Microsoft Subnet - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• New virtual assistant challenges Siri, Cortana

  SRI International has spun off yet another firm, one taking aim at digital assistants like Siri and Cortana. And if there is anyone who knows Siri, it's SRI.

• Government can exploit loopholes for warrantless surveillance on Americans

  Bright minds from Harvard University and Boston University collaborated on a new research paper that looks at how the government can exploit legal loopholes as well as "technical realities of Internet communications" to get around Americans' Fourth Amendment rights and hoover up their electronic communications.

• Facebook manipulated 689,003 users' News Feeds to 'prove' emotions are contagious

  If you are exposed to negative person, then that negativity might bleed over to infect you. If you are exposed to a positive person, then those positive emotions might put you in a more positive frame of mind as well. Since you likely have experienced that in real life, then you probably don't need research to back that up. Facebook's data scientists were out to prove if emotions expressed digitally would also be contagious.

• Microsoft Exchange Online disrupted for most of a day

  Microsoft Exchange Online in North America experienced a mysterious intermittent and inconsistent disruption of its Exchange Online yesterday that follows on a disruption Monday to Microsoft's Lync Online.

• Spellbound by maps tracking hack attacks and cyber threats in real-time

  If you've ever been entranced by maps showing data in real-time, such as a lightning strike map, then it's likely a global map with "live" cyber attacks might hold you spellbound too.

• Microsoft's Cortana may be headed to world domination

  What started out as a Windows Phone feature is about to become ubiquitous, and possibly Microsoft's biggest innovation in a while. Cortana, the voice assistant similar to iOS's Siri, is headed to your desktop and possibly other smartphones.