In the News

Microsoft’s report on cybersecurity threats around the world, revealed that about 18 percent of computers had encountered a virus or malware last year. This was down from 19 percent the previous year. But the rate of infections was far lower, says the report. Tim Rains, Director of Security, Microsoft, said, “Everyone’s paying attention to cybersecurity, and everyone understands the sense of urgency. There’s a recognition in the industry that having services that can be trusted and have security built into them is table stakes.”

Alteryx Inc., the leader in self-service data analytics, announced further product integration with Microsoft, to empower data analysts. Tiffany Wissner, Senior Director, Data Platform Marketing, Microsoft, said, “We have seen a growing number of analysts using in-database blending to speed up their time to insight. Now, more users can take advantage of this time to insight by using Alteryx to perform in-database blending in the Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse service. Combining the powers of Alteryx and Microsoft Azure SQL Data Warehouse empowers analysts with even more scalability and performance in the cloud.”

HYPE Foundation, providing people with entrepreneurship mindset and start-up best practices, announced that it has joined hands with Microsoft and Saucony, to launch the first global platform in tech innovation for sports. The platform will include a global youth startups competition that will take place alongside the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The goal of this project is to create the world’s first wide-scale platform for groundbreaking innovation in sports, focusing on wearable accessories, broadcasting tech, apps for athletes, coaches and fans.

Microsoft is offering developers guidance on dealing with its .Net Framework programming model and compatibility issues around it. Specifically, the company advises developers to target newer versions of .Net Framework, but they shouldn’t retarget existing projects to the latest update unless absolutely necessary. Microsoft recently discontinued some versions of .Net framework. But targeting these frameworks while running on a new framework will continue to be supported as per the newer framework’s support policy. Applications that ran on .Net 4.0, for example, may need to run on version 4.6 after an upgrade to the framework.

Microsoft has reminded that the free promotion for Windows 10 upgrades is finishing soon. The software maker released Windows 10 as a free upgrade for Windows 7 and 8.1 on July 29th in 2015, and gave everyone a year to upgrade free of cost. Now the company has decided to stop the free updates from July 29, after which the full version will cost $ 119 (Rs 7923) or would be free on a new machine.

Microsoft has joined Ford in contributing to a $253 million investment round in Pivotal, a San Francisco cloud-computing company. It is unclear how much Microsoft paid into the round, which also included contributions from existing Pivotal Investors General Electric, EMC and its VMWare subsidiary. Pivotal develops a Web-based software platform on which other companies can build software tools.

According to Microsoft, Pakistan, Indonesia, the Palestinian territories, Bangladesh, and Nepal attract the highest rates of attempted malware attacks. Countries that attracted the fewest include Japan, Finland, Norway and Sweden, Microsoft said in a new study, based on sensors in systems running Microsoft anti-malware software. Microsoft Manager Alex Weinert, said, “We look at north of 10 million attacks on identities every day.” Tim Rains, Director of Security, Microsoft revealed, that on an average, 240 days elapse between a security breach in a computer system and detection of that breach.

The beta for Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is now available for all Windows 10 players. It will be available through the Windows Store with an 18.8 GB download. The beta will run throughout the summer and will have updates like wheel support. Forza Motorsport 6: Apex is a free to play version of the popular Xbox One racing simulator. It features 63 cars and six tracks and is touted as a “lighter” version of the original game.

Nuspay, a technology leader in global digital currency, announced that it has selected Microsoft Azure for its Next-Gen Digital Currency Platform. Microsoft delivers more than 200 cloud services, including Bing, MSN, Outlook.com, Office 365, OneDrive, Skype, Xbox Live and the Microsoft Azure platform. These services are hosted in Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure composed of more than 100 globally distributed datacenters, edge computing nodes, and service operations centers.

Microsoft provided the hardware specifications for its augmented reality headset, the HoloLens. The HoloLens is made of Microsoft Windows 10.0.11802.1033 (32-bit) OS, Intel Atom 1.04 GHz 64-bit capable CPU, HoloLens Graphics, 8086h (Intel) GPU, 114MB dedicated video memory, 980MB shared system memory, 2GB RAM, 64GB storage, 900MB app memory usage limit, 16.5Wh battery, 2.4-megapixel photo camera, 1.1-megapixel video camera at 30fps.