Microsoft
Psychonauts Is 20 Years Old, So Let’s Remember An All-Time Classic
One of the stranger moments of my career was reviewing a game, giving it a four-page review and a well-deserved score of 89 percent in the then-massively-selling UK PC Gamer magazine, and then the game not coming out for another eight months. That was just one example of the nightmares Psychonauts—Double Fine’s magnum opus—went through…
Game Genres Are Completely Meaningless, And It’s All Your Fault
Genres are broken. Broken, I argue, beyond repair. We need to crumple them up and throw them all away. This Brutal Gothic Metroidvania Is Shaping up To Be Something Special Genres always were broken, of course. They are, as with any other form of human-invented categorization, arbitrary. The notion of labeling any specific game as…
Microsoft delivers gut punch to PC charities with end of Windows 10
Unless Microsoft changes its mind at the last minute, Windows 10 will stop receiving free security updates this coming October. For those who can upgrade to Windows 11, the solution is obvious: Run the new OS even if you don’t like it. But there are hundreds of millions – by one estimate 240 million –…
The Console Wars Are Over And Nobody Really Won
For decades, a war has been raging online and in stores. A fight between massive corporations trying to sell you plastic boxes that play games and their weirdly dedicated supporters. The fight was always silly, but very real and expensive, involving massive companies spending hundreds of millions of dollars on marketing, game development, and hardware….
Sophos MDR tracks two ransomware campaigns using “email bombing,” Microsoft Teams “vishing”
Sophos X-Ops’ Managed Detection and Response (MDR) is actively responding to incidents tied to two separate groups of threat actors, each of which have used the functionality of Microsoft’s Office 365 platform to gain access to targeted organizations with the likely goal of stealing data and deploying ransomware. Sophos MDR began investigating these two separate…
Microsoft AI Research Introduces MVoT: A Multimodal Framework for Integrating Visual and Verbal Reasoning in Complex Tasks
The study of artificial intelligence has witnessed transformative developments in reasoning and understanding complex tasks. The most innovative developments are large language models (LLMs) and multimodal large language models (MLLMs). These systems can process textual and visual data, allowing them to analyze intricate tasks. Unlike traditional approaches that base their reasoning skills on verbal means,…
Microsoft Sentinel: A cloud-native SIEM with integrated GenAI
In a recent survey, 74% of cybersecurity professionals said that the threat landscape is the worst they’ve seen in 5 years.1 Escalating cyber threats, an expanding attack surface, and staffing shortages are putting tremendous pressure on the security operations center (SOC). It’s never been more important to have the right tools in place, especially when…
The State Of Xbox And Game Pass In 2024
This was a really weird year for Xbox. You could argue that Microsoft’s gaming brand had an amazing year or that it had one of its worst, and either way I’d likely find myself nodding in agreement to most of your points. The Best Reveals From The Game Awards 2023 Sure, Xbox put out a…