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While Apple is currently re-closing stores due to COVID-19 outbreaks, Microsoft today announced that it is closing its retail stores for good. Microsoft retail locations shut down in March as the coronavirus pandemic hit, and it seems that the downtime has given Microsoft management time to reflect on their plans. In a company statement, Microsoft today announced a “strategic shift” in retail operations, which means they are shifting to all-online sales and support. The Microsoft retail stores will not reopen, and the closures will cost Microsoft about $450 million in expenses. Microsoft will keep a smaller retail presence in the...

I'm concerned about an Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet that started showing ads on the 'lock' page without warning about 5 days ago. Amazon will 'unlock' your Amazon device from the obtrusive ads for $15. My investigation determined that Amazon claims that the tablet was sold at a discount in order to add ads, and that's why they are charging $15 to remove the ads. Well, odds are that Amazon turned the ads on last week when my device started showing ads after a software update. What is really unsettling is that this device has no access to the battery...

Microsoft announced Thursday that it will not sell its facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until a federal law exists that regulates its use. "We will not sell facial-recognition technology to police departments in the United States until we have a national law in place, grounded in human rights, that will govern this technology," Microsoft President Brad Smith said. Smith said Microsoft has not sold its facial-recognition technology to police departments. And the company has backed legislation in California that would allow police use of the technology with some restrictions.The company plans to put in place “review...

LinkedIn's CEO has apologized to staff after anonymous employees made "appalling comments" about racism and diversity during a companywide meeting. "We are not and will not be a company or platform where racism or hateful speech is allowed," Ryan Roslansky wrote in an email to staff that was also posted on LinkedIn. Roslansky took over as CEO of the professional networking company this week. The company, which is owned by Microsoft Corp., convened a virtual town hall over video Wednesday. Roslansky said more than 9,000 of the company's 16,000 global employees joined to discuss racial bias following the death of...

Washington has purchased nearly a third of the initial one billion doses of AstraZeneca’s experimental coronavirus vaccine. The U.S. Department of Health has agreed to provide up to US$1.2 billion to fast-track AstraZeneca’s vaccine development while securing 300 million doses for the entire US reports MDLinx. The vaccine is being developed from a laboratory at Oxford University. “This contract with AstraZeneca is a major milestone in Operation Warp Speed’s work toward a safe, effective, widely available vaccine by 2021,” U.S. Health Secretary Alex Azar said. AstraZeneca is collaborating with Microsoft, to launch an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘Factory for Health’. One...

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has committed millions of dollars to research treatments and vaccines for COVID-19 as the pandemic continues to spread across the globe. Those endeavors are now fueling a lot of conspiracy theories. Of course even Bill Gates made some strange comments that fueled those conspiracy theories. Back in March he said, the country needs to go much further with a longer, coordinate shutdown to effectively turn back the spread of the disease. “We’re entering to a tough period that if we do it right we’ll only have to do it once, for six to 10...

American big tech companies, including Google, Amazon, and Microsoft, are supporting Chinese surveillance firms that have been blacklisted by the United States over human rights violations, according to a new report. Top10VPN, a site that reviews virtual private networks (VPNs) and researches digital rights and security issues, found in a May 21 report that more than a dozen U.S. tech firms provide “essential web services” required to power the websites of blacklisted Chinese companies. Last October, the commerce department put 28 Chinese public security bureaus and companies—including some of China’s top artificial intelligence (AI) startups and video surveillance company Hikvision—on...

Doctors in Northern California say they have seen more deaths from suicide than they’ve seen from the coronavirus during the pandemic. “The numbers are unprecedented,” Dr. Mike deBoisblanc of John Muir Medical Center in Walnut Creek, California, told ABC 7 News about the increase of suicide deaths adding that he’s seen a “year’s worth of suicides” in the last four weeks alone.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, he is being portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has pledged millions of dollars to companies developing potential novel coronavirus vaccines. In an interview on April 9 on CNBC, Gates spoke theoretically about how many people might experience side effects from...

Tell-all with president Brad Smith reveals Obama warned tech giants that a privacy reckoning was coming Microsoft president Brad Smith (pictured) has admitted that the Windows giant was "on the wrong side of history" when it came to open source.While nowadays the born-again company seems unable to resist the embrace (if that's the right word) of the open-source world, it was not always so.Former CEO Steve Ballmer memorably declared that "Linux is a cancer" back in the day. Goodness, how times have changed in Redmond."Microsoft," said Smith during a chat hosted by MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL),...

Thunderbolt vulnerabilities can let attacker with physical access steal data from memory and encrypted drives. A Dutch researcher has detailed nine attack scenarios that work against all computers with Thunderbolt shipped since 2011 and which allow an attacker with physical access to quickly steal data from encrypted drives and memory. Researcher Björn Ruytenberg detailed the so-called Thunderspy attacks in a report published on Sunday, warning that the attacks work even when users follow security best practice, such as locking an unattended computer, setting up Secure Boot, using strong BIOS and operating system account passwords, and enabling full disk encryption. Microsoft...

My computer was running like a tired old man. This Dell laptop is my surfing computer with nothing involving money or business. Windows 10 by default installs Defender firewall in real-time mode and I finally decided to get rid of it to see if the computer would act like a young person again.

Nice to see he is universally hated

With each passing day, it becomes clearer and plainer to those of us who are bible believers that we are living in a very unique time period. So unique, in fact, that we just might be witnessing the kingdom of Antichrist and the Mark of the Beast system being assembled before our very eyes. Please note that I use the word ‘might’ out of an overabundance of caution when writing articles like these, but when I am alone with my thoughts I am completely convinced that is exactly where we are. 100%. The wise shall understand. Ever hear of Luciferase?...

Microsoft beat on both top and bottom lines on revenue and earnings per share in its third quarter earnings report. The company noted that it saw a minimum net impact on total company revenue amid the coronavirus outbreak as cloud usage and demand increased. Yahoo Finance’s Myles Udland breaks down Microsoft’s earnings report. Video Transcript JEN ROGERS: Let's head to Seana Smith. She's got the breaking news on Microsoft's earnings. Seana. SEANA SMITH: Hey there, Jen. So it looks like Microsoft beat on both the top and bottom lines here for their fiscal third quarter-- coming in revenue at $35.02...

The liberal media has gone to bat for fellow liberal and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates against “conspiracy” theories regarding the coronavirus that started in Wuhan, China. But recent comments from Gates on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS shilling for the Chinese government may have just made that mission to insulate the billionaire a bit harder. In his questioning of Gates, CNN Host Fareed Zakaria said: “You've been making this case for international cooperation very powerfully and in my mind persuasively. There is right now in Washington a very different mood, which is to say far from cooperating with the second largest...

Human body activity associated with a task provided to a user may be used in a mining process of a cryptocurrency system. A server may provide a task to a device of a user which is communicatively coupled to the server. A sensor communicatively coupled to or comprised in the device of the user may sense body activity of the user. Body activity data may be generated based on the sensed body activity of the user. The cryptocurrency system communicatively coupled to the device of the user may verify if the body activity data satisfies one or more conditions set...

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has been in the news a lot lately for having warned how bad the COVID-19 pandemic would get. In April 2018, he said, “there is a significant probability of a large and lethal, modern-day pandemic occurring in our lifetimes.” He cautioned, “even in the U.S., our response to a pandemic or widespread bioterror attack would be insufficient.” He suggested it might be an unknown pathogen, like SARS or MERS, that “is capable of killing millions of people, bringing economies to a standstill, and casting nations into chaos.” In January, the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security,...

Microsoft founder Bill Gates said it is not the right time to question China's response to the onset of the coronavirus. China has been accused of trying to cover up and spread misinformation about its COVID-19 virus outbreak in a way that escalated the global pandemic. When asked to "respond to the charge" that China covered up the virus during a Sunday interview on CNN, Gates argued that it is not time to be questioning the country. "China did a lot of things right at the beginning, like any country where a virus first shows up," he said. "They can...

... The April 14 Patch Tuesday updates included fixes for a total of 133 vulnerabilities, including seven critical security flaws in Windows 10. I have always said that users need to take the fixing of security vulnerabilities very seriously indeed. When new research suggests that the average Windows 10 PC has no less than 14 weaponized vulnerabilities, that is ones with known exploits in case you were wondering, that seriousness is reinforced... ...First things first, given the sheer number of Windows 10 users out there, the number of people complaining of these issues, in the hundreds, is relatively small. This...