Articles by KENNETH

Remote work challenges inspire Windows 11 updates to increase productivity and lessen distractions When pandemic lockdowns more than two years ago required Swetha Machanavajhala to work from home, she almost immediately felt the impact on her ability to work efficiently. Born deaf, the product manager on the Azure Cognitive Service Translator team reads lips and doesn’t use sign language, so when virtual Microsoft Teams meetings became the norm for working together from home, she couldn’t follow the flow of conversation when people didn’t appear on camera when they spoke. Since 2013, when she joined Microsoft, she’d been able to attend meetings and presentations in-person, reading the lips of speakers. She also used the Microsoft Translator app and had access to the services of an interpreter who captions meetings (through an additional laptop). During that early time of remote-only work, she [ more… ]

Website typo protection defends against fraud including phishing, malware, and other scams It’s easy to make typos when writing out a website name (URL), but these simple mistakes can lead you to potentially fraudulent websites planted by malicious actors. Website typo protection helps protect you when you accidentally navigate to a fraudulent site after misspelling a well-known site’s URL by guiding you to land on the legitimate site instead. This year, we increased our phishing and fraud protections by partnering with the Microsoft Bing Indexing team on website typo protection. This partnership enables us to constantly scour the web for new “typosquatters” (the bad actors who target these small errors) and dynamically update Microsoft Edge, thus protecting you against newly identified “typosquatting” sites as soon as they are discovered. Website typo protection complements the Microsoft Defender SmartScreen service to defend [ more… ]