Google is rolling out a series of significant updates to its search engine, integrating new artificial intelligence capabilities to solve complex tasks. Those include advanced language models, deep search functionality, and AI-powered calling features for local services.
Category: Software
Xbox Insiders can now stream their console games on the Xbox PC app
Microsoft has announced a major enhancement to the Xbox experience on both PCs and consoles. Starting today, members of the PC Gaming Preview who hold an active Xbox Game Pass Ultimate subscription can now stream console games they own. While the list of supported games is limited, it already includes titles that aren't part of the Game Pass catalog. The new feature comes to 28 regions where Xbox Cloud Gaming (Beta) is supported.
Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning is a new Small Language Model from Microsoft
Microsoft has released a new small language model called Phi-4-mini-flash-reasoning, the main benefit of which is to enhance logical reasoning capabilities on devices with limited resources, be they smartphones, peripherals or embedded systems.
Browser Add-ons Widely Used as Distributed Scraping Network for AI Model Training
Security researchers from Secure Annex have identified a growing trend in browser add-on monetization. Developers are embedding a JavaScript library named mellowtel.js into extensions to form a distributed network of user systems for web content scraping. These systems act as proxies and bots that download website content upon receiving instructions from external servers.
Microsoft patched 137 vulnerabilities in July
This month, Microsoft closed 137 vulnerabilities as part of the periodical Patch Tuesday release. None of these vulnerabilities were under active attack at the time of disclosure. However, one zero-day vulnerability in Microsoft SQL Server became publicly known before the patch was released.
Microsoft Authenticator Discontinues Password Management Functionality
Microsoft has announced that the Microsoft Authenticator app will no longer support password storage or autofill capabilities starting this July. Microsoft is quickly moving to passwordless authentication methods.
Microsoft Account Suspension Leads to Loss of 30 Years of Personal and Professional Data
A Reddit user "deus03690" has shared his unfortunate experience of how an unexpected suspension of their Microsoft account resulted in the permanent loss of over 30 years’ worth of personal and professional data. The incident occurred during a routine file migration between storage drives, during which the user temporarily uploaded files - including unique photos, documents, videos, and texts dating back to the 1990s - to OneDrive.
Microsoft Adds Steam Games to Xbox App for Windows
Microsoft starts testing a unified game library in the Xbox app for Windows, which will now display games installed from Steam and Battle.net.
Open Source WSL Has Received Its First 2.6.0 Update under the MIT License
Microsoft has announced the release of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) version 2.6.0. This update is notable for being the first release in which the WSL command-line tools, background processes, and virtual machine services have been made available under the MIT open-source license. Previously, only the Linux kernel and the wslg graphics stack were open-sourced, while the associated utilities remained proprietary.
LibreOffice 25.8 will completely drop support for Windows 7/8/8.1
Developers from The Document Foundation have launched LibreOffice 25.8 Beta 1 for public testing across Linux, macOS, and Windows. They plan to release the final stable version in late August 2025.