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Walmart said it’s joining Microsoft in a bid for social media company TikTok’s U.S. assets, revealing its plans hours after the video company’s chief executive said he would step down.CEO Kevin Mayer, a high-profile former Disney executive, is leaving three months after joining TikTok, in the middle of negotiations to sell the Chinese-owned short-form video app’s U.S. operations to Microsoft Corp. or Oracle Corp.The sale of TikTok is happening as the company is under fire from the Trump administration as potential national security risk due to the vast amount of private data the app is compiling on U.S. consumers.The Trump...

The months of protests and riots in Portland have prompted some businesses in the city to opt to move out completely or relocate outside its central district, according to a report on Monday. Greg Goodman, the co-president of the Downtown Development Group, said in a letter to Mayor Ted Wheeler and members of the Portland City Council that the exodus of companies wasn’t related to the Black Lives Matter movement “but does have most everything to do with the lawlessness you are endorsing downtown.” “The number is like nothing I have seen in 42 years of doing business in downtown,”...

Microsoft’s services will drop support for IE11 in a year Microsoft will end support for Internet Explorer 11 across its Microsoft 365 apps and services next year. In exactly a year, on August 17th, 2021, Internet Explorer 11 will no longer be supported for Microsoft’s online services like Office 365, OneDrive, Outlook, and more. Microsoft is also ending support for Internet Explorer 11 with the Microsoft Teams web app later this year, with support ending on November 30th.While it’s still going to take some time to pry enterprise users of Internet Explorer 11 away, Microsoft is hoping that the new...

Also: Visual Studio Code update, new toys for Kubecon, and 25 years of the Start Button In brief While eyes were on its new phone, Microsoft slipped out a pair of updates to the Insider version of Windows 10.The Beta Channel (formerly known as the Slow Ring) received a round of security updates as well as a UWP authentication fix for the 20H2 release of the operating system (due at some point in the back half of 2020).The Dev Channel, however, received that most rare of gifts in the form of build 20190: an update with some properly in-your-face user...

The annual conference is hosted by Great Wall Club (GWC), a group comprised of executives from Chinese companies such as Tencent and their Silicon Valley counterparts. This collaboration, however, poses a national security threat and runs the risk of intellectual property theft and espionage per the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Tencent, for example, has been characterized by the U.S. State Department as a “tool of the Chinese government” with “no meaningful ability to tell the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ‘no’ if officials decide to ask for their assistance,”and is among the bevy of Chinese companies banned or on track...

The future of TikTok is in the crosshairs as the app faces a September ban from the United States unless its parent company sells it to Microsoft or another U.S. company. But Microsoft’s decades-long ties to Beijing could muddy the waters. The video-sharing app, which is wildly popular among American teens, has come under bipartisan scrutiny over national security and privacy concerns in relation to its ownership. TikTok, which was acquired by Beijing-based ByteDance Technology Co. in 2017, is estimated to have tens of millions of active users in the United States. The crux of the concern is that under...

The original Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union was fought through deploying military assets in strategic locations, manipulating trade, and even sponsoring coups.Today’s New Cold War between the U.S. and China has opened a new front: Social media.For months now, the quickly growing Chinese-owned TikTok social media app has been criticized in the U.S.Security experts have found it sends highly personal information back to Chinese servers for no apparent reason.The Department of Defense and all four branches of the military even banned it from the phones of military personnel. Last week, things escalated even further...

A security expert revealed this week that an exploit commonly used against Windows users who own Microsoft Office can sneak into MacOS systems as well. A former NSA security specialist who addressed the Black Hat security conference this week summarized his research into the new use for a very old exploit. Patrick Wardle explained that the exploit capitalizes on the use of macros in Microsoft Office. Hackers have long used the approach to trick users into granting permission to activate the macros, which in turn surreptitiously launch malicious code. But Wardle noted that attacks against Mac systems using such macros...

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people. That speech has resurfaced the start of the coronavirus pandemic with 25 million new views on YouTube — but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world’s richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system. During his interview with the...

Microsoft said on Sunday they spoke with President Trump about acquiring trendy social app TikTok — and Trump gave its parent company ByteDance 45 days to strike a deal. The time frame agreed to by the president, which was confirmed by two sources to Reuters, aligns with Microsoft’s stated intentions of wrapping up talks with the popular app’s current Beijing-based owner by Sept. 15. “During this process, Microsoft looks forward to continuing dialogue with the United States Government, including with the President,” the company said in a Sunday blog post.

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON (Reuters) - China’s ByteDance has agreed to divest the U.S. operations of TikTok completely in a bid to save a deal with the White House, after President Donald Trump said on Friday he had decided to ban the popular short-video app, two people familiar with the matter said on Saturday. U.S. officials have said TikTok under its Chinese parent poses a national risk because of the personal data it handles. ByteDance’s concession will test whether Trump’s threat to ban TikTok is a negotiating tactic, or whether he is intent on cracking down on a social media app that...

Microsoft is currently in talks buy the U.S. operations of hit video app TikTok, according to The New York Times. The report comes shortly after Bloomberg reported that President Donald Trump plans to order Chinese company ByteDance, which owns TikTok, to sell its stake in the app on Friday. According to pool reports, Trump told reporters, “We’re looking at TikTok, we may be banning TikTok.” Microsoft did not immediately respond to request made by Digital Trends. We will update this story when we hear back. In a statement to Digital Trends, TikTok declined to comment on “rumors or speculation.” “We...

With the rise in false Coronavirus cases, the Tanzanian President John Magufuli growing suspicious of the World Health Organization (WHO), decided to investigate the claims himself. He sent the WHO samples of a goat, a papaya and a quail for testing. After all 3 samples came COVID-19 positive, the President is reported to have kicked out the WHO from the country. UPDATE: Days after Tanzanian move, now Burundi kicks out WHO Coronavirus Team from the country for interference in internal matters. Meanwhile, in yet another African nation Nigeria, Bill Gates has been caught bribing forced Coronavirus program. Just couple of...

The sweeping hack of verified Twitter accounts Wednesday night was one of the largest security lapses in the platform’s history and led to thousands of users being partially locked out for hours. But the social media giant, and its users, may have gotten off easy. Now lawmakers and top officials are mulling how to ensure Twitter is not hacked by groups with more malicious intentions and how to protect other potential cyber targets from the same fate. The conversation has taken on a particular urgency as geopolitical tensions increase during the COVID-19 pandemic with only months left until a presidential...

Microsoft seems to be getting a kick out seeing users struggle to find Windows 10 features these days. After moving the Fresh Start feature in the latest version, 2004, and reducing the number of days Windows 10 Pro, Enterprise, and Education users can manually delay updates, the company is now experimenting with moving key Control Panel features, including System information, to Settings, Windows Latest spotted. It’s a change that some long-time Windows users might not take to easily. If you’re like me and have been using the Control Panel for decades, getting accustomed to this feature will be as arduous...

Hackers used malicious Office 365 apps to gain access to customer accounts, which they later used to orchestrate BEC attacks. Microsoft has obtained a court order this month allowing the company to seize control of six domains that were used in phishing operations against Office 365 customers, including in campaigns that leveraged COVID-19 lures. According to court documents obtained by ZDNet, Microsoft has targeted a phishing group that has been targeting the company's customers since December 2019. The phishers operated by sending emails to companies that hosted email servers and enterprise infrastructure on Microsoft's Office 365 cloud service. The emails...

A Google bombshell last week gave users a great reason to quit Windows 10. Now serious new problems mean millions of Gmail users might want to join them. Gmail’s spam filter is sending possibly perilous messages direct to users’ inboxes Reported by both Windows Latest and MSPowerUser, Gmail users are discovering that Microsoft’s Windows 10 built-in Mail client is deleting their emails and/or sending them to spam automatically.

Microsoft emits a fix for those fearful of Registry tinkering While Microsoft was showing off its new OneDrive toys, the company also slipped out a fix for brave souls running Windows 10 2004 and finding Files On-Demand a little borked.Issues have been rumbling for a few weeks now as users of the new OS began complaining that "OneDrive cannot connect to Windows", rendering the Files On-Demand feature, which pulls data down from the cloudy bit barn when needed, broken.Some found that a Registry tweak would bring the process back to life. Others continued to struggle.Microsoft pointed to devices or apps...

WITHIN the conduct of human endeavors we usually think of Work in the categories of various forms of interpersonal reporting hierarchies, even if sometimes modified into something of a web. You can see these hierarchies when we discuss politics or corporate structures. Yet these paths of influence can often cross nominal boundaries, such as state or national boundaries, or corporate boundaries. Sometimes we can see the boundaries breaking down, with new inter-and-intra-community structures forming. In this flux I see the the GNU Project bleeding into Microsoft. There are a number of empirical signs of the breakdown of boundaries between Free...

'Reimagined' flagships to endure, but that place you used to go to when the Apple Store was too busy is going away Microsoft has a new approach to retail. One, it appears, that does not involve its physical store locations.In a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, the company has announced what it calls "a strategic change in its retail operations".Or, in other words, shutting down its network of physical Microsoft Stores and going digital-only via Microsoft.com and Xbox.The company said it would be taking a pre-tax charge of approximately $450m to do the deed, which will...