Fortune reports on "a watershed moment" in American's nuclear power industry: In January, Meta partnered with Gates' TerraPower and Sam Altman-backed Oklo to develop about 4 gigawatts of combined SMR projects — enough to power almost 3 million homes — for "clean, reliable energy" both for Meta's planned Prometheus AI mega campus in Ohio and beyond. Analysts see Meta as the start of more Big Tech nuclear construction deals — not just agreements with existing plants or restarts such as the now-Microsoft-backed Three Mile Island. "That was the first shot across the bow," said Dan Ives, head of tech research for Wedbush Securities, of the Meta deals. "I would be shocked if every Big Tech company doesn't make some play on nuclear in 2026, whether a strategic partnership or acquisitions."

Ives pointed out there are more data centers under construction than there are active data centers in the U.S. "I believe clean energy around nuclear is going to be the answer," he said. "I think 2030 is the key threshold to hit some sort of scale and begin the next nuclear era in the United States." Smaller SMR reactors can be built in as little as three years instead of the decade required for traditional large reactors. And they can be expanded, one or two modular reactors at a time, to meet increasingly greater energy demand from 'hyperscalers,' the companies that build and operate data centers. "There's major risk if nuclear doesn't happen," Oklo chairman and CEO Jacob DeWitte told Fortune, citing the need for emission-free power and consistent baseload electricity to meet skyrocketing demand. "The hyperscalers, as the ultimate consumers of power are, are looking at the space and seeing that the market is real. They can play a major role in helping make that happen," DeWitte said, speaking in his fast-talking, Silicon Valley startup mode.

The Mozilla executive in charge of Firefox says that while some people just want AI tools that are genuinely useful, "We've heard from many who want nothing to do with AI..."

"Listening to our community, alongside our ongoing commitment to offer choice, led us to build AI controls." Starting with Firefox 148, which rolls out on Feb. 24, you'll find a new AI controls section within the desktop browser settings. It provides a single place to block current and future generative AI features in Firefox... This lets you use Firefox without AI while we continue to build AI features for those who want them...

At launch, AI controls let you manage these features individually:

— Translations, which help you browse the web in your preferred language.
— Alt text in PDFs, which add accessibility descriptions to images in PDF pages.
— AI-enhanced tab grouping, which suggests related tabs and group names.
— Link previews, which show key points before you open a link.
— AI chatbot in the sidebar, which lets you use your chosen chatbot as you browse, including options like Anthropic Claude, ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Le Chat Mistral.

You can choose to use some of these and not others. If you don't want to use AI features from Firefox at all, you can turn on the Block AI enhancements toggle. When it's toggled on, you won't see pop-ups or reminders to use existing or upcoming AI features. Once you set your AI preferences in Firefox, they stay in place across updates... We believe choice is more important than ever as AI becomes a part of people's browsing experiences. What matters to us is giving people control, no matter how they feel about AI.

If you'd like to try AI controls early, they'll be available first in Firefox Nightly.
Some context from The Register It's a refreshingly unsubtle stance, and one that lands just days after a similar bout of AI skepticism elsewhere in browser land, with Vivaldi's latest release leaning away from generative features entirely. CEO Jon von Tetzchner summed up the mood, telling The Register: "Basically, what we are finding is that people hate AI..." Mozilla's kill switch isn't the end of AI in browsers, but it does suggest the hype has met resistance.
When it comes to AI kill switches in browsers, Jack Wallen writes at ZDNet that "Most browsers already offer this feature. With Edge, you can disable Copilot. With Chrome, you can disable Gemini. With Opera, you can disable Aria...."

Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft's automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought it was resolved, but a second complete block went into effect in January, cratering Bing traffic from roughly half a million daily visitors to zero. He submitted nearly a dozen tickets through Bing's webmaster tools but could not get past the AI chatbot to reach a human. After Ars Technica contacted Microsoft, the company restored the Neocities front page within 24 hours but most subdomains remain blocked. Microsoft cited policy violations related to low-quality content yet declined to identify the offending sites or work directly with Drake to fix the problem.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon, Google, and Microsoft each reported hundreds of billions in RPO (remaining performance obligations) -- signed contracts for cloud computing services that can't yet be filled and haven't yet hit the books. Collectively, the big three cloud providers reported a $1.1 trillion backlog of revenue.

The European Commission is preparing to trial a communications platform built on Matrix, the open source messaging protocol already used by the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces, as a sovereign backup to Microsoft Teams.

Signal currently serves as the backup tool but has proven too inflexible for an organization the Commission's size, it said. The Matrix-based solution could also eventually connect the Commission to other EU bodies like the Parliament.

Microsoft has finally delivered on its promise to integrate Sysmon -- the long-standing system monitoring tool from its Sysinternals suite -- directly into Windows, a move that should make life considerably easier for enterprise administrators who have struggled with deploying and managing the utility across thousands of endpoints.

The functionality landed this week in Windows Insider builds 26300.7733 (Dev channel) and 26220.7752 (Beta channel). Sysmon allows administrators to capture system events through custom configuration files, filter for specific activity, and pipe the data into standard Windows event logs for pickup by security tools and SIEM pipelines. Mark Russinovich, Microsoft technical fellow and Winternals co-founder, has previously noted the lack of official customer support for Sysmon in production environments -- a gap this integration addresses. The feature ships disabled by default and requires PowerShell to enable. Microsoft notes that any existing Sysmon installation must be uninstalled before activating the built-in version.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Speaking during an earnings call on Tuesday, CEO Lisa Su stated that its development of Microsoft's next-gen Xbox SoC is "progressing well to support a launch in 2027."

While the comment doesn't outright confirm the next Xbox will release next year, it indicates that the Microsoft could be ready to launch soon.

YouTube has confirmed that it is blocking background playback -- the ability to keep a video's audio running after minimizing the browser or locking the screen -- for non-Premium users across third-party mobile browsers including Samsung Internet, Brave, Vivaldi and Microsoft Edge.

Users began reporting the issue last week, noting that audio would cut out the moment they left the browser, sometimes after a brief "MediaOngoingActivity" notification flashed before media controls disappeared. A Google spokesperson told Android Authority that the platform "updated the experience to ensure consistency," calling background play a Premium-exclusive feature.

Microsoft is reevaluating its AI strategy on Windows 11 and plans to scale back or remove Copilot integrations across built-in apps after months of sustained user backlash, according to a Windows Central report citing people familiar with the company's plans.

Copilot features in apps like Notepad and Paint are under review and could be pulled entirely or stripped of their Copilot branding in favor of a more streamlined experience. The company has paused work on adding new Copilot buttons to any other in-box apps. Windows Recall, the screenshot-based search feature delayed by an entire year in 2024 over security and privacy concerns, is separately under review -- Microsoft internally considers the current implementation a failure and is exploring ways to rework or rename the feature rather than scrap it entirely, the report said.

The Wall Street Journal says that Meta "might be reaping some of the richest benefits from the AI boom so far." Meta's revenue grew 22% year over year in 2025 to $201 billion, and the company expects even bigger gains in the current quarter, potentially as high as 34%. That is huge growth for a company that brought in nearly $60 billion in the latest three-month period. And Zuckerberg signaled that Meta was just scratching the surface of AI's potential. "Our world-class recommendation systems are already driving meaningful growth across our apps and ads business. But we think that the current systems are primitive compared to what will be possible soon," he said on a call with investors and analysts...

[Meta's Chief Financial Officer Susan] Li said the company doubled the number of graphics-processing units that it used to train its ad-ranking model in the fourth quarter and adopted a new learning architecture. Those actions led users to click on ads on Facebook 3.5% more often and to a gain of more than 1% in conversions, meaning purchases, subscriptions or leads, on Instagram, she said. Other AI-related improvements led to a 3% increase in conversions across its family of apps. On the ad-buying side, Meta has also been working toward using AI to automate ad creation for businesses that want to advertise their products or services on Facebook and Instagram. On the call, Li said the combined revenue run rate of video-generation tools hit $10 billion in the fourth quarter.
In short, CNBC reported, Meta's stock price surged over 10% this week "after showing signs that AI investments are boosting the bottom line."

Benjamin Black, an internet analyst at Deutsche Bank, explained the connection to the Wall Street Journal. "The more compute the ad platform gets, the far better it performs, and that's a real structural advantage that Meta has. If you can see that yesterday's spend is driving this month's growth, then as a good business person, you're going to continue to feed the beast."

CNBC says now Meta "plans to spend between $115 billion and $135 billion on its AI build-out this year. That's nearly double what it spent in 2025."

Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft to co-found Amutable, a new Berlin-based company aiming to bring cryptographically verifiable integrity and deterministic trust guarantees to Linux systems. He said in a post on Mastodon that his "role in upstream maintenance for the Linux kernel will continue as it always has." Poettering will also continue to remain deeply involved in the systemd ecosystem. The Register reports: Linux celeb Lennart Poettering has left Microsoft and co-founded a new company, Amutable, with Chris Kuhl and Christian Brauner. Poettering is best known for systemd. After a lengthy stint at Red Hat, he joined Microsoft in 2022. Kuhl was a Microsoft employee until last year, and Brauner, who also joined Microsoft in 2022, left this month. [...]

It is unclear why Poettering decided to leave Microsoft. We asked the company to comment but have not received a response. Other than the announcement of systemd 259 in December, Poettering's blog has been silent on the matter, aside from the announcement of Amutable this week. In its first post, the Amutable team wrote: "Over the coming months, we'll be pouring foundations for verification and building robust capabilities on top."

It will be interesting to see what form this takes. In addition to Poettering, the lead developer of systemd, Amutable's team includes contributors and maintainers for projects such as Linux, Kubernetes, and containerd. Its members are also very familiar with the likes of Debian, Fedora, SUSE, and Ubuntu.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft's PowerToys team is contemplating building a top menu bar for Windows 11, much like Linux, macOS, or older versions of Windows. The menu bar, or Command Palette Dock as Microsoft calls it, would be a new optional UI that provides quick access to tools, monitoring of system resources, and much more.

Microsoft has provided concept images of what it's looking to build, and is soliciting feedback on whether Windows users would use a PowerToy like this. "The dock is designed to be highly configurable," explains Niels Laute, a senior product manager at Microsoft. "It can be positioned on the top, left, right, or bottom edge of the screen, and extensions can be pinned to three distinct regions of the dock: start, center, and end."

Microsoft wants you to know that it knows that Windows 11, now used by a billion users, has been testing your patience and announced that its engineers are being redirected to urgently address the operating system's performance and reliability problems through an internal process the company calls "swarming."

"The feedback we're receiving from our community of passionate customers and Windows Insiders has been clear. We need to improve Windows in ways that are meaningful for people," Pavan Davuluri, president of Windows and devices, told The Verge. The company plans to spend the rest of 2026 focusing on pain points including system performance, reliability, and overall user experience.

January has been particularly rough for Windows 11. Microsoft issued an emergency out-of-band update to fix shutdown issues on some machines, then released a second out-of-band fix a week later to address OneDrive and Dropbox crashes. Some business PCs are also failing to boot after the January update because they were left in an "improper state" after December's monthly update failed to install. Users have also grown frustrated by aggressive Edge and Bing prompts, constant OneDrive upselling nags, and Microsoft's push to require Microsoft accounts.

The core members of the company's Windows Insider team recently moved to different roles. "Trust is earned over time and we are committed to building it back with the Windows community," Davuluri said.

Microsoft's Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company's latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft's total revenue exceeded $80 billion.

Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.

"Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company's fiscal Q2, 2026 earnings call. "Up over 45 percent year-over-year." The growth of Windows 11 over the past quarter will be related to Microsoft's end of support for Windows 10, which also helped increase Microsoft's Windows OEM revenues.

There are reports that a legitimate Microsoft email address -- which Microsoft explicitly says customers should add to their allow list -- is delivering scam spam. ArsTechnica: The emails originate from no-reply-powerbi@microsoft.com, an address tied to Power BI. The Microsoft platform provides analytics and business intelligence from various sources that can be integrated into a single dashboard. Microsoft documentation says that the address is used to send subscription emails to mail-enabled security groups. To prevent spam filters from blocking the address, the company advises users to add it to allow lists.

According to an Ars reader, the address on Tuesday sent her an email claiming (falsely) that a $399 charge had been made to her. âoeIt provided a phone number to call to dispute the transaction. A man who answered a call asking to cancel the sale directed me to download and install a remote access application, presumably so he could then take control of my Mac or Windows machine (Linux wasn't allowed)," she said.

Online searches returned a dozen or so accounts of other people reporting receiving the same email. Some of the spam was reported on Microsoft's own website. Sarah Sabotka, a threat researcher at security firm Proofpoint, said the scammers are abusing a Power Bi function that allows external email addresses to be added as subscribers for the Power Bi reports. The mention of the subscription is buried at the very bottom of the message, where it's easy to miss.

France will replace the American platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own domestically developed video conferencing platform, which will be used in all government departments by 2027, the country said. From a report: The move is part of France's strategy to stop using foreign software vendors, especially those from the United States, and regain control over critical digital infrastructure. It comes at a crucial moment as France, like Europe, reaches a turning point regarding digital sovereignty.

"The aim is to end the use of non-European solutions and guarantee the security and confidentiality of public electronic communications by relying on a powerful and sovereign tool," said David Amiel, minister for the civil service and state reform. On Monday, the government announced it will instead be using the French-made videoconference platform Visio. The platform has been in testing for a year and has around 40,000 users.

Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com -- a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party -- to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo Electric.

The misconfiguration meant anyone attempting to set up an Outlook account using an example.com email address could have inadvertently sent test credentials to Sumitomo Electric's servers. Under RFC2606, example.com resolves only to IP addresses assigned to the Internet Assigned Names Authority. Microsoft confirmed it has "updated the service to no longer provide suggested server information for example.com" and said it is investigating.

Security researcher Dan Tentler of Phobos Group noted the company appears to have simply removed the problematic endpoint rather than fixing the underlying routing -- "not found" errors now appear where the JSON responses previously occurred. Tinyapps.org, which noted the behavior earlier this month, said the misconfiguration had persisted for five years. Microsoft has not explained how Sumitomo Electric's domain entered its configuration. The incident follows 2024's revelation that a forgotten test account with admin privileges enabled Russia-state hackers to monitor Microsoft executives' email for two months.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. "This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly," Microsoft's Patrick Siu explains. "Players who opt in to this preview will see some changes to their experience including updated navigation features and a refreshed look and feel. As this is a preview, some functions may not yet be available or may behave differently than the current web experience. We will continue iterating during the preview period and changes may be made over time."

[...] There's no real info about what's in the new experience, oddly. Microsoft notes only that it "lays the foundation for accelerating [their] ability to build new experiences for players," and that it "helps [them] validate the new web platform and refine the experience for everyone." The public preview can be found at xbox.com/play.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from GeekWire: Microsoft on Monday announced Maia 200, the second generation of its custom AI chip, claiming it's the most powerful first-party silicon from any major cloud provider. The company says Maia 200 delivers three times the performance of Amazon's latest Trainium chip on certain benchmarks, and exceeds Google's most recent tensor processing unit (TPU) on others. The chip is already running workloads at Microsoft's data center near Des Moines, Iowa. Microsoft says Maia 200 is powering OpenAI's GPT-5.2 models, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and internal projects from its Superintelligence team. A second deployment at a data center near Phoenix is planned next.

It's part of the larger trend among cloud giants to build their own custom silicon for AI rather than rely solely on Nvidia. [...] The company says Maia 200 offers 30% better performance-per-dollar than its current hardware. Maia 200 also builds on the first-generation chip with a more specific focus on inference, the process of running AI models after they've been trained. [...] Microsoft is also opening the door to outside developers. The company announced a software development kit that will let AI startups and researchers optimize their models for Maia 200. Developers and academics can sign up for an early preview starting today.