourced, Microsoft has posted it on GitHub as an archive and therefore is not accepting any request to modify the source. It's there for historical reference and educational purposes. Also, the source doesn't contain the tools to generate executable binaries.