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For half a year, the website of printer company Procolored served software downloads that contained malware, cybersecurity firm GData reports. After being tipped off by a tech writer that the USB drive containing the device’s software was infected with malware, GData analyzed the software downloads available through the company’s website, only to discover that they were infected as well. The tech writer, Cameron Coward, had notified the printer firm of the issue, only to be told that the malware detection was likely a false positive and that there was nothing wrong with the flash drive. GData, however, discovered that 39…

President Donald Trump is expected to sign the Take It Down Act today, a bipartisan law that enacts stricter penalties for distributing non-consensual explicit images, including deepfakes and revenge porn.  The bill criminalizes the publication of such images, whether they’re authentic or AI-generated. Whoever publishes the photos or videos can face criminal penalties, including fines, imprisonment, and restitution.  Under the new law, social media companies and online platforms must remove such material within 48 hours of notice from the victim. The platforms also have to take steps to delete duplicate content.  Many states have already banned sexually explicit deepfakes and…

Microsoft wants to make it easier for developers to build AI-powered apps on Windows devices. On Monday during its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft announced Windows AI Foundry, a rebranding and expansion of the Windows Copilot Runtime service the company launched last May. Microsoft describes Windows AI Foundry as a “unified platform for local AI development” — a way to fine-tune, optimize, and deploy the AI models underpinning Windows apps. Microsoft increasingly sees AI, whether running locally or in the cloud, as a major profit driver, despite the high costs associated with developing tentpole models. In January, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said…

Microsoft on Monday became one of the first hyperscalers to provide managed access to Grok, the AI model developed by billionaire Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI. Available through Microsoft’s Azure AI Foundry platform, Grok — specifically Grok 3 and Grok 3 mini — will “have all the service-level agreements Azure customers expect from any Microsoft product,” says Microsoft. They’ll also be billed directly by Microsoft, as is the case with the other models hosted in Azure AI Foundry. When Musk announced Grok several years ago, he pitched the AI model as edgy, unfiltered, and anti-“woke” — in general, willing to answer…

GitHub and Microsoft, GitHub’s corporate parent, are joining the steering committee for MCP, Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to the systems where data resides. The announcement, which was made at Microsoft’s Build 2025 conference on Monday, comes as MCP gains steam in the AI industry. Earlier this year, both OpenAI and Google said they would support MCP in their respective AI products. MCP lets models draw data from sources like business tools and software to complete tasks, as well as from content repositories and app development environments. The protocol enables developers to build two-way connections between data sources and…

At its Build 2025 conference, Microsoft open sourced a number of apps and tools, including a new command-line text editor for Windows called Edit. Open source software may not earn the company direct revenue, but it can serve as a form of market research — and a funnel to paid applications and services. By contributing to the open source community, Microsoft gains valuable knowledge and product suggestions, as well as ideas for future directions. Edit, which will be installed by default on Windows via the Windows Insider Program beginning this summer, will allow developers to edit files directly in the…

Microsoft is launching new APIs for Edge, its web browser, to let developers incorporate AI functionality into web apps using models built into Edge. Unveiled at Build 2025, the AI APIs mirror some of the functionality in Google Chrome, which also offers “built-in AI” that developers can tap to power their web applications. Microsoft’s move suggests that it’s keen to offer a competitor — one that might sway devs to its side. Edge’s new APIs give websites and Edge browser extensions access to Phi 4 mini, an AI model that Microsoft released in late February. Around 3.8 billion parameters in size,…

As part of an effort to make building AI-powered chatbots on the web simpler, Microsoft is launching an open project called NLWeb. Announced at Build 2025, NLWeb lets websites provide a “conversational interface” — i.e. a text field and a submission button — for their users with a few lines of code, the AI model of their choice, and their own data. A retailer could use NLWeb to create a chatbot that helps users choose clothing for specific trips, for example, while a cooking site could use it to build a bot that suggests dishes to pair with a recipe.…

As part of an effort to make building AI-powered chatbots on the web simpler, Microsoft is launching an open project called NLWeb. Announced at Build 2025, NLWeb lets websites provide a “conversational interface” — i.e. a text field and a submission button — for their users with a few lines of code, the AI model of their choice, and their own data. A retailer could use NLWeb to create a chatbot that helps users choose clothing for specific trips, for example, while a cooking site could use it to build a bot that suggests dishes to pair with a recipe.…

Can AI speed up aspects of the scientific process? Microsoft appears to think so. At the company’s Build 2025 conference on Monday, Microsoft announced Microsoft Discovery, a platform that taps agentic AI to “transform the [scientific] discovery process,” according to a press release provided to TechCrunch. Microsoft Discovery is “extensible,” Microsoft says, and can handle certain science-related workloads “end-to-end.” “Microsoft Discovery is an enterprise agentic platform that helps accelerate research and discovery by transforming the entire discovery process with agentic AI — from scientific knowledge reasoning to hypothesis formulation, candidate generation, and simulation and analysis,” explains Microsoft in its release.…